Wolf Among Wolves

Chapter Twelve

The Quest Fails

I

Whenever Frau Eva came to the office in these weeks to discuss farm affairs Studmann never forgot to ask: “And your husband? What does Prackwitz write?” Usually Frau Eva merely shrugged her beautiful full shoulders which, so it seemed to Studmann, concealed themselves in ever more charming, ever flimsier blouses. Sometimes, however, she would say: “Just another post card. He’s getting on all right. He has now shot his five-hundredth rabbit.”

“That’s fine!” Studmann would answer, after which they said nothing more about the Rittmeister, but discussed the harvest and the work. They were both contented with their progress, and they were also contented with each other. Whatever measure they considered practical was decided upon without any long palaver, and also carried out. If it afterwards proved not to have been practical, they did not spend a long time regretting it but tried something else.

Naturally mistakes occurred, both large and small. It was not easy for Studmann to take over and manage such an entirely unfamiliar business at the busiest time. Often he had to make the most difficult decisions within the space of a minute. The bridge to outfield five had broken down, twenty teams of horses and eighty men stood idle. They stared at the cart sunk in the ditch and lolled in the shade, saying: “You can’t do anything about it.”

Studmann did do something about it. Within a minute men were racing to the farm; in five minutes rakes, spades and shovels were on the field; in fifteen minutes a dyke had been laid across the ditch; in twenty minutes a wagon brought logs from the wood—not half an hour and carts were again rumbling from outfield five to the farm …

“Fine fellow, that!” said the men.

“I’d almost like to have a child by him,” said Frau Hartig admiringly (although she now had to labor in the fields instead of the office).

“We’ve no doubt about that, Frieda!” laughed the others. “He’s quite a change from your little Black Meier.”

Yes, Herr von Studmann turned out well, but he also had good help. It was a miracle how the intimidated, humble overseer Kowalewski suddenly became communicative, how many an excellent piece of advice, born of experience, sprang from his lips. True, he was still a little lax and easy-going with the men, but there again it was amazing to see how young Pagel, sweating and lively, came sprinting up on his bicycle, cracked the most indecent jokes with the silliest of the women, but said firmly: “You’ve got to get as far as here by noon—and as far as there by evening.”

If they protested that it was impossible—the young gentleman ought to make it half that; they were just women and not a strong fellow like him—then he mocked them. They were always boasting they were a match for any man, he would say, and according to them the fellow wasn’t born who could make them tired. Well, let them prove it.

Amid their roars of laughter the young gentleman drove off, but by evening they had reached the point indicated. Or perhaps even a little bit farther, in which case he never neglected to acknowledge this with a word of praise or, better still, a coarse joke. He pleased them all, especially as none had cause to be jealous of another on his account. “He’s a smart young fellow,” they said. “He’ll marry a lady some day—not a scarecrow like you!”—“You’ve got nothing to write home about. I can always run rings round you!” And now that he came so often with Fräulein Violet, it seemed as if they were the owner’s son and daughter, for the women soon sensed that they were not lovers.

Yes, in her loneliness Vi had become Wolfgang Pagel’s constant companion. Her mother had little time for her; she also was out in the fields a lot. Frau Eva had spent all her youth in Neulohe; in the past she had often gone about the farm with her father, the Geheimrat, had heard what the old man mumbled to himself, had seen what he regarded as important. Now she was amazed how much of it had stuck. With her husband, whatever she saw she should not have seen. He had always said: “You understand nothing about it. Please don’t interfere with the way I run things.” And had immediately become annoyed.

Studmann never became annoyed. He listened attentively to what she had to say; he even encouraged her suggestions. And though he did not always do what she suggested, he would explain his contrary opinion so fully and so well that she was forced to agree—if sometimes with a little yawn. Studmann was certainly a very reliable and efficient man, but he was a little too pedantic. No one could imagine what he would look like should he one day declare his love for her, explaining it, setting forth the motives, analyzing it, discussing his attitude to his friend, stating his precise demands for the future. It was inconceivable! With all his efficiency Studmann was the most inefficient man in the world for love-making. Yet Frau Eva had to admit that his way of letting his glance rove absent-mindedly from her toes to her mouth, in the midst of a sober calculation concerning the mixture of fodder for the cows, had its charm.

Slowly but surely, she thought. She was in no hurry; she had had enough of haste for the time being. Moreover she had probably no fixed plans or intentions; Studmann’s respectful admiration, after the storm-tide of quarreling these last few years, did her good. After the cascade of trouble, disagreement, and hurry of recent years, she was happy to be rocked and cradled by the stream of dependency and order emanating from Studmann. But it must be realized that a mother who had so many things to do hadn’t much time for her daughter. At first she had tried taking Violet with her round the farm and on her visits to the office. But this contact revealed that their relationship had suffered a serious blow. With sadness Frau Eva saw that Vi obstinately rejected everything coming from her. If she said the weather was fine, Violet found it oppressive; if she suggested that Violet ought to go bathing again, Violet found bathing a bore. There was nothing to be done; there was in this resistance something like serious hostility.

Perhaps I really have been unjust to her, the mother reflected. Perhaps it was nothing—some harmless little affair—we have certainly heard nothing more of any stranger. And now her girl’s sense of honor is mortally offended. Well, it will be best for me not to force matters, but to give her time to get over it. One day she’ll come back to me.

Vi therefore regained her freedom; there was no more talk of her being confined to her room. But what was she to do now? How empty this life had become! She couldn’t go on waiting like this forever—and perhaps in vain. In that case … but she didn’t know what to do in that case. If only something would happen! But nothing did, absolutely nothing.

In the first days of her new freedom she ran to all the places where she had been with Fritz. For hours on end she wandered up and down in the forest at the spot where they had met. She remembered every single one of the places where they had lain.… It was as if the grass had only just straightened itself, as if the mossy bank had only just become smooth again. But he did not return. Sometimes it seemed as if he had been nothing but a dream.

She went also to the Black Dale, and after long searching found the cleverly concealed spot where the weapons were buried. There she stayed a long time; he was bound to come sooner or later to see if the secret was still kept. But he did not come.

Sometimes she met old Forester Kniebusch on her wanderings, and he poured out his heart to her. He had been brought face to face with the poacher Bäumer, but that scoundrel must have got wind of the forester’s boasts. Although he had not been conscious a moment after his fall, he had had the impudence to assert that the forester had thrown him from his bicycle and battered his head several times against the stone, hoping to beat his brains out. They had spoken to the old man very roughly, telling him that only his age protected him from immediate arrest. This is no time to talk of wild deer. The attempt on Bäumer’s life had to be settled first. And in the meantime the poacher was living in the hospital like a prince; he had excellent food, careful treatment, a private room—to be sure, with bars in the windows. Never in all his life had the scoundrel been so well off.

Violet was bored by these tales of woe. The forester ought to know what to expect from boasting about his heroic battle with the poacher. But when he announced that he had also met little Bailiff Meier in Frankfurt, she began to pay attention. Little Meier was a little man no longer; he seemed to have become a big man; he had money, a lot of money. In detail the forester described how Herr Meier was dressed, his elegance, the valuable rings on his fingers, his gold watch with a spring lid. But little Meier hadn’t become arrogant or haughty; he had invited Kniebusch to supper at a fine restaurant. There had been Rhine wine and afterwards champagne, finally capped with a red Burgundy which little Meier had called “Turk’s blood.” The forester licked his lips at the memory of this carousal.

“Just another profiteer!” said Vi contemptuously. “Black Meier’s cut out for that. And of course in return for the booze you told him everything that’s happening in Neulohe, I suppose?”

The forester turned red and protested vigorously against this imputation. He hadn’t even said that the Rittmeister was no longer there. And besides, they had talked about very different things.…

“What did you talk about?” asked Vi aggressively.

But the forester was not able to remember so exactly.

“You were drunk, Kniebusch,” she affirmed. “You’ve completely forgotten what you talked about. Well, so long.”

“Good day, Fräulein!” stammered the old man, and Violet continued her way alone.

The forester’s wretched babble bored her, the wood bored her, her grandmother’s pious phrases bored her. Her grandfather was always away on mysterious journeys or shut up with the magistrate Haase or silent and thoughtful. She kept out of Räder’s way and hadn’t even asked him what he had done with her letter. (But now she locked her door, both day and night, despite her mother’s astonished protests.) Oh, everything bored her, got on her nerves.… She asked herself what she used to do the whole day before she knew Fritz. She could not remember. Everything seemed hollow and empty—boring.

The only thing left was Wolfgang Pagel, whom she ought really to hate more than her mother. But she was quite indifferent to what he thought about her, what he said to her, or his mocking. It was as if she had no sense of shame where he was concerned, as if he were a sort of brother. The two spoke to each other in an incredible tone. Her grandmother would have fainted on the spot had she heard her grandchild (for whom she purified the works of that voluptuary, Wolfgang von Goethe) talking to young Pagel.

“None of your tender caresses, Fräulein,” Pagel might say. “I can see you’ve got another of your strange days today. Black rings round your eyes. But remember, I’m just a weak frail man.”

Violet could not quite cope with this tone. She hung on his arm, squeezed it hard and said: “You’re a fine one! You might be a bit nice to me for once; there isn’t any need for you to always save up everything for your Petra.”

“Always to save up,” corrected Pagel with Studmann-like pedantry. “You might perhaps try learning a little grammar sometime.”

Oh, he could irritate her into a fury. He kept at a distance; there was no more kissing—he saw to that. Sometimes she fled from him with flushed cheeks and tears of rage. She swore that he was a coward, a wretch, a weakling; that she would never speak a word to him again.…

Next morning she was standing outside the office door, waiting for him.

“Well, am I in your good graces again?” he grinned. “I swear to you, Violet, today I’m more of a coward, more of a wretch and more of a weakling than ever.”

“When my Fritz comes back,” she said, with flashing eyes, “I’ll tell him how you’ve treated me. Then he’ll challenge you and kill you. I shall be glad!”

Pagel merely laughed.

“Do you think I won’t do it? I will do it! You see!” she cried, angry again.

“You are quite capable of it,” he laughed. “I’ve known for a long time that you are really an absolutely cold-blooded creature, and that you wouldn’t care if the whole world pegged out so long as you got what you wanted.”

“I hope you peg out!”

“Yes, yes, but not now. Now I’ve got to go to the stable. Senta foaled last night. Coming along?”

And of course she went with him. Almost overwhelmed by tenderness, she stood before the little long-legged creature with its large head. “Isn’t it sweet?” she whispered excitedly. “Isn’t it a darling? Oh, it’s heavenly!”

And Wolfgang looked at his Violet askance. Yet she would take the same pleasure in seeing me lie in the dust with a bullet through my heart. Or rather a bullet through my stomach, so that she could hear me moan with agony. No; give me my Peter a thousand times over. You’re no good; all dolled up outside, but rotten inside.

But however calm and self-assured he usually felt in her presence, she could always enrage him with one thing—her casting away of all sense of physical shame before him. If she nestled close to him, exhibiting a half-ironical tenderness and passion, it was bearable, though not pleasant. (And to act Joseph to Potiphar’s wife is always a little ridiculous.) She had been awoken once and for all, but she hadn’t learned to pull herself together, to deny herself things. But when, in the middle of a walk through the fields, she said to him with studied carelessness: “Go on ahead, Pagel, I want to do a wee-wee,” or when, bathing, she undressed herself before him with as little embarrassment as if he were her grandmother—then he was seized with a wild rage, and could have struck her. Trembling with anger, he would upbraid her roundly.

“Damn it all, you’re not a whore!” he shouted.

“And supposing I were!” she said, looking at him mockingly, amused. “You couldn’t make any use of me.” Or else she would say, “Always boasting! Aren’t you spoken for? Why get so angry about such things?”

“You’re rotten and stinking, spoilt to the marrow! There’s not a speck of your body that isn’t dreck!”

“Specks are usually dreck,” she said coolly.

It was perhaps not so much the insult to his manhood which aroused him, although such things must infuriate any man, especially one of twenty-three; it was perhaps rather a sudden panic. Did she already regard herself as completely lost? Did she intentionally want to go to the dogs? Has this fifteen-year-old really already had enough of life? Every decent person feels himself a little responsible for his fellow-beings: only the wicked let their brethren run into the swamp without warning. Pagel felt his responsibility. He would try to talk to her, to warn her. But she affected a complete lack of understanding; she sat within a barbed-wire entanglement of foolish remarks: “All men are like that—one must be low-down, otherwise one just gets treated badly.” Or else: “Do you think it decent, the way Herr Studmann shows off to Mamma as soon as Papa goes away—and do you expect me to be more decent?” Or: “You don’t tell me, either, all the things you did with your Fräulein Petra before you broke it off. I don’t suppose you were very decent in that, anyway. So you needn’t have started talking about decency to me—even if I am only a country girl.” Oh, she could be as cunning as the devil. Darting off at a tangent, she would say: “Is it true that there are places in Berlin where girls dance all naked? And you’ve been there? Well, then! And you want to tell me that you faint when you sometimes see a little bit of me? You are ridiculous!”

There was nothing to be done, she would not be persuaded. Hundreds of times Pagel was on the point of talking to Studmann or Frau Eva about the girl. If he didn’t, it was not because of any silly feeling of gentlemanly discretion. But what good could the old people do if she wouldn’t listen to a young person like himself? Punishments and sermons will merely make it worse, he thought. Perhaps I shall have to speak about it if she ever wants to run away, but she certainly won’t get mixed up with any of the fellows here—she feels herself too much of the heiress for that and won’t want to tarnish her glory as future proprietress. If this scamp of a Lieutenant Fritz should turn up again, I shall hear of it instantly. Then I’ll give the rascal a good hiding and write down for him, in no uncertain terms, that he can forget any idea of returning to these happy pastures.

Pagel stretched himself. He wasn’t afraid to scrap with the toughest man in the village. Three months of country life had developed his muscles; he felt himself strong enough for any Lieutenant, any adventurer.

“Well, whom would you like to embrace now?” asked Vi ironically.

“Your Lieutenant Fritz!” was the surprising answer. He leaped on his bicycle. “Cheerio, Fräulein. Our walk is off for this morning, I must get on to my Hussars. But perhaps at one o’clock.” He was gone.

“Come along here, Violet!” called Frau Eva, who had observed this leave-taking from the office window and was sorry at the disappointed look on her daughter’s face. “I’m going to town in a quarter of an hour to fetch the wages. Come along with me—we’ll have pastry and cream at Kipferling’s.”

“Oh!” said Vi, pouting. “I don’t know, Mamma. No thanks, cream just makes you fat.” And in order not to be called back again she went quickly into the park.

“Sometimes I get very worried,” declared Frau von Prackwitz.

“Yes?” said Studmann politely, busy with his wage lists. Although he hadn’t nearly given the numbers all the noughts that belonged to them, no single column could contain the riches.

“She is so undecided, so slack. There’s no life in her.”

“It’s a rather critical age for young girls, though, isn’t it?” suggested Studmann.

“Perhaps it’s really that,” agreed Frau Eva, adding cautiously: “As a matter of fact, she’s always with young Pagel and the tone between them seems to me rather familiar. Do you think there is anything in that?”

“Anything in what?” Studmann looked up from his wage lists a little distractedly. If he used the sick-benefit column for writing down the net wages then he would have to use the disability column for the health contributions. The disability column was too narrow for all this wealth of noughts; he would use the wage-tax column instead. And now it turned out that the wages book was much too narrow. You would have to have a kind of atlas-sized wage list, including all the world’s longitude lines. What a damn mess! And nothing balanced. The orderly Studmann looked at his disorderly wage list with a stern, discouraged face.

“Herr von Studmann!” cooed Frau von Prackwitz with a dove-like softness that would have frightened any man, as if he received an electric shock, “I was just asking you whether you had any doubts about young Pagel.”

Studmann looked startled, just as was proper.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Frau von Prackwitz, I’m terribly sorry! I was so preoccupied with these wretched lists. They get worse and worse, I can’t make them balance anymore. And I’m beginning to realize that it’s useless tormenting myself with them. I suggest that we only pay round sums now; for instance, a milliard for every married man. It’s true we would be paying a little over, but I can’t see any other way of doing it.” He looked at Frau Eva, thoughtful and worried.

“Agreed,” she said tranquilly. “And now that the money questions are settled, do you mind paying some attention to my worries as a mother? To my doubts about young Pagel?”

Studmann turned very red. “Frau von Prackwitz, I am a silly ass in some ways. When I get involved in something you can’t do anything with me. I’ll explain it to you.…”

“No, please don’t, my dear Studmann!” cried Frau Eva in despair. “I don’t want explanations, but an answer! Sometimes,” she said pensively, “you are astonishingly like Achim, although you are such contrasts. With him I get no answer because of his hastiness, from you I get none because of your thoroughness. The result for me is the same: I still don’t know whether I ought to be worried about Herr Pagel.”

“Of course not,” declared Studmann hurriedly and guiltily. “Quite apart from the fact that Pagel is a man of honor, he is also perfectly harmless.”

“I don’t know,” said Frau Eva doubtfully. “He is very young. And he’s more or less in thoroughly high spirits now, looking really happy the last few weeks. I’ve noticed it, and a young girl will notice it, too.”

“That is so, isn’t it?” said Studmann, looking pleased. “He has quite recovered. I’m proud of my success. When he came from Berlin he was a wreck, ill, dispirited, lazy—almost ruined. And now? Even the convicts look cheery when they catch sight of him.”

“And my Violet, too!” said Frau Eva drily. “You are not exactly giving me a proof of the young man’s harmlessness.”

“But, Frau von Prackwitz!” cried Studmann in reproach. “He’s in love. Only a man in love is so pleased, so gay, so contented with everything. Anyone can see that. Why, even I can see it, a dry man of figures like myself.” He flushed slightly under her gently mocking glance. “When he came here he thought the affair was over. He was gloomy, without life. No, I didn’t ask him anything, I didn’t want to. I think that discussions about love are pernicious, because …”

Frau Eva coughed warningly.

“But the affair seems to have got straightened out again, he receives and writes letters, he is as merry as a bird, he works with a will—he would like to embrace the whole world.”

“But not my Vi, if you please!” cried Frau Eva with determination.

II

Yes, Wolfgang Pagel was writing and receiving letters. And Studmann was right in saying that Wolfgang’s new pleasure in life was bound up with these letters, although not a line had come from Petra or had been written to her. Despite everything, happy. Despite everything, ready for action. Despite everything, expansive and all-embracing. Despite everything, patient with the child Violet.

When old Minna had received the young master’s first letter from the postman, and had recognized the handwriting, her limbs had trembled so much that she had to sit down. And then she became quite calm.

I mustn’t frighten the old lady like this, she thought. She doesn’t eat anymore, doesn’t drink anymore, doesn’t do anything; just sits there and thinks. And when she believes I’m not looking she takes out the note which he left when he fetched his things, and in which he said that he was now going to work properly and wouldn’t write before he’d found his feet again. And now he’s written.

She looked at the letter mistrustfully. But perhaps there were only silly things in it which would upset his mother. Minna became more and more doubtful. And perhaps he only wanted money again, because he was in a fix somewhere. She turned the letter round, but on the back were only stamps.… The writing was quite neat, Wolf used to write much worse. And it was in ink, not scribbled off in a hurry. Perhaps there was good news in it.

For a moment Minna thought of opening the letter secretly and, if it was too bad, of answering it herself. Wolfi was also her child in a way. But if it was good news, let his mother be the first to enjoy it. “Oh, it can’t be anything bad!” And thereupon she stood up from her chair, calm, determination restored.

And she placed the letter under the newspaper so that nothing of it could be seen, and when Frau Pagel had sat down sadly at the breakfast table, she left her post at the door—against all habit—mumbled something about “market” and disappeared, deaf to the calls of her mistress. And she actually did dash to the market, where she purchased a trout for 900,000,000 marks. Her mistress would at last have an appetite again.

When she returned, Frau Pagel was already on the look-out for her, her eyes sparkling as they had not sparkled in the last eight weeks.

“Silly old goose!” she greeted her faithful servant. “Do you really have to run away, so that I haven’t anyone to say a word to? Yes, the young master has written, he’s in the country now, on a large farm, something like an apprentice. But he has rather a lot of responsibility, I don’t understand anything about it—you must read it yourself, the letter’s on the table. He’s getting on well and he sends his regards to you and it’s the first letter, since I don’t know how long, in which he writes nothing about money. With the inflation I really couldn’t blame him if he did; even if he still had the money from the picture it would be worth nothing now. He writes ever so cheerfully, he has never written so cheerfully before; there must be a lot of queer people there, but he seems to get on with everybody. Well, you’ll read it yourself, Minna; why should I tell you all of it? But he doesn’t want to stay on the farm even though he does like it; he writes that it is like a sort of sanatorium. I’m not to mind, and if he really has become a taxi driver, I’m not to try and change his mind. But I’m not going to answer him, I’ve not forgotten how you told me that I made everything too easy for him. Yet it was you who always gave him sweets whenever he howled, you old know-all! I think that you should reply first and then we can see whether he gets sulky and hurt again. In that case he won’t be cured yet. And, Minna, he wants some information. I don’t agree with it, no, I don’t agree with it at all, but I shan’t say anything again, so you can take this afternoon off and make inquiries. And this evening write to him at once; if we post the letter today he’ll get it tomorrow. But perhaps it’s a country post there, in which case he’ll get it a day later. Besides, I might write a line, perhaps, after all.…”

“Madam,” said Minna, “madam—if you don’t sit down at once and eat your egg and at least two rolls I won’t read the letter or reply this evening.… This is really absolute foolishness: first you don’t eat because of sorrow and then you eat nothing because of joy. Yet you expect Wolfgang to be a calm and sensible person!”

“Stop it, Minna, you drive anyone crazy with all your talk!” said Frau Pagel. “Read the letter. I’m eating now.”

However, although Frau Pagel ate a really good breakfast, and also did every justice at midday to the 900,000,000 mark trout, her reply to Wolfgang was not written that day. The information he requested was not so easy to obtain; the trail from Georgenkirchstrasse to Fruchtstrasse was not so easy to discover. Minna had to make many a journey to the registration offices, spend many an hour patiently waiting for information, questioning and being questioned, before she at last found herself in front of the large plank fence on which (alongside the usual scribblings of children—“Whoever reads this is daft”) was painted in large white letters “Emil Krupass, widow: rags, bottles and bones.”

“Here?” Minna asked herself doubtfully. “They’ve sent me to the wrong place again!”

She peered through the gateway into the large yard, which certainly did not look very inviting with its mountains of rusty old iron, its multitude of dirty bottles and its heap of burst mattresses. “Look out!” shouted a young scamp dashing into the yard with a dog-drawn barrow, missing her by a hair’s-breadth.

Minna followed him hesitatingly. But on her asking at a shed for Fräulein Ledig she was answered readily: “She’s by the rags. Over there at the back—the black hut!”

Poor thing! thought Minna. I suppose she must be finding it hard to scrape up a bit of a living. It was frightfully dirty in the old hut, and the stink was even more frightful. With a feeling of comfort she thought of her pretty clean kitchen. And if Petra was really stuck in here, she was three times as sorry for her. “Fräulein Ledig!” she shouted into the gloom where figures crouched and dust whirled, making her cough.

“Yes?”

She wore a bluish-green overall and looked queerly changed, but there was still the simple clear face.

“Lord, Petra, child, is it really you?” said Minna staring at her.

“Minna!” cried Petra in joyful surprise. “Have you really found me then?”

(And neither had an inkling that they were suddenly using the informal “du” with each other, which they’d never done before. But that’s life: There are people who only notice how much they like each other when they meet again, after not having seen each other for a long time.)

“Petra!” And Minna, of course, at once blurted out: “Look at you! You aren’t—?”

“Yes, I am,” she smiled.

“When?”

“At the beginning of December, I think,” replied Petra.

“I must write and tell Wolfi about it at once!”

“You are not to tell him about it in any circumstances!”

“Petra,” said Minna imploringly, “you’re not angry with him, are you?” Petra merely smiled. “You don’t bear him a grudge, do you? I would never have thought it of you.” They regarded each other silently for a while in the dusty rag hut, where women monotonously sorted the rags. They looked critically, as if they wanted to see how much the other had changed. “Come out of the bad air, Petra. We can’t talk here.”

“Is he outside?” Petra thought of what Ma Krupass had once said, that she would run to him if he were standing on the other side of the street. She did not want to. Minna looked at Petra guardedly. Suddenly she knew that it was of no little importance what sort of stepdaughter she would have been. Wolfgang’s mother had already born enough sorrow.

“Do you want us to stand till we take root in this muck and filth?” cried Minna, stamping her foot. “If he is outside he won’t bite you!”

Petra turned pale. But she said firmly: “If he’s outside then I am not going out. I promised.”

“You won’t go out, eh? That’s a nice thing. You won’t go to the father of your child? Whom do you promise such things to?”

“Oh, do be quiet, Minna.” This time it was Petra who stamped her foot. “Why is he sending you, then? I thought he would have become a bit different, but that’s the way he always was. If he found anything unpleasant to do, he got others to do it.”

“You mustn’t excite yourself so, Petra. That can’t be good for it.”

“I’m not excited in the least!” said Petra, growing ever angrier. “But can you expect anyone not to be annoyed if he never learns anything and never changes? I suppose he’s crept under his mother’s skirts again. It’s all just as Ma Krupass said it would be.”

“Ma Krupass?” asked Minna jealously. “Is that the widow whose name is on the fence outside? Do you tell her all the doings of our Wolfi? I would never have thought it of you, Petra!”

“One must have someone to talk to,” said Petra firmly. “I couldn’t go on waiting for you. What’s he doing now?” And she motioned with her head toward the street.

“So you are really afraid of him and don’t want to see him?” said Minna, terribly angry. “After all, he is the father of your child!”

But suddenly it seemed as if some thought had wiped all doubt, all fear and worry from Petra’s face. Its former clear character traits were apparent again; in times of greatest distress at Madam Po’s Minna had never seen that face look either angry or tearful. And there was the old tone in her voice, the old ring. It was the ring of the old bell—trust, love, patience. Petra quietly took Minna’s shaking hand between her own and said, “You know him, too, Minna, you saw him grow up, and you know that one can’t be angry with him when he laughs and cracks his jokes with us poor women.… Your heart goes out to him straight away, you feel happy and think no more of anything he might have done to you …”

“Yes, God knows!”

“But, Minna, now he’ll have to be a father and think of others. It mustn’t just be that everyone should look happy when he is there; he must help in sharing troubles and work and also put up with an angry face sometimes, instead of running off at once for the day. And Ma Krupass is right, I’ve thought of it hundreds of times these past weeks: he must become a man before he can be a father. At present he’s merely a child whom we’ve all spoiled.”

“You are right, Petra, God knows.”

“And if I stand here with you and go all hot and cold, it isn’t because I’m angry or bear him a grudge or want to punish him! If he came in here, Minna, and gave me his hand and smiled at me in his old way, I know that the first thing I’d do would be to hug him, I’d be so happy. But, Minna, that must not be. I’ve realized that I mustn’t make things so easy for him again. In the first hour it would be wonderful, but in the next I should be thinking: Is my child to have such a spoiled darling for its father, one for whom I have no proper respect? No, Minna, God forbid! Even if I have to run away from here, run away from him and from my own weakness! I promised Ma Krupass and myself: he must first be something. Even if it’s only something quite small. And anyway I don’t want to see him at all for six months.” She paused for a moment. “But now he’s again crept under the skirts of you old women!”

“But he hasn’t, Petra!” cried old Minna joyfully. “What silly ideas you’ve got! He hasn’t done that at all.”

“Now you’re lying, Minna. You just told me yourself.”

“I said nothing of the sort! No, just come out with me now. I’ve had enough of your stink and dust.”

“I’m not going out. I’m not going to him!”

“But he isn’t outside! You’re just imagining it.”

“You said it yourself, Minna—please, let us stay here.”

“I said I wanted to write to him that you are expecting a baby. How can I want to write to him if he’s standing outside? You’re just imagining it all, Petra, because you are afraid, afraid of your own heart and afraid for the child. And because you’re afraid, everything’s all right. And now just let anyone, madam or anyone else, say anything against you—I know different. I’m glad you’ve spoken this way. I know now what I have to write to him, not too much and not too little. Now ask for an hour off and come out, there must be something like a café in the neighborhood. I pinched his letter for you, and madam didn’t say a word although she saw me. But you must give it back; you can copy it quickly if you like. Well, where shall we go? Can you get the time off?”

“Why shouldn’t I get the time off?” said Petra with bravado. “I take time off when I like! Everything you see here,” and she went with Minna to the hut door, “everything, the rags, the paper, the old iron and the bottles—it’s all under my management, and the men working here too, of course. Herr Randolph,” she said to an old man, “I’m going up to my room for a bit with my friend. If there’s anything special you’ve only got to call me.”

“What do you call special, Fräulein? Do you think they’ll be bringing in Kaiser Bill’s crown this afternoon? You go and have a lie down. If I was you I wouldn’t stick all afternoon among the rags!”

“Very well, Herr Randolph,” said Petra happily. “After all, it’s the first time I’m having a visitor here.”

And the two of them went up to Ma Krupass’s little flat, sat down, talked, and talked more.

When the time came for Minna to go home to make supper for her mistress, she did what she had not done since time immemorial; she went to the telephone and announced that she was not coming, that the key of the larder was in the right drawer of the kitchen sideboard behind the spoons, and that the key to the right drawer was in the pocket of her blue apron hanging up with the tea towels. And before Frau Pagel had quite grasped these clear instructions, Minna had already hung up. “Otherwise she’d start pumping me on the telephone, and she can wait for once. Now go on telling me about your Ma Krupass—pinches cuff links and yet has a good heart. Such things are neither in prayer book or bible. How long has she got, did you say?”

“Four months—and that’s just as if the court had known, for I’ll be confined at the beginning of December and she’ll be coming out at the end of November. She didn’t appeal—her lawyer said she ought to be glad. But still, it’s a pity when an old woman like that is up before the judge. I was there, and he told her off properly, and all the time she was crying like a child.”

It was half-past ten before Minna came home. She saw the light in her mistress’s room, but “You can wait!” she told herself, and crept quietly to her bed. But not quietly enough. For Frau Pagel called out: “Is that you, Minna? Well, thank God for that. I was beginning to think you were taking to night life in your old age.”

“Seems like it, madam,” said Minna staunchly. And then, with affected innocence: “Is there anything else madam would like?”

“Why, you deceitful cat!” cried Frau Pagel angrily. “Are you pretending you don’t know what’s itching me? What have you found out?”

“Oh, nothing special,” said Minna off-hand. “Just that madam will soon be a grandmother.” And with that she fled into her room with a speed that one would never have thought possible in such an old bag of bones, and slammed the door, as if to say: “Consulting hours are over for this evening.”

“Well, I never!” said old Frau Pagel, vigorously rubbing her nose and looking dreamily at the spot on the carpet where her vixen of a servant had been standing. “That’s a nice way to tell me! Grandmother! A moment ago a widow without any encumbrances, and now suddenly a grandmother.… Oh, no, we shan’t swallow that medicine, even if you do give it to me so craftily, you spiteful old devil!”

With that Frau Pagel shook her fist at the empty passage and withdrew into her room. But she could not have thought the news too bad, for she fell asleep so soundly that she did not hear Minna creeping out of the house with a letter. And it was now past midnight!

This letter was the beginning of that correspondence which, even though it did not contain a line from Petra Ledig, turned Wolfgang Pagel into a young man who, in Herr Studmann’s words, looked as if he wanted to embrace the world.

III

When Wolfgang Pagel bicycled to the prisoners on his own, and Violet von Prackwitz agreed to this without demur, although she would rather have spent the morning with the young man herself, it was because a higher will prevailed to which everyone had to agree: That of the Principal Warder Marofke. This ridiculous, conceited little man with a potbelly not only made the faces of his convicts sullen—whenever he entered the farm office with one of his never-ending requests, Frau von Prackwitz groaned: “Lord, here he is again!” and Studmann frowned. The workers, the chief guards and their assistants cursed the principle—but quietly. The girls in the kitchen cursed “the conceited clown”—only very loudly.

Marofke was always finding something wrong. First the mutton was too fat, then the pork was too scanty. There had been no peas for three weeks, but white cabbage had been cooked twice a week. The men didn’t return punctually from work, and the meals were not punctual. That window had to be walled up, otherwise the prisoners could see into a room occupied by girls. It was not permissible for the lavatory next to the barracks to be used by villagers—women, for instance. It was likewise not permissible for women to let themselves be seen near the gang at work; it might excite the men.

There was no end to it. Yet this potbellied rascal made life damned easy for himself. He usually left the supervision of the gang to his subordinates, the four warders, and sat almost the whole day in his barracks, drawing up lists in a self-important manner, or writing reports to the prison administration, or striding restlessly through the rooms, pulling every bed to pieces, for inspection. A spoon handle from which a prisoner had made himself a pipe cleaner aroused him to intense thought. What could it signify? A pipe cleaner, of course; but whoever could make that could also make a skeleton key! And he inspected every lock, every iron bar, every socket. Then he strode to the closet, lifted up the lavatory seat, and looked down to see if there was only toilet paper or perhaps the torn bits of a letter there.

But most of the time he sat outside the barracks in the sun, twiddling his thumbs over his fat belly, eyes half-closed, thinking. The people who saw him sitting there so comfortable and sleepy laughed at him contemptuously. For in the country it is a shame for any healthy man to laze during the harvest. Everyone is needed; there are not enough hands.

But it must be admitted that the principal warder was not daydreaming in the sun; he actually was thinking. He thought uninterruptedly of his fifty prisoners. He recalled their sentences, their crimes, their ages, their relations with the world, how much time each had still to serve. He examined their characters man by man, he thought of incidents in the prison, trifling events which, however, vividly revealed what a man was capable of. When the men ate, rested, talked, slept, he observed them. He noticed who spoke to whom; he noticed friendships, hostilities. And as a result of his observations and reflections there was a continuous redistribution; enemies were placed together, friendships were torn asunder. Those who hated each other had to sleep in neighboring beds. Continually Marofke changed the order of sitting at table; he decided who should work by himself, whom the warders must always keep their eyes on.

And the prisoners hated their Marofke like the plague; the warders, to whom he gave endless trouble, cursed him behind his back. At the slightest contradiction he went scarlet, his fat belly shook, his hanging chops trembled. “I make you responsible for it, warder!” he shouted. “You have sworn an oath to do your duty!”

“These fault-finders always exist!” said Studmann with disgust. “It’s best to let them alone. Even God wouldn’t do anything right for them!”

“No!” said Pagel. “This time you are wrong. He is a really cunning fox. And efficient.”

“Now I ask you, Pagel!” said the irritated Studmann. “Have you ever seen this man doing regular duty like his colleagues? Yes, sit in the sun and think out new complaints, that’s all he can do. Unfortunately, I can’t say anything to the fellow; he’s subject only to the prison authorities. But you can be certain if I were his superior I’d give that fat fellow a bit of exercise!”

“Very efficient,” Pagel had persisted. “And cunning. And diligent. Well, you’ll see.”

Yes, Pagel was the only one who believed in the merits of this unbearable buffoon, and it was probably because of this that the two got on well together.

That morning, before riding out to the field, Pagel had paid the principal warder a short visit. Herr Marofke was very susceptible to such courtesies. He was sitting at his table, his face red, staring at a letter which the postman had probably just brought him. Pagel could see that there was a storm in the offing. “Well, any news from the western front, chief?” he asked.

The little man jumped to his feet so suddenly that his chair fell over with a crash. Slapping the letter, he cried: “Yes, news, but not good news! Rejected—my petition to be relieved is rejected!”

“Did you want to leave us?” said Pagel, astonished. “I didn’t know that.”

“Me leave? Nonsense! I wouldn’t let myself be relieved of such a difficult post. Me a shirker? No, never have been—people can say what they like about me. No.” He was calmer. “I can tell you about it—you’ll keep your mouth shut. I made a request that five men should be relieved because they no longer seem safe to me. And the pen-pushers in the office have rejected it—they say my request has no grounds! They have to have a murdered warder in their office before they have their grounds. Idiots!”

“But everything is quite peaceful,” said Pagel soothingly. “I haven’t noticed the slightest thing. Or did anything happen last night?”

“You also think that something must happen first,” growled the principal warder sullenly. “If anything happens in a prison gang, young man, then it is already too late. But I don’t blame you for that; you’ve no experience, and you know nothing about convicts.… Even my colleagues don’t see anything—only this morning they said again that I had a bee in my bonnet—but better to have a bee in your bonnet than be a night owl that sees nothing by day.”

“But what in heaven’s name is wrong?” asked Pagel, surprised at so much sullen rage. “What have you found, officer?”

“Nothing!” said the principal warder dully. “No note, no skeleton key, no money, no weapon—nothing to indicate escape or revolt. But it stinks of it. I’ve been smelling it for days. I notice things like that. Something is going on.”

“But why? What makes you think so?”

“I’ve been in prison over twenty-five years,” confessed Herr Marofke, and saw nothing objectionable in saying so. On the contrary! “I know my men. During the whole of my time of service three have escaped. For two of them I was not responsible, and as for the third, I had only been in service for six months—one doesn’t know anything in that time. But today I do know something, and I swear to you—those five have got something on, and until I get them out of my gang, my gang won’t be clean!”

“Which five?” Pagel had the impression that the principal warder was imagining things.

“I made a request for the following men to be relieved,” said Marofke solemnly. “Liebschner, Kosegarten, Matzke, Wendt, Holdrian.”

“But those are just our pleasantest, most intelligent and handiest men! Except for old Wendt—he’s a bit daft.”

“They’ve only got him in it as a safety valve. He’s to be their scapegoat if there’s any danger. Wendt is their forfeit, as it were, but the other four …” He sighed. “I’ve tried everything to separate them. I’ve redistributed them, none of them sleeps in the same room as the others, I don’t let them sit together, I show favor to one and treat the others severely, which usually makes them angry—but no, hardly do I turn my back when they’re together again, whispering.”

“Perhaps they just like each other?” suggested Pagel. “Perhaps they’re friends.”

“There are no friendships in prison,” declared the principal warder. “In prison everyone is always the other’s enemy. Whenever two stick together they are conspirators—for a definite purpose. No, it stinks; if I tell you that—I, Principal Warder Marofke—then you can believe it!”

For a while they were silent. “I’m going out to the men now,” Pagel said finally in order to get away. “I’ll keep my eyes open in case I see anything.”

“What do you think you’ll see?” said the principal warder. “They are tough lads—they’d make an old detective inspector sweat. Before you’d see anything you’d be lying there with a hole in your skull. No, I’ve thought it over. Since they’ve rejected my request, I’m going all out. I shall cause a mutiny at lunch time; I’ll shove salt in their food, literally; I’ll put so much salt in their grub that they won’t be able to swallow it. And then I shall force them to eat. I’ll taunt them and threaten them until they mutiny. And then I shall have my grounds; then I shall grab my five and send them back as mutineers. That’ll cost them another year or two in prison.” He giggled in scorn.

“Well, I’m damned!” Pagel was horrified. “But it might go wrong. Five men against fifty in that narrow room!”

“Young man!” said the principal warder, and he no longer appeared ridiculous to Pagel. “If you know for certain that someone wants to attack you from the back, what do you do? You turn round and attack him. That’s the way I am. I’d rather be killed from the front than from behind.”

“I’ll come over at lunch time with my gun,” said Pagel eagerly.

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” growled the principal warder. “I’ve no use for an inexperienced chap in a business like this. One minute, and the nearest crook will have your gun, and then it’ll be Good-by, my Fatherland! Oh, dear no, you just run along now; I’ve got to work out my table order so that I have the loudest shouters sitting just under my truncheon.”

IV

A man’s settled conviction has something in it which can affect even his opponent. Broodingly Wolfgang Pagel rode along the old familiar way to the ninth outfield, where the potatoes were being gathered. Now and then he met a dray loaded with them and, getting off his bicycle, asked the driver what the crop was like. Then, before mounting again, he would casually add: “Everything all right out there?” A silly question. Obviously everything was all right, and the only reply one got from the driver was a vague mumble.

He rode on. It was no good letting oneself be influenced by those who saw ghosts everywhere.

It was a fine autumn day toward the end of September, and if the east wind was a little fresh, it was pleasantly warm in the sun and out of the wind; now that he was in the wood there was not even a breeze. Outfield nine, the remotest of all the areas of the estate, bordered on the long and the short side of the wood. Its other short side bordered on the Birnbaumer field. Almost soundless, except for the whirring chain, his bicycle sped over the forest paths. Of course everything would be in order there, but Pagel had to admit that the outfield, almost four miles from the farm, hidden in the woods and far from all inhabited places, offered the convicts a splendid opportunity.

Instinctively he trod harder on the pedals, then, smiling at himself, put on the brakes. He must not let himself get nervous. The convicts had been working there over a week, without anything happening. What was the good, then, of hurrying just in order to get out there five minutes sooner? If nothing had happened in six working days it was not likely to do so in those five minutes.

He tried to imagine how something could happen. The convicts worked in the open field in four gangs of twelve and thirteen men. Ten paces behind each group stood the warder with his loaded carbine in hand, and in front of him, continually under his eyes, were the men on their knees. A convict might not even stand up without permission. And before he could take three steps he would be shot down. They all knew they would be fired on without warning. In theory, of course, it was possible that two or three might sacrifice themselves to obtain freedom for the others, and that once the warder had emptied his magazine, and before he could draw his pistol, the rest would be off. Actually, however, convicts were not self-sacrificing; each, you might be sure, was quite prepared to sacrifice anyone but number one.

No, it was not out here that things would happen, but in the barracks. Marofke was playing a dangerous game at midday, and Pagel resolved that he would at least be outside with his gun. Perhaps Marofke was venturing on this game for nothing, for illusions, phantoms …

Pagel rode on slowly, pondering. It was this habit of thought which distinguished him from many young people and most old ones—an independent, persistent brooding, a desire to understand. Not for him the beaten track, but his own path. In Neulohe everyone considered the principal warder to be a lazy, conceited ass; but that had no influence on Wolfgang Pagel, who was of a very different mind. When Marofke asserted there was something going on among his prisoners, it was stupid, however weak might be the ground for his opinion, simply to reply: Nonsense!

In one thing the principal warder could not be wrong. He himself knew nothing about convicts, but Marofke knew a great deal. They were very pleasant to Pagel, making little jokes and frankly telling him of their troubles in “stir,” and in the world outside. They made a harmless, if somewhat too friendly, impression. This impression, however, must be wrong. One realized that as soon as one thought about it. How could they be so inoffensive and friendly?

“Don’t let them pull wool over your eyes, Pagel,” Marofke had told him a dozen times. “Don’t forget they are convicts because they have all done something criminal. Once a crook, always a crook. There may be many in prison who got there because of misfortune or jealousy—but whoever’s in a penitentiary has always done something pretty low.”

Yes, and they make themselves look harmless. He was right; one must not be taken in. That was where Marofke was different from the other officers; he was always suspicious, he was not to be caught napping. Never for a moment did he forget that fifty dangerous criminals lived in what was, after all, an insecure harvesters’ barracks, and that if those fifty men ever escaped it would mean incalculable misfortune for their fellow men.

“But they will be out, anyway, in a month, in three months, in half a year,” Pagel had objected.

“Certainly—but registered by the police, in their civilian duds, and with a little money to start off with. If they give us the slip here, however, their first crime must be in getting proper clothes—theft, burglary, assault.… Wherever they live they daren’t register, but must hide among criminals or prostitutes who don’t do a thing for nothing. And so they have to get money—theft, fraud, swindling, burglary, hold-ups.… Now do you understand what the difference is between release and escape?”

“Quite understand!” said Pagel.

Markofke was right and the others were wrong.

And the others were wrong also when they declared that, because he stayed behind, Marofke was shirking his duty. (The Rittmeister had said at once that he was a shirker.) But Pagel now understood what a numbing, indifferent occupation could be made of standing behind the gang of prisoners. Marofke was not stupid; he racked his brains; several times he had groaned: “If only I was back safe and sound with my fifty blackguards. At the beginning you’re glad to be outside in the fresh air; but now I go on counting, another six weeks, another five weeks and six days, and so on and so on, and most likely we shan’t get in your potatoes before the first of November anyway.”

“And there are still the turnips,” said Pagel spitefully.

One ought not to be spiteful to the man, however. He was no coward, as his plan for midday showed—a plan requiring a fair amount of resolution and courage. He might be a little unhinged, though; twenty-five years of prison service were enough to make any man queer. Not that one altogether believed this, however. The principal warder was a keen observer and a clear thinker, and Pagel decided to keep his eyes wide open today, and find out if what the other thought was correct or not.

And in five minutes events were to show him the value of his own powers of observation and the utility of an outsider among convicts.

He leaned his bicycle against a tree which, incidentally, was something the principal warder had severely forbidden (since a bicycle left unattended could assist a man’s escape), but this time Pagel’s carelessness had no further consequences. He crossed by the potato mounds toward the gang, which was working in a long column, the convicts sliding forward on their knees, digging up and collecting the potatoes. Four men, walking to and fro, emptied the full baskets into sacks, and returned them to the diggers. Behind the chain stood four officers in the listless manner of people who for ten hours a day fear something that never comes. Two had their carbines under their arms; two had them slung over their shoulders—Pagel noticed it because Marofke had forbidden this also. The convicts were just working down from the top of a small hill into a hollow bordered by older plantations of pine trees. This hollow was overgrown with weeds which, because of all the water collecting there, were still half green and made digging hard.

This the men shouted to Pagel at once. “It’s all rotten here, bailiff! We can’t get on at all. The potatoes are still quite green. Just to save tobacco!” As an incentive Pagel had arranged that a bonus in tobacco should be given for a fixed yield in hundredweights.

“We’ll see what can be done,” he shouted, going up to the nearest officer, whom he at once asked the question which was constantly on his tongue today: “Everything all right?”

“Of course,” replied the bored young assistant warder. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

“I was only asking.… Digging’s bad here?”

“I see Marofke’s been at you. He’s cracked! Always bleating and nosing around! I tell you, this detachment couldn’t be better off. And still he’s not satisfied! That’s overdoing it.”

“How overdoing?”

“Warder!” interrupted a prisoner. “Can I fall out for a minute?”

The warder looked first at him, then at the others. “All right, Kosegarten.”

The prisoner gave Pagel an amused, familiar look, stepped behind the row, and, grinning, unbuttoned his trousers. Squatting down he kept his eyes on Pagel, who half turned away so as not to have this spectacle before him.

“How overdoing?” replied the assistant warder. “Because Marofke wants to suck up to the director, that’s why. He’s sworn that he’ll take back every man to Meienburg twenty-five pounds heavier. ‘Even if we have to eat you out of house and home,’ he said yesterday; ‘I keep on grumbling about the food, they just can’t cook too well for us!’ ”

There was no time to reply to this denunciation, for dismay suddenly changed the warder’s face. “Halt!” he bawled, tearing the carbine from his shoulder …

Pagel swung round and saw the prisoner Kosegarten running off into the pine trees …

“Out of the way!” roared the warder, hitting Pagel heavily on the breast with the barrel of his carbine.

“Don’t shoot, warder!” shouted voices. “We’ll fetch him.”

The man hesitated a moment, and two, three more figures disappeared among the pines.

“Halt!” he shouted and fired.

The report sounded feeble beside the uproar of the prisoners. There was shooting now at the top also. “Form fours!” roared voices.

Pagel, seeing a fifth man running to the pines, set after him.

“Stand still, fool! How can I shoot?” bellowed the officer.

Pagel hesitated, threw himself down, and the bullets whistled over him. They could be heard pattering on the trees. Five minutes later the men were drawn up ready to march off, numbered, and the names of the missing ascertained. Five men. Their names were: Liebschner, Kosegarten, Matzke, Wendt, Holdrian.

Shrewd Marofke, thought Pagel, ashamed of his own stupidity. How often had the warder told him not to enter into conversation with officers while on duty! How damned idiotic he had been to run after a fugitive when two men had just shown him that such pursuit excellently covered up a flight!

The prisoners were buzzing with excitement or they were very gloomy and silent; the warders agitated, morose and furious.

“You, Herr Pagel, go like hell and tell Marofke the whole stinking mess. My God, what a row he’ll make, how he’ll curse us! And he’ll be right—compared with him we’re idiots. Well, it’s all over with the harvest gang. Back to Meienburg this afternoon! Tell Marofke it’ll be a good two hours before we come along. We shall march round by the open fields; I won’t risk taking the lads through the woods. Now off with you!”

Pagel jumped on his bicycle and sped through the woods.

V

For the next three or four hours, Neulohe was buzzing and humming like a beehive before the queen leaves. Only here the leaving had already taken place—and not by the queen!

“I thought so,” was all that the principal warder said before flinging himself into the office to ring up the prison authorities, followed by a perspiring and breathless Pagel.

“You ought to have been a bit more careful with your people,” said Studmann angrily.

Conceited little Marofke, however, spent no time in justifying or clearing himself. “We must get them today before they’re out of the woods, or we’ll never get them!” he told Pagel. He did not so much as attempt to say, “I told you so.”

While the warder was telephoning, Pagel whispered to Studmann, astonished to find that what he himself had most at heart was to defend little Marofke. Little Marofke, however, thought quite otherwise. He had only two ideas: to lead the remainder of his party back to Meienburg without further loss, and to catch the fugitives as rapidly as possible. Clearly he was getting a frightful dressing down on the phone, but he did not wince, he made no reference to his rejected application. What alone interested him was what was going to happen now.

“There’s a man for you!” said Pagel.

“If he’s such a fine fellow, he shouldn’t have let them get away first,” Studmann muttered.

The principal warder hung up the receiver. “Herr von Studmann,” he reported in a very frigid and military manner, “the harvest gang at Neulohe will be withdrawn today. Warders for the removal of the men are coming at once from Meienburg. I should like to have ready at, say, three o’clock, two teams for the conveyance of effects. I myself will go to meet the gang and bring it to the barracks.”

“You yourself? Oh, really!” said Studmann bitterly. “And what about our potatoes?” He could foresee evil consequences.

Marofke ignored the thrust. “Will you, Herr von Studmann, get into touch with the forester, and perhaps the owner of the forest? In the next half-hour we must ascertain from the forest map where the fellows are likely to be. When exactly did they get away, Herr Pagel?”

“Round about half-past ten.”

“Well, we know the place; a plan must be drawn up—thus, they may have got as far as this, or here they have perhaps hidden themselves. Gendarmes will come, fifty, a hundred, perhaps soldiers, too. By evening it’ll be a real hunt.”

“Charming!” said Studmann.

“I myself will be back as soon as possible. You, Pagel, go at once to the Manor and ring up police headquarters in Frankfurt. They will give you instructions. Afterwards you will have to ring up all gendarme stations in the neighborhood.… The Polish frontier has to be watched and the way to Berlin cut off. The phone here is to be only for incoming calls, no out-going calls here at all; inform the post office of that.”

“My God!” cried Studmann, infected at last by the little man’s energy. “Is it really so dangerous?”

“Four of the men are relatively not dangerous,” said the principal warder. “Souteneurs, swindlers and cheats. But there’s one, Matzke—he wouldn’t worry about murder so long as he got clothes and money. Well, gentlemen, let’s get started.” And he shot out of the office like a rocket.

“Off, Pagel!” cried Studmann. “Send the old gentleman to me!”

Pagel ran through the park. Passing Fräulein Violet, who said something, he called out: “Convicts escaped!” and ran on. Pushing aside old Elias, who let him in, he ran to the phone in the hall. “Hello, hello. Exchange. Police headquarters in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder. Urgent. Urgent. No, at once. I’ll hold on.…” In the doorways appeared frightened and astonished faces. Two housemaids looked at each other. What’s the meaning of that queer look? he thought. Then Violet came into the hall. “What’s up, Herr Pagel? The convicts?”

Noisily the door of the Geheimrat’s room opened. “Who’s bellowing in my house? In my house I do the bellowing!”

“Herr Geheimrat, please go to the office at once. Five convicts have made off.”

Upstairs a servant girl laughed hysterically.

“And because of that you want me to go to your office?” the Geheimrat beamed. “Do you think they’re going to come in order to look at me in your office? I told you at the time—get respectable people! Now I suppose every night I and my wife must look under the bed with a revolver as a torch.”

“This is Neulohe Estate,” said Pagel on the phone. “Neu-lo-he! On behalf of the administration of Meienburg Penitentiary I want to—”

“It’s all right!” came an equable voice at the end of the wire. “We’ve already heard from Meienburg. Who’s speaking? The bailiff? Well, you seem to be up to some fine larks. Couldn’t you have kept your eyes peeled a bit more? Now listen. Ring off, and in the meantime I’ll inform your exchange, and when it rings again it’ll be the exchange giving you all gendarme stations in your district. All you need say to them is: ‘Five convicts escaped; send every man to Neulohe—and jump to it.’ Do this as quickly as you can, all our lines are engaged; the frontier’s not thirteen miles off.…”

The Geheimrat had gone with his granddaughter to the office, nevertheless. Young Pagel went on telephoning; the servants were running about quite brainlessly. Sometimes one stood by him, panting, watching him and reading from his lips a message which was always the same. What crazy faces women can make when they’re frightened, he thought, himself genuinely excited, too. A little upset and a little unhappy. Is the lady upstairs in tears? She must already be fearing for her bit of life. And while he went on repeating the same old warning, he was able to hear in what different ways people reacted to it:

“Donnerwetter!”

“You don’t say so!”

“Just when I’ve got rheumatism in my leg!”

“But what are convicts doing in Neulohe?”

“Is there a reward offered?”

“Well, well! But there, today’s Friday! It would happen when my wife’s cooked a chicken!”

“Anyone can ring up and say he’s speaking on behalf of police headquarters! Who are you, anyway?”

“What do you think, Inspector—boots? Or can I come in drill trousers?”

“Five’s bad!”

And the appalling remark: “The one they may kill, perhaps in the next ten minutes, is alive and hasn’t heard anything yet.” Something rather gruesome arose from these words—guilt and complicity.

Pagel, telephoning, was considering in what way he had failed in this affair. Not in much, only in trifles. Where so many of the experienced had failed, no reasonable person could reproach him, the inexperienced. Wolfgang Pagel, however, who only a few months before had been so prepared to condone all his own transgressions—Wolfgang Pagel now thought otherwise. Or rather, he felt otherwise. Was it the work in the fields, or recent events, or was it the mention in Minna’s letters of him becoming a man? What did it matter if others had trespassed more? He didn’t want to have to reproach himself in any degree.

The gendarme stations were still on the line, the telephone rang constantly, there was the same message, the same cries of anger, of astonishment, of action. And all the time he could see the five men in convict garb, crouching like deer in some concealed corner of the woods, without money or weapons and of no great intelligence, but with one thing which did distinguish them from ordinary people: they had no inhibitions to stop them from doing what they wanted.

Wolfgang Pagel reflected that, not long ago, he had thought with pride, “I’m not tied to anything. I can do what I want. I’m free.…” Yes, Wolfgang Pagel—now you understand, you were free, unfettered like a wild animal. But humanity is not about doing what you want, but rather about doing what you must. And while he went on with his calls, thirty, fifty, seventy of them, he could see the healthy powers of life about to do battle with the sick; and suddenly the jokes about the Devil’s Hussars appeared unsavory and the convicts’ song impudent. Fifty, a hundred gendarmes were mounting their bicycles; making from all directions for one goal—Neulohe. He saw the officials in the police administration at Frankfurt. Telephones were ringing in dozens of police stations; there was the tap-tap-tap of Morse. In customs posts on the border, officials were putting on their caps, buckling up their belts with great care, examining their pistols—death was about!

Death! Five men capable of anything! And at a time when there seemed no unity anywhere, when everything was rotten and in collapse, at that moment life was at least united against one thing—death! Life was blocking all the highways; its eyes were everywhere. Police stood on the roads leading into the big towns, inspecting every passer-by—a scarf, a trouser leg might betray something. The slums, the dens where criminals hide, were being more closely watched than ever, and in the small towns the police were going into the alleys behind the houses, where they opened on to the gardens and yards.

Along the main roads they were warning pedestrians, drivers of carts, and truck drivers. A whole region between the Polish frontier and Berlin had come into movement. From the great presses in the printing works flowed police notices, proclamations and personal descriptions; these by this afternoon would be stuck on walls and billboards. Officials were examining the files of Liebschner, Kosegarten, Matzke, Wendt, Holdrian—from the report of former crimes hoping for hints of possible new ones, trying to divine fresh clues from the old. Where would this man try to go? Who were his friends? Who wrote to him while he was imprisoned?

Perhaps life no longer had its former strength and soundness; so much had been overthrown in recent years that life itself was sick. What it was now doing was possibly to a great extent only habit. The machine creaked and groaned—but it still revolved. It reached out once more—would it lay hold?

VI

How long had Wolfgang Pagel been at the telephone? An hour? Two hours? He didn’t know. But when he left the Manor he saw the first results of his telephoning. Bicycle after bicycle stood against the office wall; gendarmes were in groups near the door and by the roadside, smoking, talking, some laughing. And more were coming, met with a “Hello” or expectant silence or a joke.

In the office they were graver. Maps were spread over the table; tensely Frau von Prackwitz, the old Geheimrat and Herr von Studmann examined them. A gendarme officer was pointing at something. At the window stood Marofke, pale and downcast. Obviously things had fared ill with him.

“The Polish frontier, Poland—quite out of the question,” said the gendarme officer. “So far as we know, none of the five speak Polish; and Poland, anyway, is no field for criminals of their type. I’m convinced they mean to make their way as quickly as possible to Berlin. By night, of course, and on footpaths. All but one of them, pimps, swindlers, frauds. It’s Berlin that attracts such fellows.”

“But—” began Marofke.

“Don’t interrupt, please,” said the gendarme officer sharply. “Undoubtedly they will lie low in the woods till night. I’ll try to catch them there with some of my men, although it’s pretty hopeless—the woods are too large. Our chief job is to keep our eye on the smaller roads and the isolated villages at night. That’s where they’ll attempt to pass and get clothes and food.… We might possibly catch them tonight even; they’ll still be in the district.”

“Only don’t tell my wife that, my dear sir,” said the Geheimrat.

“If there’s any place between here and Berlin which is absolutely safe from the scoundrels, it’s Neulohe,” said the gendarme officer, smiling. “That’s certain. We’ve got our headquarters here! No, it’ll be bad for the isolated villages; we’ll have to watch those. And solitary farms—but we’ll warn them! And even if we don’t catch a glimpse of the five, we shall still know roughly where they are. I imagine about thirty miles a night on the average—at first less, then a bit more. If they have to stop much for food it will be less again. I assume the first night they’ll go north rather than west, so as to avoid this disturbed region. Though, to be sure, Meienburg’s that way.” He turned to Marofke. “Has any of them connections in Meienburg? Relatives—a girl—friends?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?” asked the gendarme officer in sharp reproof. “Don’t you know, or haven’t they any connections?”

“They haven’t any,” said the warder angrily.

“That is, as far as you know,” sneered the gendarme officer. “But you don’t know very much, do you? Well, thank you. We shan’t need you any longer, principal warder. Report to me before you leave with your detachment.”

“Yes, sir!” The principal warder saluted and left the office. They watched him go but no one said a word of farewell. Not even Studmann. The Geheimrat started to hum “How swiftly, how swiftly, do beauty and greatness vanish!”

The gendarme officer smiled benevolently.

“He made a bad impression on me from the first,” said Frau von Prackwitz.

“Herr Pagel thinks differently,” observed Studmann.

“Excuse me a moment.” Pagel dashed from the office.

Through the crowd of gendarmes Marofke, looking neither to the right nor left, had passed with his ridiculous potbelly, his thin legs in irreproachably pressed trousers, his purple cheeks like the pouches of a hamster; he walked with such energy that his cheeks trembled at every step. But, if he saw nothing, he could not avoid hearing a gendarme ask in astonishment: “Who the devil is that chap?”

“Good Lord, he’s the one who let them escape.”

“Oh, so it’s because of him we’ve got to lie around in the woods at night!”

Without the slightest change of expression, Marofke passed on to the barracks, and sat down on the bench where, to the annoyance of the people of Neulohe, he had so often sat.

The barracks resounded with the noise of packing and moving. In angry, excited voices the warders were giving their orders: enraged, the prisoners answered back. Marofke didn’t get up. He knew there was nothing missing. Not a blanket had been exchanged for tobacco, no sheet torn up for wicks, not a spade forgotten in the fields; all in the best of order—except that five men were missing. And even if they were caught today, which he did not believe, that would not remove his disgrace. Five convicts had got away from him, and he was the cause of a detachment being withdrawn. That shame could never be removed. There was, of course, his report to the prison authorities. He had proved observant, had asked for the removal of those very five; even that, however, wouldn’t clear him. The same pen-pushers who had rejected his application would do their utmost to minimize its importance—it was absolutely groundless, arrangements for removal could not be made as a result of such applications, the men would have had every right to complain. If Herr Marofke had really mistrusted them so very much, why had he let them out of sight for a moment? He ought to have been beside them night and day, instead of entrusting them to an inexperienced assistant warder. Yes, they would put all the blame on him, and in addition there would be the reports from the farm management and the gendarme officer!

Marofke had been long enough in the service to know that he could not be pensioned off because of this affair; but he wouldn’t be promoted. And he had counted on that this coming autumn. Krebs, the head warder, was retiring at Michaelmas, and he had expected to get the post; he ought to. It was not vanity or ambition which made him wish for this advancement; it was something else. At home he had a daughter, a somewhat old-maidish creature of whom he was very fond; and she would have liked passionately to become a teacher. With the salary of head warder he might perhaps have been able to help her—now she would have to become a cook. Life was idiotic. Five men had run away because a young fellow chattered to a warder on duty, and therefore he wouldn’t be able to gratify his daughter’s dearest wish.

He looked up. Young Pagel had joined him on the bench; with a smile he was holding out his cigarette case and saying: “Idiots!”

Marofke would have liked to refuse. Yet he felt obliged to this young fellow for following him from the office, for letting everyone see him sitting beside a disgraced man. He means well, he thought, and took a cigarette. How could the other know what were the consequences of his foolishness? Everyone committed blunders.

“I’ll take care, officer,” said Pagel, “that it’s I who make the report to your administration. And it shall be of a kind to please you.”

“That’s nice of you. But it’s not worth while your spoiling your own position here, since it won’t help me much. But pay attention to what I’m now going to tell you. I won’t speak to anyone else; they wouldn’t listen to me anyway. Did you understand what the gendarme officer was saying?”

“I was only in there a minute, but what he said seemed clear to me, officer.”

“Good. Not for me, though. And why not? Because they’re the sort of things a man thinks of when he doesn’t know convicts. I’d be all right if Wendt and Holdrian only were at large. They’re stupid enough to carry out half a dozen bad burglaries and perhaps hold-ups, just for a little food and clothes on the way. Even if they do reach Berlin they’ll have let themselves in for six to eight years’ penal servitude, only to get there. But they’ll never do it. Every burglary will be a clue.”

“What will they do, then?”

“Well, Matzke, Liebschner and Kosegarten are with them. Bright lads who think a bit more about what they do. Their idea is always: whatever we take’s got to be worth it. They won’t break into any farmhouse at the risk of a year in jug at least, just to find some plowboy’s old corduroy jacket, which they wouldn’t even dream of wearing.”

“But they’ll have to obtain clothes somewhere. They won’t get far in prison dress.”

“Of course,” said Marofke, putting his finger to his nose with that old superiority which looked so conceited. “And since they’re cunning and have thought of that, and because they’re prudent and don’t want to steal clothes, what follows?”

Pagel didn’t know.

“Someone will get clothes for them,” Marofke gently explained. “They have accomplices here in Neulohe, one or several. You can take it from me that hard-boiled lads like Kosegarten and Liebschner don’t take a powder without any preparation. It’s all been arranged, and because I didn’t find out how they arranged it—for it was done here by notes or signs, they couldn’t have done it in Meienburg!—because I’ve been stupid, it’s really quite right in the end for everyone to blame me.”

“But, officer, how could they, here under all our eyes? And who in Neulohe would have lent themselves to such a thing?”

The warder shrugged his shoulders. “If you only knew how cunning someone is who wants to regain his freedom! You yourself spend your time thinking of a hundred different things, but a prisoner is thinking all day and half the night about one thing only: how to get away. You talk about our eyes! We see nothing. When a convict goes out to work and starts to roll himself a cigarette and finds he has no tobacco and chucks the cigarette paper down in the mud, right in front of you, you march on with the gang. And three minutes later along comes another in the know and picks it up and reads what’s scribbled on it.… Perhaps nothing—it’s only folded in such and such a way, which means this and that.”

“It seems a little improbable.”

“Nothing’s improbable with them,” said Marofke, now in his element. “You just think of a prison, Pagel: iron and cement, locks and bolts, and chains too. And walls and doors and threefold supervision and guards outside and inside! Yet you can take my word for it, there isn’t a prison in the whole world which is absolutely shut. On one side an enormous organization, and on the other an individual in the middle of iron and stone! Yet time and again we hear that a letter’s gone out and no one saw it, that money or a steel file has come in, and no knows how. If that can be done in prison with all its organization, isn’t it possible out here in our unguarded work gangs, under our very eyes?”

“It’s always possible,” said Pagel, “that they could manage to write a letter. But there must be someone here also who is in league with them, who wants to read it.”

“And why shouldn’t there be someone, Pagel? What do you know about it? What do I? It’s only necessary for someone to be living here who was in the war with one of my lads. They’ve only to look at each other and the glance of my one says, ‘Help, comrade!’—and the plot is on foot. Someone here may once have been on remand, and my chap was in the next cell on the same business; and every night through the cell window they told one another about their troubles—the damage is done! But it needn’t be that. That would be an accident, and it doesn’t need to be that. Women are not accidents; everywhere and always they come into it.”

“What women?” asked Pagel.

“What women, Pagel? All women. That is, I obviously don’t mean all of them, but there’s a certain type everywhere which is as fond of such fellows as many people are of venison when it’s really high. They think a convict who has had time to rest himself is better than an ordinary man, is more knowing, so to speak—you understand what I mean. Women like that would do anything to get one in their bed all to themselves. Harboring felons and so on, they don’t consider that, they’ve never heard of it.…”

“There may be such women in Berlin, officer,” objected Pagel, “but surely not in the country?”

“How do you know, young man, what things are like here, or the women either?” asked Marofke, immensely superior. “You’re a nice chap, the only one who’s been decent to me here, but you’re a bit hazy. You always think things aren’t so bad after all, and that what’s eaten isn’t as hot as what’s cooked. Young fellow, you ought to have grasped early this morning that sometimes it can be even hotter.”

Pagel looked uncomfortable, with an expression like a cat’s in a thunderstorm. And it really was thundering, and uncomfortably so.

“I explained to you this morning all my ideas about it,” said Marofke, sighing. “I didn’t believe you could help me much, but I did think, The young man’ll keep his eyes open. But that’s not exactly what you’ve done, Lieutenant; you wouldn’t have got the Iron Cross for that in wartime. But there, it’s all right, I know what a young man’s like. But please do this for me now—do keep your eyes open a little the next few days. I don’t think all the gendarmes together, whatever they say, will catch my five chaps. You’re here, though, and it would be very nice if you could write to the administration in a few days’ time: We’ve got the five and Marofke told us how to catch them.… What do you think?”

“Gladly, officer,” said Pagel obligingly. “And what is it you think I ought to do?”

“Man, have you got cotton wool in your ears?” Marofke jumped up. “Haven’t you any brains? I can’t tell you anything more. Keep your eyes open, that’s all. I don’t ask anything else. No need to play the detective or skulk in corners, nor even try to be cunning—only keep your eyes open!”

“All right, then,” said Pagel, rising. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“You know what to do,” replied Marofke hurriedly. “I’m convinced that they have accomplices in the village, one or more, probably girls, but not necessarily. And while the police are all over the place here, they’ll keep under cover in the woods, in the village, who knows! It’s you who must use your eyes. In three or four days’ time, when it’s a bit quieter, our old pals will set forth, properly, by train, and well dressed.…”

“I’ll look out,” promised Pagel.

“Do it, too,” Marofke begged. “Looking out is harder than you think. And there’s another thing you ought to know. What they have on their backs.…”

“Yes?”

“That’s State property. And every prisoner knows that if he makes away with one piece of it he’ll be wanted for larceny. A missing scarf may mean six months’ penal servitude. So when really experienced lads bolt they take care that their things get sent as soon as possible to the prison. Usually by post—in which case I’ll let you know. If so much as a single piece turns up here, then you must keep watch like a pointer. Don’t think that it’s something I’ve left behind, because I never forget a thing. If it’s only a gray prison sock with a red rim, there’s something wrong. Do you even know what our shirts look like? Or the mufflers? Come along—I’ll show you.”

The principal warder did not, however, get as far as initiating Pagel into these secrets. Down the village street came ten bicycles, bringing nine warders from the prison, all belted, with rubber truncheons swinging and their faces dripping with sweat. In front rode a fat flabby man in a thick crumpled black suit. His belly almost rested on the handle bars. When the principal warder saw this threatening colossus he stared, forgetting everything else, including young Pagel, and murmured in dismay: “The labor inspector himself!”

Pagel saw the fat man, breathing heavily, descend from his bicycle, which a zealous warder held while he wiped the sweat from his forehead. He did not look at Marofke.

“Inspector,” said Marofke imploringly with his hand still at his cap badge. “Report Harvest Detachment Five Neulohe, a senior warder, four warders … forty-five men …”

“Where is the Manor office, young fellow?” demanded the colossus distantly. “Please show me the way. As for you, Marofke”—the inspector seemed to be interested in the gabled wall of the barracks, on which the stone cross stood out with its somewhat lighter red—“as for you, Marofke, you will soon find out that you’re finished.” He went on looking at the wall, considering. Then, in an indifferent tone: “You will immediately, Marofke, see if the footwear of the prisoners has been greased according to regulations and if laced up in conformity with orders. That is, bow knots and no others!”

One of the warders sniggered. Marofke, the little vain potbellied principal warder, replied, pale: “Yes, inspector,” and disappeared round the corner of the barracks.

Pagel, leading the way to the office, thought bitterly about the little man who, although he had taken the greatest trouble and borne the heaviest anxieties, was snubbed by everybody. No one, however, had cast any reproach at himself … despite all the mistakes he had made. He resolved, if an opportunity offered, to rehabilitate Herr Marofke. He could understand how difficult it was for anyone who looked so absurd to obtain respect—however efficient he might be. Efficiency was not at all the chief thing; it was more important to look like it.

“So this is the office,” said the inspector. “Thank you, young man. Who are you?”

“A friend of Herr Marofke’s,” answered Pagel rudely.

The fat man was not to be put out. “I was thinking of your occupation,” he said, still friendly.

“Pupil,” replied Pagel with fury.

“There you are!” beamed the fat man. “Then you are certainly suited to Marofke. Pupil! He, too, has a lot to learn.” And, nodding, he opened the door.

Wolfgang Pagel had had another lesson, which was that one should not vent ill-humor on those whom it delights.

VII

Half an hour later Harvest Detachment Five moved off from Neulohe, and a quarter of an hour afterwards the gendarmes set out on their battue through the woods. From the office windows all four—the Geheimrat, the gendarme officer, young Pagel and Frau von Prackwitz—watched the convicts’ departure. It was very different from their arrival. There was no singing, no one smiled; they went away with lowered heads, sullen faces, and their feet dragging in the dust. This dull shuffling along had in it something despairing, an evil rhythm, a “We are the enemies of this world”—that was what it sounded like to Wolfgang.

No doubt the prisoners had been thinking about their escaped fellow sufferers; burning envy had filled them when they considered the freedom of those five who now haunted the woods, while they were to return, under an escort of loaded carbines, to their solitary stone cells—punished because the others had escaped. From them had been taken the sight of distant fields, a laughing girlish face, a hare jumping along the potato furrows—all exchanged for the faded yellow dreariness of cell walls, because five others were scampering about in freedom.

In front of the column went the principal warder, Marofke. On the right he had to push a bicycle, on the left another; he wasn’t even allowed to watch over his men now. And behind the column trod the inspector, with spiky eyebrows and elephant feet, alone. His fat, white face raised, expressionless. Strong white teeth flashed in his mouth. At the side of the road Vi had stood to take stock. Seeing her there, Pagel had been angry.

The Geheimrat spoke to his daughter. “I should advise you, incidentally, not to sleep in the Villa alone with your stupid Räder the next few nights. All respect to our clever gendarme officer—but safe is safe.”

“Perhaps one of the gentlemen would …?” began Frau von Prackwitz, looking from Pagel, who was staring out of the window, to Studmann.

Although Marofke had specifically warned against any playing at being detective, Pagel preferred being free in the nights that followed, to do a bit of looking and hearing around—to keep his eyes open, as he’d been told. So he looked at no one but out of the window—but the convicts had left at last, and the barracks looked like an empty red box.

“I shall be very pleased to sleep with you,” said von Studmann—and flushed terribly.

The old Geheimrat bleated, and looked out of the window, too. Pagel shrugged his shoulders. The awkwardnesses of the adroit are always the worst. When a completely conventional man like Studmann makes a slip, everyone turns red.

“That’s settled, then. Thanks very much, Herr von Studmann,” said Frau von Prackwitz in her deep, even voice.

“It will cost you a heap of money to restore the barracks to its old condition,” declared the Geheimrat. “All this trellis-work and bolts must disappear as soon as possible, and the doorway be made free again.”

“Perhaps we could leave the place as it is for the moment,” suggested Studmann cautiously. “It would be a pity to tear everything out and have to put it back next year.”

“Next year? No detachment’s coming to Neulohe again!” announced the Geheimrat. “I have had about enough of your mother’s nervousness, Eva. Well, I’ll go up now and see how she is. All these green police coats will have cheered her up, of course! What an upset! And I keep asking myself what you’re going to do about your potatoes.” With this last thrust he left the office. The jealous father had taken a sufficient revenge for Studmann’s flush, for his daughter’s momentary embarrassment (perceived only by him), and for the accentuated indifference with which young Pagel was staring out of the window.

“Yes, what’s going to happen to our potatoes?” asked Frau von Prackwitz, looking doubtfully at Studmann.

“I don’t think that will offer any great difficulty,” said Studmann hurriedly, glad to have found something to talk about. “Unemployment and hunger are on the increase, and if we let it be known in the local town that we are digging potatoes, not paying cash, but giving ten or fifteen pounds in kind per hundredweight, we’ll get all the people we want. We shall have to send, two, three, perhaps four carts into town every morning to fetch the people and take them back at night, but we can manage that.”

“A nuisance—and expensive,” sighed Frau von Prackwitz. “Oh, if those convicts …”

“But far cheaper than if the potatoes are frozen. You, Pagel, won’t be a landed gentleman any longer. You will have to be in the fields all day and distribute tokens, one for every hundredweight.…”

“Thank Heaven!” said Pagel submissively.

“I have to be away tomorrow,” went on Studmann, “so I will also get a start on with this business—put an advertisement in the town paper, and settle things with the labor exchange.”

“You’re going away? Now, when the convicts … !” Frau von Prackwitz was very annoyed.

“Only a day in Frankfurt,” said Studmann. “Today is the twenty-ninth, you know.” Frau von Prackwitz didn’t understand. “The rent is due the day after tomorrow,” he added with emphasis. “I’ve already been in negotiation about it, but now it’s high time to scrape together the money. The dollar is a hundred and sixty million marks, and we shall have to raise an enormous amount—at any rate, an enormous amount of paper.”

“Rent! Rent! When convicts are loose in the district!” cried Frau Eva impatiently. “Did my father press for—?”

“Herr Geheimrat said nothing, but …”

“I am certain my father would not approve of your going off at this moment. In a way, you have taken over the job of protecting us.” She smiled.

“I shall be back by evening. In my opinion, the rent ought to be paid exactly on the minute. That is a point of honor with me.”

“Herr von Studmann! Papa loses nothing if he gets the rent a week later at the current dollar exchange. I will speak with him.”

“I don’t think the old gentleman will prove very amenable. You have just heard him demand that the harvesters’ barracks be immediately put into its former condition.”

“Anything might happen now, any minute!” pleaded Frau von Prackwitz. “Please, Herr von Studmann, don’t leave me alone now … I have such a disagreeable feeling.”

Herr von Studmann was embarrassed. For a moment he looked at Pagel, who was himself looking silently out of the window, but he immediately forgot about him again. “I would really like to say yes, but I’m sure you’ll understand; I don’t want to have to ask the Geheimrat for a postponement. It is really a point of honor. I took the management over from Prackwitz, and I am responsible to him. We are able to pay—I’ve gone into that thoroughly. I don’t want to look ridiculous. In life we have to be exact, punctual.…”

“Ridiculous!” cried Frau von Prackwitz angrily. “I tell you it’s the same to my father when we pay, since my husband’s not here. He’s only like that in order to annoy him. I tell you, when I think of the Villa, alone there with Vi and those stupid servants and the still more stupid Räder, and over five hundred yards to the nearest cottage.… Oh, it’s not that!” she exclaimed, irritated and surprised at meeting another Studmann and learning something at last of the drawbacks of pedantry and trustworthiness. “I have a disagreeable feeling, and I don’t want to be alone these next few days.”

“But you have nothing to fear,” declared Studmann, with that obstinate gentleness which can drive excited persons mad. “The gendarme officer is also of the opinion that the convicts have left the district. After all, an agreement is an agreement, especially among relatives. It must be carried out to the letter, and I am ultimately answerable for that. Prackwitz would rightly be able to reproach me—”

“The Rittmeister!” said Pagel in a low voice from the window. “He’s driving up to the farm now.”

“Who?” asked Studmann, dumbfounded.

“My husband? I thought he was shooting his five-hundredth rabbit!”

“Impossible!” said Studmann, yet in that moment he saw the Rittmeister getting out of a car.

“I had this uneasy feeling all day,” declared Frau von Prackwitz.

“Just what I thought,” said the Rittmeister entering, to shake hands, beaming, with the surprised trio. “A full council meeting once more to debate those quite insoluble problems my friend Studmann always solves in the end. Fine! Just as I thought; everything the same. Don’t pull such a face, Studmann. Your still unknown friend Schröck asks, by the way, to let you know you are, now as formerly, the right man for him. I’m good only to shoot rabbits. But, tell me, my dears, what are all the green frogs doing in Neulohe? I saw a whole section marching away into the woods. Is my father-in-law thinking of catching his poachers? That reminds me, I met our old Kniebusch this morning in the station at Frankfurt, quite broken up; his case is on today, about Bäumer.… So none of you, including my respected father-in-law, has been fretting himself much about the old chap. He might really have been spared that! Well, I shall have to get down to work again. And the gendarmes? Convicts have bolted? The gang’s withdrawn?” He laughed heartily, dropping into a chair. And the more he caught sight of the surprised, embarrassed faces, the more he laughed.

“But, my dears, you didn’t need to get rid of me for that. I could have committed such stupidities by myself. Magnificent. I suppose mother-in-law is shivering with fright as usual? And the young gentleman here doesn’t think of joining in the drive? Well, if I was your boss, Pagel, you’d have to go. It’s a question of honor; there ought to be someone at least from the estate. Otherwise they’ll think we’re afraid.…”

“Very good, sir,” said Pagel. “I’ll go.” And went.

“There!” beamed the Rittmeister. “Now he’s out of the way. The youngster can’t be always standing round here without lifting a hand; after all, he’s supposed to be working here. Well, children, now tell me your worries. You can’t imagine how fit and rested and restored I feel. Every day a pine-needle bath and ten hours’ sleep—that does one good! Now then, Studmann, out with the worst. What about the rent?”

“I am fetching the money tomorrow from Frankfurt,” replied Studmann without glancing at Frau von Prackwitz.

Strange. All of a sudden he no longer felt so pleased that he had had his way about that trip.

VIII

When toward evening the milk cart came back to the farm, and the milkman handed over the postbag, Studmann found in it a letter from Dr. Schröck which threw some light on Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz’s sudden return.

Dear Herr von Studmann [read the letter from the gruff and rather truculent consultant for nervous and mental disorders] this will reach you at the same time as your friend Prackwitz, who did not become mine. A visit from him as a paying patient will always be a pleasure to me, but to avoid misunderstandings I should like to inform you now that psychopathic persons like Rittmeister von Prackwitz, unstable and inclined to moods of depression and excitement, with a considerable craving for self-assertion together with weak intellect, are not really curable—certainly not at his age. What is required in most cases of this sort is to encourage interest in some harmless occupation, such as stamp collecting, cultivating black roses, or finding out the German for foreign words; then they can’t do any damage and may even become bearable.

I had got Herr von Prackwitz almost as far as five hundred rabbits and was making extremely broad hints about the record being a thousand when he—devil take him!—hit on the idea that he ought to cure my patients, since I couldn’t. This he set about doing with all the enthusiasm of the ignoramus. There is a Russian princess who has been with me for over eight years, believing herself pregnant all the time and who has been going round a pond in my park these eight years, convinced that, if she circles this pond ten times a morning, she will be delivered. What he did was actually to drag this excellently paying and completely satisfied patient, weighing two and a half hundredweight, ten times round the pond; whereupon, if she did not give birth, nevertheless her heart and mental condition are in a state of collapse. He asked a beautiful schizophrenic for a lock of hair, the girl cropped herself bald—and the visit of her relatives is expected. With his fists he attempted to change the peculiar disposition of an unfortunately abnormal gentleman who had made certain proposals to him; and in his innocence he helped Reichsfreiherr Baron von Bergen, whom you have met, to escape again. In short, through Herr von Prackwitz I have lost patients to the value of about three thousand gold marks monthly. Therefore I say, thus far and no farther. I have made it clear to him that his presence in Neulohe on the first of October is absolutely essential—I am aware, of course, of all his troubles—and he is in agreement with this.

Should you, dear Herr Studmann, be inconvenienced by his return, this will make me very glad, because I take it that you will then come here all the sooner.

Yours, etc., etc.

“Well, well,” sighed Herr von Studmann, striking a match and setting fire to the letter. “So he’s back again to help us over October first. It ought to be all right; at least he doesn’t seem so touchy now. If only he won’t do anything too silly. Considerable craving for self-assertion together with weak intelligence! Nasty, but I’ll manage somehow.”

Studmann was to make a mistake. Herr von Prackwitz had, on the very day, several irreparable blunders behind him.

IX

As the Rittmeister earlier that morning had jumped at the very last moment into a compartment of the train from Berlin to Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, he had been greeted by a very surly voice. “Beg pardon, full up.”

Although an obvious lie, because only two of the eight seats were occupied in a compartment already in motion, it was not this which had made the Rittmeister flush. He had recognized the face of the man who was so impolite. “Oh, no, my dear Lieutenant, I am not always turned away so easily as from my own wood,” he said smilingly.

The Lieutenant too flushed deeply, and replied also with an allusion to that earlier event: “Out of your father-in-law’s wood, I think, Rittmeister?”

They smiled at each other, both recalling the scene in the Black Dale, the sentry’s whistle, the Lieutenant’s abrupt order to retire. Both gentlemen were thinking themselves very intelligent and superior to the other; the Lieutenant because he had concealed from the father his connection with the daughter, and the Rittmeister because, in spite of the other’s rudeness, he had found out about the buried weapons.

Their next remarks were worthy of notice. The Lieutenant said in a friendly, innocent way: “And how is your daughter?”

“Thank you, quite well,” replied the Rittmeister. Good bait catches fine fish, he thought and went on: “Everything all right in the Black Dale?”

“Yes,” said the Lieutenant coldly.

Conversation was over. Each of the intelligent pair believed he had found out what he wanted—the Lieutenant that the daughter had not prattled—the Rittmeister that the arms were still in the wood. Instinctively both looked across at the third man in the compartment. He, busy with a paper, sat silently in his corner, but now looked up, lowering his paper.

Although he, like the Lieutenant, was in mufti, his face and the way he held himself betrayed one whom the constant wearing of uniform had made stiff. In spite of his far too large lounge suit, the officer could be seen in him—it was not necessary to observe the monocle hanging from a wide black cord or the Hohen-zollern order in his buttonhole. His glance, heavy and slow, had been made cautious by endless experience. The bloodless face, with its thin skin, looked as if it were supported on the bones without interposing flesh; the scanty pale-blond hair was carefully flattened down in long wisps, through which a parchmentlike skin gleamed. The most noticeable thing about this barely disguised death’s head was the mouth, a mouth without lips, a line sharp as the slit of an automatic machine, a mouth which appeared to have tasted every bitterness.

I must have seen him somewhere, thought the Rittmeister, quickly visualizing the picture pages of those journals seen in recent weeks.

With a slender-fingered, trembling child’s hand, the disguised officer raised his monocle and the Rittmeister felt himself scrutinized. But just as he was about to introduce himself, the glance passed on to the young Lieutenant.

“Herr von Prackwitz, tenant of an estate at Neulohe, retired cavalry officer,” said the Lieutenant hurriedly. One felt that the glance had given him a jerk.

“Delighted,” said the other without, however, giving his own name, which did not at all disturb the Rittmeister, who knew that it was really his duty to have recognized a high officer. The monocle fell. “But sit down! Had a good harvest?”

Rittmeister and Lieutenant sat down. “Oh, the harvest’s not altogether bad,” replied the Rittmeister with the caution usual among farmers, to whom praise of a harvest seems like a challenge to heaven. “I was not in Neulohe these last weeks,” he added.

“Herr von Prackwitz is the son-in-law of Herr von Teschow,” explained the Lieutenant.

“Evidently,” said the officer mysteriously. To what this “evidently” referred, whether to the absence from Neulohe or to the family relationship, was not evident. Or it might refer to the harvest.

The Lieutenant, whose name—as the Rittmeister now noticed—had also not been mentioned, assisted again: “Herr von Prackwitz is the tenant of his father-in-law.”

“Clever man,” said he with the monocle. “Visited me once or twice recently. You know that?”

The Rittmeister did not, and couldn’t imagine what his rustic father-in-law might have to do with this parchment-like soldier. “No,” he said, confused. “I’ve been away, as I mentioned.”

“Clever,” said the other gratingly. “The kind who always pay only when they have the goods in their hand. Family feelings hurt?”

“Oh, no!” protested the Rittmeister. “I, too, am always having difficulties with—”

“Who wants to join the trip must first take his ticket,” proclaimed the officer with a bitterness which no word in the conversation made understandable. “Won’t perhaps even know the definition. You understand?”

The Rittmeister did not, but he nodded profoundly.

“Suppose,” went on the officer, “you have a car …”

“I haven’t,” explained the Rittmeister. “But I shall buy one.”

“Today? Tomorrow?”

“Certainly in a few days.”

“Either today or tomorrow, otherwise no use,” said the officer, seizing hold of his paper again.

“I don’t know.” The Rittmeister hesitated. Was this man with the monocle a representative of a motor-car factory? “After all, it’s a large sum of … I don’t know if the money …”

“Money!” cried the other contemptuously, crumpling his paper fiercely. “Who pays cash for cars? Give a bill!” He vanished behind his newspaper.

This time the Lieutenant gave no help, but sat in his corner with such an expression of repudiation that the Rittmeister withdrew into his, and, remembering his own newspaper, also began to crumple it fiercely. But somehow he couldn’t read. Continually his thoughts strayed to those mysterious words about a too-clever father-in-law, a ticket which must be paid for first, and a car which need not be paid for … In spite of many weeks in a peaceful sanatorium he was seized by a very impulsive anger, and when he thought of how the young man had treated him in the wood, he discovered that that matter hadn’t yet been settled; while, if he took into account his treatment today at the hands of the parchmentlike man, he felt even more that something ought to be done.…

The pair opposite had begun to whisper, which was unmannerly, the more so because they were obviously whispering about him. He was, after all, a reputable officer and a successful farmer. If you don’t discuss such things in front of ladies, you certainly don’t whisper them in front of elderly gentlemen. He had had a good deal to drink, and he now gave his paper a powerful blow—the row could begin. But the train was slowing down—they were already at Frankfurt; he would have to get out and change. His anger ought to have been quicker.

“You’re getting out, Rittmeister?” asked the Lieutenant politely and groped for the other’s suitcase.

“I’m changing! Don’t trouble yourself, please,” exclaimed the Rittmeister angrily. Despite which the Lieutenant lowered the case from the rack. “I have been asked to inform you,” he said in a low voice without looking at the Rittmeister, “that we are having a sort of old comrades’ reunion the day after tomorrow, October the first, in Ostade. At six in the morning, please. Uniform. Weapons, if any, to be brought.” Then he looked at the Rittmeister, who was overwhelmed; so overwhelmed that he said: “At your service!”

“Porter!” shouted the Lieutenant from the window and busied himself with the Rittmeister’s luggage.

Just as things had become interesting one must leave. The Rittmeister looked at the gentleman in the corner. He had stretched out his legs, his monocle dangled from its band; he seemed to be sleeping. Hesitant but respectful, the Rittmeister stepped across the somnolent legs, murmuring: “Good morning!”

“But with a car, you understand?” muttered the sleeper and dozed off again.

The Rittmeister stood on the platform in a daze. For the third time the porter asked where he was to carry the luggage. First the Rittmeister said to the Neulohe train, then he said Ostade.

“Oh, you want to go to Ostade. Then you’re on the wrong line. You ought to have gone by Landberg,” said the porter.

“No, no!” cried the Rittmeister, impatient. “I want a car. Can I buy a car here?”

“Here?” asked the porter, looking first at the passenger and then at the platform. “Here?”

“Yes, in Frankfurt.”

“Of course you can buy cars here, sir,” the porter reassured him. “Here you can get anything that way. That’s what they all do. They come by train from Berlin and buy their cars in Frankfurt …”

The Rittmeister followed the man. Everything was clear now. He had seen the officer who had been described to him a hundred times, whose face he had never before glimpsed: Major Rückert, who was plotting the big Putsch against the Government. It was coming off early the day after tomorrow, at six, in Ostade, and the Rittmeister was to be present, with a car.

Father-in-law was too clever. He wanted to wait and see if the Putsch was successful before he bought his ticket. The Rittmeister, however, wasn’t so clever about money. He would buy a car at once, on credit. That might not be businesslike, but it was the right thing.

Docilely he let himself be taken to the waiting room, where he sat down pensively, tipped the porter, and ordered a coffee. He was not thinking now about the Putsch with Major Rückert and the impolite Lieutenant. That affair had been settled: he would be in Ostade the day after tomorrow at six o’clock. There would be no hitch, and no need to be uneasy about it. He was not the over-prudent, crafty Geheimrat Horst-Heinz von Teschow: he was Rittmeister von Prackwitz, and when an old comrade said to him: “Join us!” he went along, without inquisitiveness. The little he had heard was enough for him. The Reichswehr and the Black Reichswehr were in it; that is, the old soldiers and the young ones, against a Government which printed worthless money, which had given up the Ruhr fight, and which wanted to “agree” with the French. One didn’t need to reflect about such things—the Putsch was in order.

What did absorb him, while he stirred the coffee, was his car! It was of course already “his,” although he didn’t even know yet what it should look like. He had wanted one for a long time, only he had never had the money—and, as a matter of fact, there was none now. Indeed, he was traveling to Neulohe so as to be on the spot when the rent for the farm fell due on October the first; that is, the day after tomorrow—a difficult time. The Rittmeister was like a child. When a child has managed ten times not to take off shoes and stockings and splash in the water, it only requires the boy from next door to say the eleventh time: “Ah, it’s so warm today!” In a minute the child, in spite of all commands, goes bare-legged and splashing. The Major had said that he ought to buy a car. Money was scarce, scarcer than ever, and the car would have to go on a dangerous adventure at once. But the Rittmeister didn’t think a moment of that. He didn’t even think of the Putsch and the Government to be overthrown; all he thought of was that he could at last buy a car. This Putsch was a splendid affair; it procured him a car.

The Rittmeister reviewed all the cars of his friends and acquaintances. He hesitated between a Mercedes and a Horch. Cheap ones were not considered. If one was to have a car, it couldn’t look like a country doctor’s—it had to look good; and since it was bought on credit, a bit more or less didn’t matter.… No, the problem was not the car—it was where to get a chauffeur quickly, one who would look all right at the wheel; otherwise the pleasure of sitting behind him was halved. And the thing had to be done quickly, because the Rittmeister wanted, at the least in two or three hours, to be on the way to Neulohe in his own car.… And then there was the garage. Which would be the best place for a garage, close to the Villa?

The Rittmeister, wrapped up in his thoughts, resembled extraordinarily that retired officer who, a few months before, had sat at the gaming table, and who, out of sheer longing not to miss a single stake, couldn’t wait to learn the rules of play. Once again he didn’t know the game, and he was staking higher than he could afford. He might indeed buy some sort of corrugated-iron garage, but such things looked like nothing at all.…

“Herr Rittmeister,” said for the third time a humble voice at the next table.

“Well, I never!” Starting out of his dreams and projects, he stared in surprise at the forester, who sat in his best clothes behind a glass of beer. “What are you doing in Frankfurt, Kniebusch?”

“The court case, Herr Rittmeister!” said the forester reproachfully. “My case about Bäumer.”

“Well,” nodded the Rittmeister, “I’m glad the rascal’s to be sentenced at last. What do you think he’ll get, then?”

“But, Herr Rittmeister,” declared the forester solemnly, “it’s me who’s accused. It’s me they want to sentence. I’m supposed to have done him grievous bodily harm!”

“Hasn’t that dirty business been settled yet?” The Rittmeister was amazed. “Herr von Studmann wrote nothing about it. Come and sit at my table and tell me about the case. The cart seems to have lost its way badly, but perhaps I’ve come just at the right time to pull it out of the mess.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, Herr Rittmeister! I always told my wife: ‘If only the Rittmeister was here, he’d soon get me out of it.’ ” And having not ineffectually appealed to old soldierly sentiments, the forester fetched the stale dregs of his beer and poured out his heart slowly and with many lamentations. The Rittmeister listened. Then, with the same élan which had been his about the car, he threw himself into legal affairs. Nor did he refrain from some bitter reflections on how everything was neglected even by the most reliable people when he wasn’t there, and how he had to do everything himself. Pettifogging lawyers, poachers, the dollar and the Socialists were cursed, and he did not forget to make it clear to the forester that his employer was actually Geheimrat von Teschow, and that the business really had nothing whatever to do with him, von Prackwitz.

“Listen, Kniebusch,” he said finally. “Your case comes on at half-past ten, eh? Actually I have a lot to do—I’m going to buy a car, you know, and shall have to engage a chauffeur, too …”

“A car! That will please Frau von Prackwitz.”

The Rittmeister was not so sure; it was a point he preferred not to discuss. “I’ll go with you to the court and give the gentlemen there a real piece of my mind.… You may rely on it that the whole thing will be settled in ten minutes, Kniebusch; one has only to put matters in a proper light, and it’s high time that this persecution of landed property was stopped. Well, all that is going to be changed the day after tomorrow—you’ll be surprised, Kniebusch.”

The other pricked up his ears.

But the Rittmeister changed the subject. “And immediately afterwards I’ll buy the car, get a chauffeur—a good chauffeur’s a condition of purchase—and then I’ll take you to Neulohe. You can save your fare, Kniebusch.”

The forester’s thanks knew no limit; this program delighted him, and wisely he suppressed the doubt which he perhaps still entertained that his case, in spite of the Rittmeister’s intervention, might not pass off so smoothly. Herr von Prackwitz was now in a hurry. With his long legs he steered himself through the town of Frankfurt as though each step brought him nearer the car he yearned for; and a little behind trotted Kniebusch, puffing.

And thus they got to the court fifteen minutes too early. Nevertheless the Rittmeister pressed on to the courtroom indicated in the summons—where they knocked, listened, warily opened the door. The room was dirty, dreary and empty. Intercepting an usher, they showed him the summons. He looked from one to the other.…

“Is it you?” he asked the Rittmeister.

“Good heavens, no!” The Rittmeister did not at all like this, however readily he might be espousing the case.

“Oh, you then! Well, just wait a little! It’ll take a little time yet. Your case will be called.”

Sighing, the Rittmeister sat down with the forester on one of those benches where, perhaps because of their construction, perhaps because of the situation, no person can keep still. The corridor was dingy and deserted. People kept coming; their steps, however softly they trod, reverberated from stone walls and floor and ceiling. In the gray light they peered short-sightedly at the numbers on the doors, made up their minds to knock, and listened a long while before they entered.

Angrily the Rittmeister stared at a notice on the wall opposite, announcing “No Smoking. No Spitting.” Underneath was a spittoon. He might now have been running around Frankfurt acquiring a magnificent car and going for a trial drive, instead of sitting in this dreary corridor out of pure good nature. The affair had really nothing to do with him at all.

“What a time it’s taking!” he cried angrily, although it was no more than twenty-five minutes past ten.

The forester perceived the restlessness of a companion whom it was so very important to retain. Moreover he had been meditating on what the Rittmeister had alluded to.

“The weapons are still in the Black Dale,” he said discreetly.

“Shush …” went the Rittmeister, so loudly that some one at the far end of the corridor started, and turned inquiringly. Waiting till the man had disappeared into a room, he asked in a low voice: “How do you know about that, Kniebusch?”

“I had another look yesterday afternoon,” whispered the ever-inquisitive forester. “One likes to know what is happening in one’s own wood, Herr Rittmeister!”

“Oh,” said the Rittmeister importantly. “And if they are still there today, tomorrow they won’t be.”

The forester pondered. The Rittmeister had used the word “tomorrow” twice already.

“Are you buying a car because of that, sir?” he asked cautiously.

The Rittmeister had traveled in an express train with an important man, the leader of a Putsch; he had brand-new information. It was very irritating, then, for the forester to presume to know as much as he himself did.

“But what do you know about this business, Herr Kniebusch?” he asked ill-humoredly.

“Oh, nothing at all, Herr Rittmeister,” replied the forester apologetically, aware that he had blundered somehow, and not wishing to admit that he was fully in the secret until he knew which way the wind was blowing. People in the village talked such a lot, however. They had been saying a long time that something was going to happen soon, but no one knew anything about the day or hour. Only the Rittmeister knew that!

“I have said nothing,” declared the Rittmeister, who nevertheless felt flattered. “How have the villagers got hold of such an idea?”

“Oh … I don’t know whether I ought to talk about it.”

“You can with me.”

“Well, there’s this Lieutenant.… You know him too, Herr Rittmeister, the one who was so rude to you.… He’s been in the village a few times and spoken to the people.”

“Oh!” The Rittmeister was annoyed that the Lieutenant had spoken with the villagers and no doubt also with the forester, but not with him. He did not want to show this, however. “Well, I don’t mind telling you, Kniebusch, that I have just come from Berlin with this Lieutenant.”

“From Berlin!”

“You’re not very quick on the uptake, Kniebusch,” said the Rittmeister condescendingly. “You didn’t even see that this rudeness had been agreed upon because we weren’t safe from eavesdroppers.…”

“No!” The forester was overwhelmed.

“Yes, my dear Kniebusch,” declared the Rittmeister conclusively. “And since you’ll hear about it tomorrow, I may as well reveal to you that the day after there’s an old comrades’ meeting at Ostade at six in the morning.”

“That’s what I always say,” muttered the forester. “Our troubles will never come to an end.”

“But you must give me your word of honor on the spot that you won’t tell a soul.”

“Of course, Herr Rittmeister, my word of honor. How could I?”

The pair shook hands. Already the Rittmeister felt uncomfortable that he should have talked so much, especially to Kniebusch. But, after all, he had told him nothing he didn’t already know. Or not much more. Anyhow, the forester was in the plot.

Nevertheless an uncomfortable silence fell between them.

Very opportunely a young man came down the corridor, a real dandy, with a little cane and a peaked cap, the sort of fellow one immediately hoped would get three years’ military service. Tapping his cane against the peak of his cap he said: “ ‘Scuse me. Where does one leave the Church here?”

“What?” the Rittmeister almost shouted.

“Where do you leave the Church—it’s here somewhere.”

“Why do you want to leave it?” The Rittmeister was indignant at such an intention on the part of a mere whippersnapper. “And smoking, by the way, is forbidden here.”

“You’ve been lucky then, chief!” said the young fellow, sauntering off down the corridor, cigarette in mouth, quite free and easy.

“Nothing but louts nowadays!” burst out the furious Rittmeister. “Leave the Church! Smoking! That’s what they’re like.” Every moment he was growing more excited, throwing indignant glances at the notices on the walls. If they were only to threaten him and not such louts, they were good for nothing.

“I say, you!” he shouted to the usher who at that moment appeared again like a ghost in the corridor. “When are things going to start here?”

“I’ve already told you that you must wait a little,” said the usher, offended.

“But it should have started at half-past ten and now it’s just on eleven.”

“I have told you that your case will be called.”

“You can’t expect people to sit here for hours,” said the Rittmeister, more and more provoked. “My time is valuable.”

“Yes, but … I know nothing about it,” hesitated the usher, touching his cap. “They said nothing definite about it. Perhaps … Show me your summons.”

“I haven’t been summoned at all,” shouted the insulted Rittmeister. “I’ve only come along with …”

“Have you?” In his turn the usher became angry. “You haven’t been summoned but you can shout at me! Go home if you can’t wait! Things are getting pretty fine nowadays.” And, shaking his head, he shuffled down the corridor.

“I tell you what,” said the Rittmeister, seizing the forester’s arm affectionately. “As a matter of fact the man’s quite right. What’s the good of my sitting here and waiting any longer? He says himself it can be quite a good while yet.”

“But Herr Rittmeister,” implored the old man, “you won’t leave me in the lurch now! I was ever so happy to have met you, and you were going to take up the cudgels for me.…”

“Of course I was, Kniebusch,” said the Rittmeister with all the cordiality associated with a bad conscience. “It’s not my fault. I came along with you at once, and gladly.”

“Herr Rittmeister, wait a little. Perhaps it’s nearly time, and it would be so excellent if …”

“But Kniebusch!” The Rittmeister was reproachful. “You understand the reason. I’m not here in Frankfurt just for my own pleasure. I have to get the car in plenty of time. You know that!”

“But Herr Rittmeister! …”

“No, you must pull yourself together, Kniebusch,” declared the Rittmeister, releasing his arm from the forester’s hand. “Man, an old experienced non-commissioned officer like you—and afraid of a few conceited lawyers! I tell you, Kniebusch, if the case was called this very moment, I’d still go. It’s a good thing for you to face danger once more. You’ve become too soft, man.” And with this Herr von Prackwitz nodded to the forester, curtly yet not without affection, walked down the corridor and disappeared.

Kniebusch, however, sank down on his condemned bench, hid his face in his hands and thought despairingly: They’re all like that, these gentlemen. All promise and all humbug. I told him exactly what my position was, that perhaps I might even go to prison.… But no, he can’t wait to find out; he wants to buy a car. Just as if he couldn’t buy it this afternoon or tomorrow morning! For people like that you risk your good bones and a bullet. I’ll not forget it, though.

“Well, has he gone, your old broomstick?” asked a bumptious voice.

Kniebusch looked up, stupefied. Before him stood a little fellow hideous to look at, with blubber lips and protruding eyeballs behind owl-like glasses, but grandly dressed in a short fur jacket and plus-fours, golf stockings and brogues. “What are you doing here in the court, Meier?” he asked, adding enviously as he eyed the former bailiff: “Lord, Meier, how do you do it? Every time I see you, you’re looking better off, while our like hardly knows where to get the money to have his shoes soled.”

“Sure,” grinned Meier, “the old head!” And he hit his pear-shaped skull so hard with the palm of his hand that it resounded. “Money’s lying nowadays on the pavement. Do you need some, Kniebusch? I can easily help you out with a few millions or milliards.”

“Money!” groaned the forester. “It’s help I need. My case is on today. I told you about it, the one with Bäumer.”

“Yes, I know all about it, old fellow!” said little Black Meier, laying his hand, glittering with rings, on Kniebusch’s shoulder. “That’s why I’m here. I saw it posted up yesterday in the hall: Criminal case against Kniebusch, private forester from Neulohe, Room 18.… So I thought to myself, You’ve got nothing on, why not go and stand by your old comrade? … And I should have been able to testify what an excellent employee you are.”

“You really are a decent chap, Meier,” said the forester, touched. “I should never have thought you would come to the court for my sake.”

“I don’t mind at all, Kniebusch,” said little Meier complacently. “But I’m not wanted now, of course, when you can drag along such important witnesses as Rittmeister von Prackwitz.”

“But he’s left me in the lurch, Meier,” groaned the forester. “He hadn’t got time to wait a moment, because my case didn’t come up at once. He’s made up his mind to buy a car this very hour.”

“You see, money’s lying on the pavement, Kniebusch.” Little Meier screwed up his eyes. “Even the Rittmeister has money enough for a car.”

“I don’t know whether he’s got money or not. I shouldn’t think so,” said the forester. “Or it’s possible they gave him the money in Berlin.”

“Berlin? Who?”

“Oh, those—you know—the Lieutenant—when you set fire to the pines.”

“Oh, that business!” Meier grinned contemptuously. “That’s all nonsense, Kniebusch. It’s not worth a paper mark.”

“Oh no, Meier. You’ll see, in the next few days. I can’t say anything, though.… I’ve given my word.… I’m not talking!”

“No need to, Kniebusch. Not a word. Though I don’t think it’s very decent of you when you know that I also am very nationalist and would prefer to march against the Reds today rather than tomorrow.”

“I promised most faithfully,” said the forester obstinately. “Don’t be angry, Meier.”

“Good Lord! Why should I be angry?” Meier laughed. “In fact I’m inviting you to lunch; you know, just as before. Rhine wine, champagne, Türkenblut.… Come along, old chap.” And he put his arm through the forester’s and was dragging him away.

“But, Meier!” cried the other in a panic, “I have my case—”

“Come along, come along,” persisted Meier. “Your case? As for that, there’s nothing to stop you having a drink; all the more because of your case.” He looked at the forester triumphantly. “Yes, you old boozer, you! That’s a surprise, eh? If I was as unfriendly as you are, I’d hold my tongue and think: Let him go on sitting there, the old crow—but I’m different. Come along, Kniebusch, and have one.”

“But, Meier—”

“Your case has been dropped, Kniebusch. It’s vanished. It’s blown up, Kniebusch; your case has bolted!”

“Man! Meier!” The forester was almost sobbing.

“Bäumer escaped this morning at nine, Kniebusch!”

“Meier! Young Meier, you’re the best fellow in the world, the only friend I have.” Great tears were rolling down the forester’s cheeks into his beard; he was sobbing so much that Meier clapped him hard on the back. “Is it really true, Meier?”

“I saw it with my own eyes, Kniebusch. He’s a cunning hound, Bäumer, always pretending to be at death’s door. They were going to bring him in an ambulance to the court, and as they came out of the hospital with the stretcher—they hadn’t even strapped him up, the poor chap was so ill—he gave one jump and the attendants went down with the stretcher and he went into the hospital garden. Shouts, chasing.… And I joined in the chase as well, but not in the right direction because I thought: Better for my old friend Kniebusch if they don’t get him.…”

“Meier!”

“Obviously it was a put-up job. You know Bäumer’s had repeated visits in the hospital. There was a car waiting for him.”

“Meier, I’ll never forget what you’ve done, man. You can ask me anything you like.”

“I don’t want to. You don’t have to tell me anything. Only have lunch with me.”

“I’ll tell you everything. The others leave me in the lurch; you’re the only one to help me. What do you want to know, then?”

“I don’t want to know anything—unless you wish to ask me for advice or if you’re worried about the Putsch. I’m only too pleased to help. But otherwise—I don’t mind.”

He stopped short. With a superior air he addressed the usher. “Look here, what do you think you’re up to? Letting the old gentleman wait here over an hour when you know very well the chief witness for the prosecution has hopped it.”

“Yes, sir,” said the usher, “but we don’t do things in a hurry here. Officially the case comes on today; officially we don’t know yet of the disappearance of this particular witness.…”

“But don’t you know all this?”

“We’ve known about it for quite a while! The judges have disappeared once again as well.”

“Well, listen now, my man,” said Meier, and the forester was quite enchanted with the unceremonious way in which he treated the court official. “Then my friend can go and wet his whistle to celebrate.…”

“Far as we’re concerned,” said the usher. “If I wasn’t on duty I’d come too.”

“Well, you go along later.” Meier spoke like a prince, bringing out of his fur jacket a ball of carelessly crumpled notes, one of which he withdrew and, pressing it into the usher’s hand, said genteelly: “Good appetite! … Come along now, Kniebusch.” And went off with him.

Enraptured, Kniebusch followed his friend, the only person in the world whom he could really trust.

X

“Aren’t you sending the car back?” asked Frau Eva. It stood in the courtyard and the chauffeur was smoking beside it.

The Rittmeister hesitated a moment. Face to face with his wife, it was not easy to confess the purchase. There would be endless discussion.

“I’ll keep it—just for a few days to begin with,” he said, “The day after tomorrow all kinds of things will be decided, and that includes us.” He addressed the chauffeur. “Finger! Drive to the Villa. I don’t exactly know where we’re going to keep the car the next few days, but we’ll manage somehow. You’ll stay with us at first; my man will show you.”

“Very good, Herr Rittmeister,” replied the chauffeur, opening the door.

Frau Eva eyed the brilliantly finished, softly upholstered monster with a mixture of reluctance, fear and anger. “I can’t understand it,” she murmured as she got in. And she did not sit back in a corner, but bolt upright, despite cushions which invited her to relax.

The car roared out and swung, gently as a cradle, between the cottages. Because of the convicts’ escape and the marching away of the gendarmes, everyone was out and about, and thus saw the car, the smiling Rittmeister and his very erect wife. She felt that all the windows in the Manor, too, were occupied—it was insupportable. I ought never to have got in this devilish thing, she thought bitterly. Achim has made a fool of himself again, and my parents will think that I agreed to it.

The weeks of separation and the contact with Studmann had had their effect—Frau von Prackwitz had changed too. Before, whenever her husband acted rashly, she thought, “How can I hush this up?” Now she thought, “Nobody should think I’m in agreement.”

“Do you like the car, Eva?”

“I should like you please to explain to me, Achim,” she said hotly, “what all this means. Is this car …?”

The Rittmeister tapped the chauffeur on the back. “Now straight ahead. Yes, the white house in front on the right.… It’s a Horch. Do you notice how smooth she is? Does twenty-eight to the gallon, no, twenty-five.… I’ve forgotten exactly, but it’s all the same.”

With a hoot the car swept up to the Villa.

“There’ll have to be a drive here,” said the Rittmeister, lost in his thoughts.

“What!” Frau Eva started. “For a few days! I thought you had hired it only for a few days.”

Violet came running from the house.

“Oh, Papa! Papa! You’ve come back?” She embraced her father; he couldn’t get out of the car quickly enough. “Have you bought it? Oh, how smart! What make is it? How fast can it go? Have you also learned to drive? Let me just sit in it, Mamma.”

“There!” said the Rittmeister reproachfully to his wife. “That’s what I call pleasure.… Violet, be so good as to take Herr Finger to Hubert. He’s to have the little spare room in the attic for the moment. The car can stay here for the time being. Eva, please.”

“Now, Achim,” said Frau Eva, really upset. “Please explain to me what all this means.” She sat down.

The worse the Rittmeister’s conscience, the more amiable his manner. He, who could not bear even a hasty word in his presence, was now all softness before his wife’s bad temper. It was precisely this, however, which made things look dubious to her.

“What it means?” he asked, smiling. “Actually we haven’t said good day properly to one another yet, Eva. In the office the schoolmaster was staring at you all the time.”

“Herr von Studmann! Yes, he likes to look at me and he’s never impolite. And he doesn’t shout, either.” Frau Eva’s eyes flashed.

The Rittmeister thought it better not to insist for the moment on a tender welcome. “I myself don’t shout nowadays,” he said with a smile. “For weeks I haven’t shouted. Altogether I have picked up marvelously.”

“Why have you come so suddenly?”

“Well, you see, Eva, I didn’t think I was going to inconvenience you here. It simply occurred to me that October the first is, after all, an important day, and I thought perhaps you would want me here.” It sounded very amiable and modest, and for that reason it displeased her.

“No notification whatever,” she said. “You seem to have remembered this October the first very suddenly.”

“Oh, well,” he replied a little irritably, “I’ve never been one for writing, and then there was a slight bother.… That Baron von Bergen—you remember, the one who took in Studmann—well, he humbugged me, too. Nothing much—a few marks. But he got out because of them and Dr. Schröck was unbelievably upset about it.”

“And then you remembered October the first,” said Frau von Prackwitz coldly. “I understand.”

The Rittmeister made an angry gesture.

She jumped up, seized him by the lapels of his coat and shook him gently. “Oh, Achim, Achim,” she cried sadly, “if only you would not always go on deceiving yourself. You’ve done this for so many years and I keep on thinking: Now he has had a lesson—now he will change. But always it is the same, always.”

“How do I deceive myself?” He was vexed. “Please, Eva, let go of my coat. It has just been pressed.”

“I’m sorry.… How do you deceive yourself? Well, the truth is, Achim, you were sent away from there because of some folly or indiscretion. And because it’s painful for you to admit so, and it occurred to you in the train that the rent falls due on October the first—therefore you try to bamboozle yourself and me.”

“If that’s how you interpret it …” he said, offended. “Very well, then; I’m sent away and now I’m here. Or should I not be here?”

“But, Achim, if it’s not like that, say something, then. What is the help you intend to give? Are you going to get hold of the money? Have you any plans? You know that Papa made it a condition you should stay away for a good time, and yet you come back without a word of notice. We haven’t even been able to break it to my parents.…”

“I certainly didn’t think about my father-in-law’s feelings. All I thought was, you would be pleased.…”

“But, Achim!” she cried despairingly. “Don’t be a child. What have I to be pleased about? We’re no longer a newly married couple, for me to beam with pleasure as soon as I see you.”

“No, you certainly don’t do that.”

“Here we are struggling for the lease! That is the only thing which ensures us a small income such as we are accustomed to. What are we going to do if we lose it? I’ve learned nothing and there’s nothing I can do—and you—”

“I can do nothing either, of course,” said the Rittmeister bitterly. “What’s come over you, Eva? You are quite changed. Well, I may have come back a bit sooner than expected and perhaps it was a little thoughtless. But anyway, is that a reason to tell me I’ve learned nothing and can do nothing?”

“You are forgetting the car in front, Achim!” she cried. “You know we have no money at all, but there in front of the house is a brand-new car that certainly cost ten thousand gold marks!”

“Seventeen, Eva, seventeen.”

“Very well. Seventeen. Things are so bad I can say it’s all the same whether it cost ten thousand or seventeen thousand. We can’t pay either sum. What is the position with the car, Achim?”

“Everything is all right with it, Eva.” The proximity of extreme danger had restored his calm. He didn’t want another scene; he wished to hear no more unpleasant things. He had the right, surely, to do what he wanted. A man whose wife has done everything he wishes for twenty years can never understand why she so suddenly changes. The woman who for twenty years has been silent, forgiving, smiling, patient, becomes in his eyes a rebel when in the twenty-first year she loses her patience and argues, accuses, demands explanations. Then she is a mutineer against whom every stratagem is permissible. Twenty years of patience have only given her the right to be patient also in the twenty-first.

It was so easy for the Rittmeister. His nimble mind, his boundless optimism, made him see everything in the rosiest light. To put his wife in the wrong there was no need at all for him to give a false account of this car purchase; he only needed to say how it could have come about. Women didn’t understand. “All is in order, Eva. I’m not really supposed to speak about it, but I can say this. I bought the car more or less on higher instructions.”

“On higher instructions? What do you mean by that?”

“Well, on behalf of someone else. In short, for the military authorities.”

Frau von Prackwitz looked at her husband uneasily. That incorruptible weapon of womankind, her sense of reality, was not to be duped. Something was wrong.

“For the military authorities?” she asked thoughtfully. “Why don’t they buy their cars themselves?”

“My dear girl,” explained the Rittmeister, “the military today are restrained by a thousand considerations. By the talking shop in Berlin which won’t vote them any supplies. By the Treaty of Versailles. By the Commission of Control. By hundreds of spies. As a consequence they must, unfortunately, be secret in what they regard as indispensable.”

Frau von Prackwitz looked at her husband sharply. “So the car has been paid for by the military authorities?”

The Rittmeister would have liked to say yes, but he knew that a payment of 5,000 gold marks was due on October the second. Yet he ventured something. “Not quite that. But I shall get the money back.”

“Will you? I suppose, since the military have to be secret, there is consequently no written agreement either?”

The worst thing about the Rittmeister was that he became so quickly tired of anything, even of his lies. It was all so boring. “I am under official orders,” he said irritably. “And thank God I am still officer enough to carry out unhesitatingly whatever a superior officer commands.”

“But you’re not an officer, Achim! You’re a civilian, and if you as a civilian buy a car, you are answerable for it with your entire fortune.”

“Listen, Eva.” The Rittmeister was determined to put an end to all this questioning. “I ought not to speak about it, but I’ll tell you everything. On October the first, the day after tomorrow, the present Government is going to be overthrown—by the Reichswehr and other military associations. Everything is prepared. And I have received the official command to appear on October the first at six o’clock in Ostade—with a motor car. This motor car.”

“A different Government,” she said. “That wouldn’t be so bad. Instead of this mire into which we sink deeper every day. That would be a good thing.” She was silent for a moment. “But …”

“No, please, Eva,” he said resolutely. “No ‘buts.’ You know what is at stake. The thing’s settled.”

“And Herr von Studmann?” she asked suddenly. “He is also an officer. Does he know anything about it?”

“I couldn’t say.” The Rittmeister spoke stiffly. “I don’t know what are the principles according to which gentlemen are called upon.”

“I’m sure he knows nothing about it. And Papa? One of the richest men in the district? Hasn’t he been called upon also?”

“Some mention was made of your father,” retorted the Rittmeister bitingly. “Unfortunately, rather to his disfavor. It seems he has been the soul of caution, wanting to see the outcome first, before he joins.”

“Papa’s careful,” reflected Frau von Prackwitz. Then, suddenly seized by a thought: “And supposing the Putsch fails? What then? Who’s going to pay for your car then?”

“It won’t fail.”

“But it can,” she insisted. “The Kapp Putsch failed. Just think, seventeen thousand marks!”

“It won’t fail, however.”

“But it’s possible. And we should be ruined.”

“I’d return the car in that case.”

“If it’s confiscated? Or wrecked? Seventeen thousand marks!”

“I buy a car,” said the affronted Rittmeister, “and you go on talking about seventeen thousand marks! But when your dear father demands immense sums from us, simply ruinous, then you say we have to pay them without fail.”

“Achim, the rent must be paid. But we don’t need a car.”

“It’s an official command.” He was as obstinate as a mule.

“I don’t understand it at all. You have only just come out of the sanatorium, where you thought of nothing but shooting rabbits. And now, suddenly, you talk about a Putsch and buying a motor car, all at once.”

She looked at him thoughtfully. Her instinct kept on warning her that something was wrong.

He had colored under her glance; hastily he bent forward and took a cigarette from his case. Lighting it, he said: “You must excuse me, but you know nothing about it. This business was arranged a long time ago. I knew about it before I went away.”

“Achim, why do you say that? You would certainly have told me about it in that case.”

“I was sworn to silence.”

“I don’t believe it!” she cried. “This whole business happened suddenly. If you hadn’t quarreled with Dr. Schröck you would still be there shooting your rabbits, and there would have been no talk about a Putsch, buying a car, and all that.”

“I’d rather not hear again,” said the Rittmeister menacingly, “that you don’t believe something I say, that I’m a liar, that is. As far as that goes, I can prove what I said. Go and ask the forester if a whole lot of men in Neulohe are not waiting only for the signal to burst forth. Ask Violet if there isn’t a very large arms dump hidden in your father’s forest.”

“Violet knows about it, too?” she cried, mortally offended. “And that’s what you both call trust! That’s supposed to be a family! Here I work myself to death, I humble myself to Papa, I calculate and worry, I put up with everything, I cover up your blunders—and you’ve got secrets from me! You conspire behind my back, get into debt, endanger everything, play fast and loose with our existence, and I’m to know nothing about it!”

“Eva, I beg you.” He was frightened at the effect of his words, and put out his hand to her.

She looked at him with fury. “No, my friend,” she cried angrily, “that was a bit too much. Kniebusch, a doddering old chatterbox, and Violet, a mere slip of a girl, plotting with you—but as for me, there you plead your duty to be silent. I’m not to know anything. I don’t deserve the confidences you give the other two.…”

“I beg you, Eva! If you’ll let me tell you …”

“No. Tell me nothing! I don’t want your confessions afterwards. I’ve had enough of that all my married life. I’m so tired of it all. I’m sick to death of it! Understand,” she cried, stamping on the ground, “I’m sick to death of it. I’ve heard it all hundreds of times before, the pleas for forgiveness, the promises to pull yourself together, pleasant words—no, thank you!” She turned toward the door.

“Eva,” he said, following her, “I can’t understand your agitation.” He was fighting with himself. After a hard struggle: “All right then, I’ll send the car back to Frankfurt this very minute.”

“The car!” she said contemptuously. “What do I care about the car?”

“But you yourself have just said … Do be logical for once, Eva.”

“You haven’t even understood what we’re talking about. We are not talking about cars, we’re talking about trust. Trust! Something that you have demanded for twenty years as a matter of course, and which you have never shown me.”

“Very well, Eva,” he said bitterly, “say precisely what it is you really want. I’ve already told you that I’m willing to send the car back to Frankfurt at once, although actually official instructions.… I really shouldn’t know how to justify it.…” He was getting muddled again.

Her eyes were cold. Suddenly she saw, as he really was, the man at whose side she had lived for almost a quarter of a century: a weakling, spineless, without self-control, at the mercy of every influence, a babbler.… He hadn’t always been like that. No, he had been different, but the times had been different, too—luck had been his, life had smiled, there were no difficulties, it had been easy to show only his good side. Even in the war. Then there had been superiors to tell him what he had to do, and discipline. Uniform, and everything connected with it, had kept him upright. But once he had taken that off, he collapsed, and showed that there was nothing in him, nothing, no core, no faith, no ambition, not one thing to give him the power to resist. Without a guide he had wandered, lost, in a lost age.…

But while all this flashed through her mind, and she saw that familiar face into which she had looked more frequently than any other, a voice within her whispered accusingly: Your work! Your creation! Your guilt!

All women who sacrifice themselves completely to their men, relieving them of all burdens, forgiving everything, enduring everything—all live to see their work turn against them. The creature rounds on its creator; tender indulgence and kindness turn to guilt.

She heard him continuing to speak, but hardly listened to what he said. She saw his lips opening and closing, and she saw the lines and folds of his face moving. That face had once been smooth when she had first looked at it. Alongside her, with her, through her, it had now become the face that it was.

“You keep on talking about trust.” He was reproachful. “Surely I have shown trust enough? I left you alone here for weeks, I put the whole property in your charge. After all, it’s I who am the tenant.”

She smiled. “Oh, yes, you are the tenant, Achim!” She spoke in ridicule. “You are the master, and you left your poor weak wife all to herself.… Don’t let us talk about it anymore now. Nor do I mind if you keep the car. Everything must be considered. I should like to talk it over thoroughly with Herr von Studmann, and perhaps sound Papa a little.…”

Wrong again! Always doing things the wrong way! No sooner was she gentler than he became harsher. “On no account do I wish Studmann to be told,” said he, beginning to be irritated. “If he hasn’t been called upon, there will be a reason for it. And as for your father …”

“Very well, leave Papa. But Herr von Studmann must be informed. He’s the only one who has a real notion of our finances and can say whether it is possible to buy the car after all.”

“Don’t you understand, Eva?” he cried angrily. “I reject Studmann as competent judge of my actions. He is not my nurse.”

“It is necessary to ask him,” she persisted. “If the Putsch fails …”

“Listen! I forbid you to speak a word to Studmann about the matter. I forbid it.”

“What right have you to tell me what not to do? Why should I do what you think is correct, since everything you do, everything, is wrong? Certainly I shall talk to Herrr von Studmann.”

“You’re very obstinate about your friend,” he said suspiciously.

“Isn’t he your friend also?”

“He’s a self-opinionated fool, a know-all! An everlasting nursemaid!” he burst out. “If you say a word to him about this matter, I’ll throw him out on the spot. We’ll see who is the master here!” he shouted, holding himself rigid.

With pale and unmoving face she looked at him a long, long time, and once again he grew uncertain under this gaze.

“Do be sensible, Eva,” he pleaded. “Admit that I am right.”

Suddenly she turned away. “Very well, my friend, I won’t say anything to Studmann. In future I won’t say anything whatever.” And before he could reply he was alone.

He looked around discontentedly. The lengthy quarrel had left a feeling of emptiness, of something unsatisfied. He had had his way, and for once this did not please him. He wanted to forget the quarrel—it had been an endless torrent of words, long disputes about nothing—and why? Because he had bought a car! If he could pay over twenty thousand gold marks in rent he could afford a car. There were peasants who had them. There was a peasant in Birnbaum who had a car and a tractor plow, and another had twenty-five sewing machines in his barn, just to have something for his money. Goods!

It was not as if he had bought the car for his own pleasure. He would never have thought of it had not Major Rückert instructed him to get one. He had done it for the Cause; a thing she, however, couldn’t understand. And didn’t want to understand. In her dressing table there was a drawer at least a yard long and twenty inches deep, crammed with stockings. Yet she was constantly buying herself new ones. There always had to be money for that! He himself had hardly spent a penny for weeks, only the few cartridges which he needed for the rabbits, and the wine at meal times—but the very first thing he did buy, she made a row!

Soft and musical, the car hooted in front; his car, his brilliant Horch. Glad of this diversion, the Rittmeister put his head out of the window. Violet sat at the wheel, playing with the knob of the horn. “Stop that, Vi!” he shouted. “You’ll frighten the horses.”

“The car’s so smart, Papa. You really are the nicest man. It must be the finest car in the whole district.”

“It’s also pretty dear,” whispered the Rittmeister, twisting his head to look at the floor above.

Vi screwed up her eyes laughingly. “Don’t worry, Papa. Mother’s gone to the farm. In the office again, of course.”

“In the office? Oh!” The Rittmeister was annoyed.

“How much, Papa?”

“Frightful. Seventeen.”

“Seventeen hundred? That’s not so much for a swell car.”

“My dear Vi! Seventeen thousand!”

“At any rate, Papa, for that we have the finest car in the district.”

“You think so? That’s what I say. If you’re going to buy something, it may as well be something decent.”

“I suppose Mamma is not quite in agreement?”

“Not yet. But she’ll change her mind, you see, when she’s been out in it.”

“Papa?”

“Yes …? What?”

“When can I go in it? Today?”

“Oh!” Both children were equally delighted. The nursemaids were absent, in the office.

“I know, Papa! Suppose we go quickly through the forest? The gendarmes are searching there for the convicts. We might catch the fellows. Our car’s so silent and fast! And then we could drop in at Birnbaum. Uncle Egon and the cousins will burst with envy.”

“I don’t know,” said the Rittmeister doubtfully. “Perhaps Mamma would like to come.”

“Mamma? She’d rather be in the office.”

“Oh? What’s the chauffeur doing now?”

“He’s having something to eat in the kitchen. But he can’t be long now. Shall I call him?”

“All right. By the way, Vi, guess whom I met in the train today.”

“Who then? How can I tell, Papa? All the neighbors might have been there. Uncle Egon?”

“What are you talking about? I shouldn’t have asked you to guess about him. No. Our Lieutenant!”

“Who?” Violet turned crimson and lowered her head. Confused, she pressed the knob of the horn and the car hooted loudly.

“Don’t make that noise, Vi, please. You know, the Lieutenant who was so rude …” In a whisper: “The one with the weapons.”

“Oh, him!” She still kept her head down, and played with the wheel. “I thought you meant someone we knew.…”

“No, that ruffian.… You remember? ‘Such things are not discussed in the presence of young ladies.’ ” The Rittmeister laughed. “Well, to do him justice, Vi, he seems to be a big pot, however young he is. And damned clever.”

“Yes, Papa?” she said very softly.

“As a matter of fact, he’s responsible for my buying the car.” Very low and mysteriously: “Violet, they’ve got a big thing on hand—and your Papa’s in it.” This was only the third time that Rittmeister von Prackwitz had let out his secret; and for that reason he was still enjoying himself.

“Against the Socialists, Papa?”

“The Government’s to be overthrown, my child.” (This very solemnly.) “So the day after tomorrow, on October the first, I am going with this car to Ostade.”

“And the Lieutenant?”

“Which Lieutenant? Oh, the Lieutenant! Well, he’ll be with us, naturally.”

“Will there be fighting, Papa?”

“Very likely. Highly probable. But, Violet, you are not afraid, surely? An officer’s daughter! I survived the World War; a few small street fights like that won’t harm me.”

“No, Papa.”

“Well, then. Stiff upper lip, Violet. Nothing venture, nothing win. I think the chauffeur ought to have finished his meal by now. Call him. We want to get back before it’s quite dark.”

He watched his daughter get out of the car and go into the house, slowly, thoughtfully, her head down. She really loves me, he thought proudly; what a shock it was when she heard there would be fighting. But she pulled herself together marvelously. He thought thus, not out of joy in his daughter’s love, but so that he could, mentally at least, upbraid a wife who had not thought for a moment of the dangers to which he was about to expose himself, but only of buying cars, financial difficulties, rent, and questions of trust.…

And while he, proud of a daughterly love which fully appreciated his worth, got ready for the drive, Vi stood as if paralyzed in the small hall, with only one thought in her heart. The day after tomorrow! We have not seen one another again, and he may be killed. The day after tomorrow!

XI

Immediately after the quarrel with her husband Frau von Prackwitz had gone up to her room. She felt she had to cry. In the mirror over the wash-basin she saw a woman no longer young but still quite good-looking, with slightly bulging eyes which now had rather a torpid look. It seemed as if all life had gone out of her; she felt icy cold, her heart was dead as a stone.…

Then she forgot she was standing in front of the mirror looking at herself. What is the good of it all? she asked herself once more. There must have been something which made me love him. What could I have seen? For so long!

An endless series of pictures swirled by her, memories of the past when they were first married. The young first lieutenant. A call from the garden. His charmingly foolish behavior at Violet’s birth. The first intoxicating homecoming after the banquet. A garden party in the garrison town—they had endangered position and reputation when a sudden and overwhelming passion had united the married pair in a park crowded with visitors. The discovery of his first gray hair—already at thirty he had begun to turn gray—a secret she alone knew. His affair with that Armgard von Burkhard; how he had brought her a basket of delicatessen and she had suddenly known that what she had cried about so much was at last definitely over.

A thousand memories, speeding by, happy or sad, but all in a faded, calamitous light. When love goes and the eyes are suddenly opened, and the once-loved is seen as others see him—an average person without special merits—seen with the merciless eyes of a woman who has lived beside him for two decades, knowing beforehand every word he will say, to whom every pettiness and fault is familiar—then arise the perplexed questions: Why? What is the good? Why have I borne so much, retrieving, forgiving? What was in him to make me sacrifice myself so?

No answer. The form to which love alone gave breath has become lifeless without it, a scurrilous figure made up of buffooneries, whims and misbehavior, an insupportable marionette, all its strings known!

Frau Eva heard the sound of feet on the stairs, and came to herself with a start. Two men were talking. It would be Hubert coming down from the attic with the chauffeur. For a moment she was seized with the idea of being truly her father’s daughter, cunning and subtle.…

Oh, let him go ahead and manage! He insists on being the master here, she thought. Let him see how far he can get without me and—Studmann. The money for the car, the rent.… I will tell Studmann not to go tomorrow, not to look for money, not to make any arrangements about hands for the potato harvest. He’ll find out in a week how irretrievably he’ll be stuck in the mud. I’m really tired of having to beg him for permission to do what is right.… This Putsch he’s so full of now is nothing but an adventure. Papa’s not in it, nor Studmann nor my brother. They’ve talked him round at the last moment. He will find …

She examined her face in the mirror. There was a trace of self-righteousness about the mouth which she didn’t like. Her eyes were bright, but neither did she care for that. The fires of malice shine thus.

No, she told herself resolutely, not that way. I don’t want that. If, as it now appears to me, everything is really finished, it will collapse without my assistance. I shall go on doing everything I can. That won’t be much; there’s no longer any enthusiasm, any love in it, only duty. But I have always been as honest as I could, and all these years I have nothing grave with which to reproach myself.…

Once again she examined the mirror. Her face had a strained expression; the skin round the eyes looked drawn, heavily wrinkled and dry. Promptly she took up her pot of cream and greased her face. Massaging the skin gently, she thought: I’m not finished yet; I’m in the prime of life. And if I’m more careful with myself and what I eat, I can easily lose fifteen or twenty pounds—then I shall have exactly the right figure.…

Five minutes later Frau von Prackwitz was sitting in the office with Herr Studmann. Studmann, of course, hadn’t the slightest notion of how she was feeling. Frau Eva, who in a quarter of an hour had discovered that she no longer loved her husband, who had decided that she would remain honest in all circumstances, but who had nevertheless conceded herself a quite joyous and hopeful life—Frau Eva had to listen to an exhaustive lecture on how Herr von Studmann proposed to raise the money for the rent the day after tomorrow.

The old schoolmaster! she thought, but not without sympathy. She was no girl now; she knew men (for to know one man properly is to know all) and she was aware that they possessed a bewildering lack of intuition. Under their very eyes a woman might expire from her desire for tenderness while they were demonstrating at length and in detail that they needed a new suit, and why they needed a new suit, and what color the new suit had to be.… And suddenly, very surprised and a little hurt, they say: “Aren’t you listening at all? What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you well? You’re looking so strange!”

Frau Eva had crossed her legs, which, her skirt being fashionably short, gave her the opportunity of studying them during the lecture. They were, she thought, still very nice to look at, and if she reduced, it would be better to do so on the hips and behind. But of course, one always got slimmer just where it was not so desirable.

Both suddenly noticed that neither was speaking.

“What was that, Herr von Studmann?” she asked and laughed. “Excuse me, my thoughts were elsewhere.” She drew back her legs as much as possible beneath the skirt.

Studmann was fully prepared to excuse her; his thoughts also had strayed. Hastily he took up his lecture again. It appeared that in the town of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder there lived a deranged person who was ready the following day to provide the full sum of rent in the finest of notes, if only the management of Neulohe Farm engaged to deliver him in December fifty tons of rye in exchange.

“The man’s mad!” exclaimed Frau von Prackwitz, puzzled. “He could have one hundred and fifty tons for his money tomorrow.”

That, admitted Studmann, had also been his opinion at first. But it was like this. The man—a rich fishmonger, by the way—would only have to change his tons of grain into paper money tomorrow or in a week. Everyone today, though, fled from paper money, tried to lay it out on some commodity of permanent value, and so this man had hit upon grain, no doubt.

“But how can he know that it will be different in December?”

“Obviously he can’t know. He hopes so, believes so; he is speculating on it. A little while back there were negotiations in Berlin about issuing a new currency. After all, the mark can’t go on falling forever. But they are at variance over money based on grain or on gold. No doubt the man thinks we shall have the new currency in December.”

“Would that change things for us?”

“As far as I can foresee, no. We should always have to deliver fifty tons of rye only.”

“Then let’s do it. We shall certainly never be able to rid ourselves of this nightmare more favorably.”

“Perhaps we ought to ask Prackwitz about it first,” proposed Studmann.

“Willingly. If you think so. Only—why? You have full authority.”

Women are the devil. At this moment there were certainly no legs in a conversation devoted to business, rent and currency. But when Frau Eva threw doubt on the necessity of consulting her husband, something dark and suppressed crept into the matter-of-fact discussion. It really sounded a little as if, to speak frankly, they were talking of a dying person.

“Yes,” said Studmann softly, “to be sure. Only, you both undertake the obligation to deliver in—December.”

“Yes. And—?” She did not comprehend.

“December! You will have, in all circumstances, to deliver in December. Fifty tons of grain. In all circumstances. A good two months yet.”

Frau von Prackwitz tapped a cigarette on the lid of the box. There was a small furrow between her eyebrows. For greater comfort she crossed her legs, without, however, thinking about it. Nor did Studmann notice it this time.

“You understand, madam,” he explained, “it would be a personal obligation of yours and your husband’s, not of the farm. You would have to deliver the fifty tons if—well, wherever you were.”

A long pause.

Frau von Prackwitz stirred. “Accept, Herr von Studmann,” she said vivaciously. “Accept in spite of that danger.” She shut her eyes; she was a beautiful, plump, fair woman, withdrawing into herself. She was like a cat, a cat who is happy, a cat on the hunt for mice. “If we lose the tenancy by December,” she said smilingly, “my father won’t leave me in the lurch. I should then take it over and deliver the fifty tons.”

Studmann sat like a lump of wood. Amazing tidings had reached his ears. These women!

Frau von Prackwitz smiled. She was not smiling at Studmann, but at something imaginary between the stove and the law shelves. Putting her hand out to him, she said: “And may I rely also on you not to leave me in the lurch, Herr von Studmann?”

Disconcerted, Studmann gazed at the hand. It is a large but very white woman’s hand with rather too many rings. He felt exactly as if he’d been hit on the head. What had she said? Impossible! She couldn’t have meant it like that. He was a donkey.…

“Donkey!” said she in a deep warm voice, and for one moment the hand gently touched his lips. He felt its fresh softness, perceived its scent, and looked up, crimson. He would have to turn things over in his mind—the position was difficult. Prackwitz was his old friend, after all. He encountered her look, in which was a blend of mocking superiority and tenderness.

“Dearest madam …” said he, confused.

“Yes,” she smiled. “What I have always wanted to ask you was—what actually is your Christian name?”

“My Christian name? Well, it’s a bit awkward … actually I don’t use it. I’m called Etzel; that is—”

“Etzel? Etzel? Wasn’t that—?”

“Correct!” he explained hurriedly. “Attila or Etzel, a prince of the Huns, who swept into Europe with his Mongolian hordes, robbing and murdering. About 450 A.D. Battle on the Catalaunian Plain. ‘Savagery was as innate in him as dignity and sobriety.’ But, as I say, I make no use of it. It’s a sort of family tradition.”

“No, Etzel is quite impossible. Papa called his gander Attila. And what did your friends call you? Prackwitz always only says Studmann.”

“Like all the others do,” he sighed. “I’m not really suited to intimacies.” He turned a little red. “Sometimes I was called the Nursemaid. And in the regiment they called me Mummy.”

“Studmann, Nursemaid, Mummy.…” She shook her head with irritation, “Herr von Studmann, you really are impossible. No, I must find something else.”

“Dearest madam!” cried Studmann, enraptured. “Do you really mean that? I’m such a boring fellow, a pedant, a fussy old woman. And you—”

“Quiet,” she urged, shaking her head. “Wait. Don’t forget, Herr von Studmann, for the moment I have only asked you about your Christian name … nothing else.” She paused, supporting her head in her hands, armlets gently tinkling. She sighed, she made the most enchanting beginning to a yawn. She was altogether the cat which cleans itself, stretches, and does everything but look at the sparrow it is going to devour the next moment. “And then there is also the car.”

“What car?” He was confused again. Her transitions today were much too sudden for any sober-thinking man.

She pointed out of the window, though there was no car outside. But he understood. “Oh, the car! What about it?”

“He’s bought it,” she said.

“Oh?” He was thoughtful. “How much?”

“Seventeen thousand.”

Studmann made a gesture of despair. “Absolutely impossible!”

“And by installments?”

“Also.”

“Listen, Herr von Studmann,” she said with vigor, though a little sullenly. “In all circumstances you will go to Frankfurt tomorrow and obtain the money, but no more.”

“Certainly.”

“Whatever you may be told, you will go and fetch only that. Is it agreed?”

“Certainly.”

“You will hand over the money for the settlement of the rent to Herr von Prackwitz tomorrow evening. Do you understand? Herr von Prackwitz is to give my father the money himself. You understand?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“Wait. Prackwitz has planned a small journey for the day after tomorrow. Well, that’s nothing to do with us. He can pay the money over tomorrow evening. You understand me?”

“Not quite, but—”

“All right. If you only keep to what I say.… Herr von Prackwitz is to receive the money for the rent punctually—that’s enough. Perhaps you’ll ask for a receipt?”

“If you wish.” Studmann hesitated. “Prackwitz and I haven’t usually—”

“Of course not. But now!” She spoke sharply, stood up and gave him her hand. Once again she was the mistress of Neulohe. “Then au revoir, Herr von Studmann. I suppose I shan’t see you till after your trip to Frankfurt. Well, good business!”

“Thank you very much,” said Studmann, looking at her a little unhappily. There ought to be frankness, something positive discussed; but no, nothing! Etzel, and a hand kiss! Such things ought not to be done that way.

Shaking his head, Studmann set about composing an advertisement: “Hands wanted for potato digging …”

Outside blows the September wind, beginning to tear off and carry away the sere leaves. Something in Eva told her it was autumn and winter was coming. Her bearing is all the more erect, however. The wind pressed her clothes against her body. She felt its cool freshness on her skin. No, it’s not autumn for everybody, only for things ripe enough to die. She felt herself still young, and walked into the wind. She has made an experiment; she has encroached on Fate. Will Prackwitz pay the rent? Yes or no? Everything depends on that.

XII

Tranquil and in good spirits, Pagel made for the wood, after the gendarmes, on the hunt for convicts. No Rittmeister von Prackwitz could upset him now, by a long way. What a child the man was, a silly thoughtless child! Came back with a brand-new car and at once set about showing the young man he was master! But the young man didn’t care—he was glad to be in the woods; he had no wish to remain in the office with such a paltry employer. A queer fish, the governor! Damned rude to someone who could raise his finger any moment, point at the car and say: “Well—and my two thousand gold marks?”

Not that he would exactly do that. Studmann would take care that he got the money some day, when it was needed. There had been a time when one had said to the Rittmeister: “Oh, forget about the trash. I don’t want the money back at all.” Then the Rittmeister had flushed and excitedly spoken about “debts of honor.” Time had passed since then, however. One thought quite differently about money when stamps and boot repairs and cigarettes and laundry had to be paid for out of a small monthly sum, graciously conceded by the Rittmeister (although one really did nothing at all for it, of course!)—in other words, out of a miserable pocket money. In fact, a small installment of that debt would often come in very pat, these days. But, at the slightest hint of that kind now, the Rittmeister would flush again and cry out, offended: “But, Pagel, you know very well what my financial position is at present, man!”

Yet a brand-new car stood in front of his house. And one was ordered out like some mere lad. Undoubtedly a queer fish!

Thus preoccupied, Pagel strolled through the woods. He had no idea in what parts the gendarmes were beating; but so long as he steered for the potato field, he would find them.

For the moment he therefore continued and thought as he went. He was comfortable and content. It would be a great mistake to suppose he was angry with the Rittmeister. Not a bit! People could only be what they were. Idiots formed a splendid background for Petra. The more foolish others were, the clearer that girl stood out. And Wolfgang thought about her with deeply grateful tenderness, an emotion which grew constantly stronger; since he had heard from Minna that he was to be a father there was more joy than longing or desire in it. An odd feeling! It was a confounded long time, three months, ninety-four days exactly, before she would let him go to her. He thought about everything they had experienced together, how it had come about and what had happened next. It had been good! Strange. Living with Petra, he hadn’t really thought much about her. Gambling had been the chief thing. Now that he lived in Neulohe, he actually mainly lived at Madam Po’s. Strange! Did there ever really come a time in life when a man had the feeling that experience and awareness were one? When he felt: Now you are happy, in a manner you can never again experience in the whole of your life? In the very second of experience! Not like this, when it was only afterwards discovered: in those days I was happy! As happy as we always were—? No! It was strange and dangerous!

Pagel whistled thoughtfully. And considered whether the capture of convicts in a wood was aided by whistling, whether they would sneak off at the sound or make an attack upon him, to get his money, clothes and pistol. In a flash he saw Marofke’s face with its trembling baggy cheeks. But let the fellows come! he thought defiantly. Whistling louder, he grasped the pistol butt in his trouser pocket.

Yes, indeed! It was strange and dangerous, always to think of your sweetheart and compare her to all the others, and only in her favour. Once again Pagel asked himself if the image he now had of Peter was still true. Was she really pure gold? That couldn’t be true either. She must have faults, too, and if he looked for them, he easily found some. For instance, her tendency to silence if something didn’t suit her—if something annoyed her. He would ask her what was wrong? Nothing was wrong. But he could see, something was. He’d done something wrong. No definitely nothing. You had to talk to her for a full quarter of an hour. She could make you furious. Almost drive you insane with her eternal no! It was clear as clear. Well, there was a fault all right. In any case, he’ll help her break this habit. A girl like Peter shouldn’t have any faults. As for himself, it was different. He had so many that it wasn’t even worth beginning to improve.

Pagel, busy with his thoughts, had long passed beyond the potato field into ever stranger and more remote parts of the wood. He had seen nothing of the convicts and nothing of the gendarmes either. Well, he would take a pleasant walk instead of joining in an idiotic hunt; for idiotic it must be, he decided. Woods upon woods, up and down, hour after hour, overgrown thickets, plantations of thousands of small straggling pines, high as a man, half as high again, hundreds and hundreds of acres, glens of fir so gloomy that even on the brightest day one hardly saw a foot in front—and the police were hoping in this wilderness to find five shrewd and desperate men whose intelligence would be concentrated on not letting themselves be found. Absolute nonsense! In the woods one really perceived how impossible the task was. He would go on alone, comfortably, instead of crawling around with the others among thorns and junipers.

But, turning the next corner, he exclaimed “Ah-ha!” and was no longer alone. A little man in a fur jacket was walking toward him, that is, walking was not quite the right word; he had a kind of quavering in his progress, a staccato. He, so to speak, yodeled somewhat with his legs. “Damned roots!” he said far too loudly, though there were none in that spot. And a pace in front of Pagel he stopped with so sudden a start that he almost fell over.

Wolfgang seized him just in time. “Ah-ha! Herr Meier,” he said smiling, “Germans don’t say ‘cognac,’ they say ‘brandy.’ ”

Meier’s small, reddened eyes contemplated his successor on the farm. Suddenly a gleam of recognition shone in them and, with a broad impudent grin, he screeched: “Oh, it’s you. I thought … Doesn’t matter. I’m a bit boozed. Seen my car anywhere?”

“What!” Pagel became suspicious. “Have you got a car, too, Herr Meier? What are you doing in our forest today with a car?”

“So you too say our forest now,” laughed Meier. “That seems to be the fashion here. The forester says my forest, the Rittmeister says my woods, his wife sometimes takes a little walk in her plantations, and the one it really belongs to, the old Geheimrat, he only talks about a few pine trees!”

Out of politeness Pagel laughed also. But the other’s presence here, particularly today, still seemed suspicious. “Where did you leave your car, Herr Meier?” he asked.

“If only I knew, blockhead that I am!” said Meier, thumping himself on the head. “So it’s not up that way, then?” Pagel shook his head. “Well, let’s go up here.” He seemed to take it for granted that Wolfgang would accompany him, and this somewhat removed the suspicion that he might be an associate of the escaped convicts. Cheerful and fairly erect, he sauntered along, apparently glad to have found a listener.

“As a matter of fact, I’m a bit boozed, you know. I’ve been celebrating with a friend. Actually he isn’t a friend, but he thinks he is. Well, let the child have its pacifier. So I found myself here, I don’t know what it’s called, it was somewhere near. But I’ll find it all right. I’ve a marvelous memory for places.”

“Surely.”

“Let’s take this path on the left. I’ve forgotten your name for the moment, one gets acquainted with too many people in life, particularly the last few weeks; one’s got to work his way in first. But my memory for names is good, the Colonel’s always saying so.”

“What colonel? You’re not with the Army now, are you?” Pagel encountered a glance which was wary, suspicious, and not in the least drunken. He’s not so tipsy as he seems, he thought. Take care!

But Meier was laughing again. “Well, are you with the Army because you say Rittmeister to your boss?” he asked adroitly. “He’s bought himself a fine car, the old sod. Saw him today in Frankfurt scorching on a trial run—the world’s got to collapse nobly. What’s little Vi doing now?”

“Well, your car doesn’t seem to be here either.”

“Don’t pull a face or I’ll laugh. So I suppose you’ve been dropped, too? Is the Lieutenant still the only one? Lordie, what a girl! Love must be wonderful. Well”—in quite a different, a threatening, tone—“soon the Lieutenant will be dropped; he’s going to feel sick soon. He’d better wash his chest, he’ll be shot.”

“Perhaps you are rather jealous, Herr Meier?” inquired Pagel amiably. “That time you screamed in the night—I suppose that was because of him? Incidentally, I found the copy you made of the letter, inside the District Gazette.”

“Oh, that stupid thing! Far as I’m concerned, you can blow your nose on it. Haven’t got any time nowadays for flea bites like that. We’ve got other things on tap. But there, a young chap from the country won’t understand about that. You’ve no idea what I’m earning now.”

“Oh, I can see it, Herr Meier.”

“Isn’t it so? Look at the rings, all real good stones. I have a pal who gets ’em for me at half price. And since I always pay only in foreign money …” Once again he stopped short, with the same intensely suspicious side-glance. But Pagel had not heard the treasonable word; he was following up another clue.

“Isn’t that a little dangerous, Herr Meier? To go walking about here alone in the forest with so much jewelry and money? Something might easily happen to you.”

“Don’t you believe it!” laughed Meier contemptuously. “What could happen then? Nothing’s ever happened to me before. You haven’t the least idea, man, of all I’ve been through—and nothing’s happened to me yet. Here,” he said, stamping with his foot on the earth, “here in this wood someone once walked behind me, for a quarter of an hour, with his revolver all the time on my nut—and was going to shoot me dead. Well, did he shoot me?”

“Funny things happen to you,” laughed Pagel, somewhat uncomfortably. “One would never have thought it. No doubt he was not really in earnest …”

“Him? He meant it all right.… The thing was loaded, and he only let me keep on walking because he wanted to get to a place a bit more secluded. So that they wouldn’t find my body straight away, of course.”

In these words there was something sinister and horrible. Pagel looked at the little man askance. What he said need not be true, but the fellow believed it was.… Threats were forming themselves on his lips.

“I’ll get the swine, though. If I was frightened, he’s going to be a hundred times as frightened. I escaped, but he won’t.…”

“Well, Herr Meier,” said Pagel coldly, “if the Lieutenant is ever found dead somewhere you can be quite certain the police will be told at once by me.”

Meier turned with a vicious stare. Of a sudden, however, his expression changed, his heavy blubber lips curled, his owl-like eyes smiled scornfully. “You think I’m such a fool as to shoot at the fellow? Shoot off the mark, most likely, and be done to death by the swine? That’d be a fine revenge! No, man! Trust old Meier! He’s got to be afraid, the swine. I’ll hound him down, rob him of his honor, everyone shall spit at him—and then, when there’s no way out for him anymore—then he can shoot himself, the swine! That and no other way!”

Triumphantly he stood before Pagel. There was no more intoxication to be seen, except that possibly the alcohol had inflamed his revengefulness and made him blab of things he otherwise carried locked within him. Pagel, watchful, was taking care not to let his disgust for the fellow become visible; he felt certain that behind all the threats much was hidden which it would be good to know. One must be clever and pump him, this Meier! But he could not hold back his youthfulness, the abhorrence of the young for whatever is sick, impure and criminal.

“You’re a fine lump of turd!” he said contemptuously, and turned to go.

“And what about it?” challenged Meier. “What’s that to do with you? Have I made myself? Have you made yourself? I should like to know what you’d look like if you’d always been treated as dirt, as I’ve been treated! You’re a precious mother’s pet, anyone can see that; a fine school and everything else that goes with it.…” He quieted down a little.

“You believe that a good education drives all the swinishness out of one?” asked Pagel. “Some people feel quite happy even in filth.”

Meier looked evilly at him for a minute. Then he laughed. “Look here, why quarrel about that? I always think it’s a short life and a long death, so let’s see that we too have a decent time. And since money’s necessary for that, and a poor devil will never get any by being honest …”

“You get it by being dishonest. Only I don’t understand, Herr Meier, why you have it in for the Lieutenant so much. You won’t get any money, will you, if he’s done for?”

Now, however innocently Pagel had said this, immediately there was that same suspicious glance. But this time Meier didn’t reply. Growling, he turned into a fresh path. “Damn and blast it, where the devil’s the bloody car! I must be quite crazy. Aren’t we going round and round in a circle really?” Again he looked viciously at Pagel and murmured: “You needn’t worry about letting me go on by myself. You’re not a help to me, anyway.”

“I am afraid something might happen to you,” said Pagel politely. “Your fine rings, all that money …”

“I’ve already told you, nothing can happen. Who’s going to pinch rings in a forest?”

“Convicts,” said Pagel calmly, with a sharp eye on his man.

Meier did not turn a hair. “Convicts? What convicts?”

“Ours, from the harvest crew,” replied Pagel, convinced that his suspicion had been unjust. (But what was little Meier doing in the forest?) “In fact, five of them ran away this morning.”

“Damn and blast!” shouted Meier, and his fright was genuine. “They’re hiding here in the forest? You—you’re trying to be funny. Why, you yourself are walking about just the same.”

“Not at all!” said Pagel, half pulling the pistol from his trousers. “Besides that, I’m looking for the gendarmes. There are fifty of them, you know, ransacking the forest.”

“That beats everything,” said Meier, coming to a stop. “Five lags and fifty frogs—and me right in it with my bone-shaker! That can be painful. Lord, man, I must get my car right away. What was it called now? I’ve got it. The Black Dale! Do you know it?”

Pagel felt that the little man had known this name all along, had he wished to come out with it. Meier was looking at him suspiciously, too. Why? It was only a forest name, like any other. “I’ve never been there,” he said. “But I’ve seen it on the map. It’s very near Birnbaum and we’re going the whole time toward Neulohe.”

“Fool that I am.” Meier hit himself on the head with his fist. “Onwards then, man—what do you call yourself?”

“Pagel.”

“Keep your eyes open. In this sand even a worm could find a wheel mark. This way? Good. But is it the right way?”

“Oh, yes,” said Pagel. “But why are you so enormously upset all of a sudden? I thought that nothing could happen to you?”

“Yes, I’d like to see you in my place. Suppose everything’s messed up! Damnation! This is always my luck. That cursed drunk …”

“What’ll be messed up?”

“What’s that to do with you?”

“Well, I’d really like to know.”

“Then write to Aunt Dolly in Advice to the Lovelorn.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s not yet been settled that we’re really going to the Black Dale now.”

Meier, coming to a stop, fixed young Pagel with a look of hatred. He would certainly very much have liked to do something to him, but he thought better of it, and snarled: “What do you want to know, then?”

“Why are you in a hurry so suddenly?”

Meier reflected. “I’ve business in Frankfurt,” he said in a surly voice.

“So you had five minutes ago, and you weren’t in any hurry then.”

“Would you let a new car be pinched by convicts? Even if it’s not a tiptop Horch like your Rittmeister’s—only a baby Opel.”

“You were frightened when I talked about the gendarmes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“All right. I haven’t got a driving license. And anyway, I like to steer clear of the police.”

“Because of your business?”

“If you like. I don’t mind—I do a bit of business on the sly.”