Under a Changing Moon, page 15
Georg slipped away for a while every afternoon into town to learn the latest news and see his friends, who sorely missed him on their evening strolls. “I’ll just see what’s up,” he would say to August. “You keep an eye on the young ones, meanwhile.” When he came back, he brought the latest bulletins with him, for the news was always posted outside the printing office of the newspaper. One evening he rushed home breathless just as the family was sitting down to table and blurted out his tremendous news almost before he reached the door: the Duke had left Nassau and had gone to join his troops. The proclamation to the people was posted everywhere in the town, the town crier had announced it in the marketplace, and tomorrow everyone would be able to read about it in the newspaper.
Immediately afterwards, Father Knodt came in; he had been invited to supper with the family, and he was able to confirm Georg’s report. As soon as the meal was over, the Amtmann, Uncle Emmo, and the young priest went out together. “To the bishop, I expect,” said August to his brothers, and he was right.
No one could sleep much that night. Every hour one of the boys would get up, rush to the window, and look out to see if there were any enemy troops in sight. There was no Nassau soldiery in the town any more, and the duke had gone, but there was still no news of a declaration of war. Twice Paula came into the boys’ room to ask if they could see anything and to have a look out of the window with them. But no, there was nothing to be discovered. The moonless night was dark and uncannily silent. Once there was a sound like distant thunder. In the garden, the crickets kept up their monotonous chirping, and down by the river a belated nightingale sang ceaselessly.
Their parents, too, had little sleep. The next morning the Amtmann went down to his office earlier than usual, fetched the files on a case he had to deal with that day, and began to read them. After a while, he heard steps and voices outside in the hall. Wittich burst in without knocking. The Amtmann looked up and raised his eyebrows. Whatever it was, there was no excuse for informality.
“Pardon me, Herr Amtmann . . . the Prussians!” stammered the beadle.
“Please ask the gentlemen to step this way,” said the Amtmann.
A major and an adjutant entered; at the door they clicked their heels and saluted. They had come to the Amtmann, as the highest civil authority in the district, to inform him that the Prussian commander-in-chief had declared a state of emergency throughout the whole of Nassau. He, the Amtmann, would have to assume responsibility for peace and order and communicate the necessary procedures to the civilian population. The country had been occupied without any resistance to speak of; the general hoped to put an end to the state of martial law very shortly.
“Now you’ll be able to see what real soldiers look like, fellows!” August said to his brothers. “These chaps have not only occupied Nassau before you could wink, but they’ve taken over Frankfurt, the thousand-year-old free city. Think of it! The war’s over before it’s even started. Here, at any rate.”
The young people were disappointed that it had all happened with so little to-do, but they had something to make up for it. The victorious Prussians marched into the town with flags waving and regimental music playing; hussars rode up the main street; light artillery rattled past, followed by such a vast crowd of schoolboys that the drivers had to be careful not to run any of them over. There was a general on horseback with a plume of white feathers on his helmet, his adjutant beside him. People said he was the commander-in-chief, General Vogel von Falkenstein, but no one knew if this was true or not. Others said that the bishop had been assured that Catholic Nassau would be occupied mostly by Catholic troops, a noble gesture that did much to calm many people’s fears. In the courthouse, business was even more lively than usual, people coming in from morning to night to get the Amtmann’s orders or advice in this exceptional situation.
As Paula was crossing the yard the next morning to fetch the new-laid eggs from the henhouse for breakfast, Adolf rushed out to her from the stable, full of excitement. “We’ve got soldiers billeted on us! There are two splendid horses in the stable and a hussar! Come and have a look. The trooper is a jolly fellow; he whistles like a canary and has settled into the stableboy’s room already.”
But Paula had no time to look at horses now. She quickly fetched her eggs, and as she had forgotten to bring her basket, she slipped them into her apron. When she was hurrying back into the house, she almost bumped straight into a blue and silver hussar officer. He stepped politely aside, clicked the heels of his high riding boots with a flourish that made the spurs jangle, put his hand to his cap, and said, “Pardon, mademoiselle! Lieutenant von Quitzow. Would you be so kind as to announce me to His Honor, Herr Amtmann.”
Paula grasped the corners of her apron together with one hand and felt for the handle of the door with the other. It was embarrassing to have to face such an extremely elegant young man wearing her house dress! She realized that she was blushing, which made her embarrassment all the greater. One of the eggs tumbled out of her apron and smashed on the stone steps, and foolishly she bent to pick it up, although there is not much of a broken egg to pick up. The polite hussar could not do otherwise than bend down too, and this time they really did bump into one another—head on. “Pardon, mademoiselle!” he said for the second time this morning. Paula hurried into the house. He followed close behind her.
“Please wait here,” she said, as distant and severe as possible. “The Herr Amtmann is not in his office as early as this. I’ll go and tell him.” She hoped this would make him realize that a visit at such an impossibly early hour was far from being comme il faut! He looked like twenty at the most, a newly hatched lieutenant evidently, at least six feet tall, and from this height he looked down on little Paula, which she felt as an insult somehow, though one couldn’t blame him for being so tall. The ridiculous little mustache on his upper lip didn’t hide his attempts to suppress a smile. Without giving him a further glance, she ran upstairs. The family was already sitting down to breakfast—without eggs.
“Why are you bringing the uncooked eggs in here?” asked Mama in astonishment. “And what have you been doing with yourself?”
Paula realized for the first time that there was egg yolk dripping down her apron and onto her shoes. Apart from the one she had dropped, another one must have been smashed in her apron when she and the officer had bumped together. It never rains but it pours, she thought.
“I just wanted to tell Papa quickly that there is an officer waiting to see him downstairs,” she said. “I think he must have been billeted on us.”
The Amtmann finished his coffee without hurrying.
“Then you’d better get the guest room ready again straight away,” said Mama. “But first, take of that dirty apron and have your breakfast. Did he really look so fearsome that it made you break the eggs?”
“What sort of soldier is he?” Karl broke in, saving Paula from having to answer her mother’s question.
“A hussar,” she said.
“With a bay and a brown and an orderly,” Adolf rattled off. “Weren’t you listening when I told all about it?”
Papa rose from the table. “You must see that Silver gets some exercise today, Adolf,” he said as he left the room to go downstairs. “Please take this letter with you and hand it in at Frau von Savigny’s house. You know the one, in the big garden behind the mill. You can tie the horse up at the gate while you go in. The house has been let for the holidays to an architect called Ippel from Wiesbaden. Our friend Winter recommended the family to me.”
Adolf exchanged a glance with Paula. He had been waiting a long time for an opportunity to explore this mysterious garden. As soon as breakfast was over, he saddled Silver, whistled to his dog, and set off. When they reached the little gate in the wall, he dismounted and threw the reins over an ornamental curl in the ironwork of the gate. “Look! Lovely grass, Silver,” he said. “You can help yourself; it’ll have to be cut some time anyway. Sit, Aqua, be good! I’ll be back in a moment.”
He passed the fountain with the moss-covered rim that he had seen when he looked over the wall. From a rusty spout trickled a thin column of water. The frog prince was not at home today, but there was a big gold carp floating motionless among the duckweed. It was a hot July day, and it occurred to Adolf that the animals could do with a drink. Aqua came at once to his call and lapped thirstily at the water, which was clear and fresh under the thick covering of green. The carp disappeared under a water-lily leaf, all except its tail fin, which quivered indignantly—a grumpy old man’s gesture of dismissal when his nap has been disturbed. Silver had a drink, too, after Adolf had cleared away some of the duckweed with his hand. Then he took the animals back to the little gate and left them there in the shade of the wall and the old chestnut tree. Aqua whimpered a little as the boy left him, and Silver rubbed his nose against his face. It was almost as though the two of them wanted to dissuade him from penetrating the enchanted green wilderness.
The main path, as far as it was recognizable between the thick bushes, turned a corner, and after a few more yards, Adolf realized that he was no longer walking toward the house. Instead, he found himself between tall box hedges, higher than himself; once upon a time they must have been trimmed into elegant shapes, but now they were all ragged and grown over. He turned right, in the direction he thought the house must lie, but found himself trapped between more hedges. It was the same thing wherever he turned—to right or to left, the same narrow paths, the same hedges. The air was curiously silent. There were no birds singing in the shady tangle of leaves and branches. Once he heard a whinny from Silver and a short bark from Aqua. They sounded surprisingly distant and as if they came from a completely different direction than he would have imagined. Being Adolf, he at once began to weave a story in his mind, turning into Theseus in the labyrinth of the Minotaur. His imagination made his situation even eerier than it was. About time for Ariadne to turn up and rescue me, he thought, and he began to whistle loudly to dispel the unpleasant feeling of being lost. Then he stopped and listened. From somewhere he thought he could hear voices and laughter.
“Hello!” he shouted and waited for a moment. “Hello!” he shouted again.
“Is someone there?” replied a girl’s voice.
“You bet there is!” he called back. “I’ve lost my way in these bushes.”
Again he heard voices and laughter somewhere behind the impenetrable walls. Was a consultation in progress as to how long they could go on teasing him like this? Finally he lost patience. “Aqua!” he shouted as loud as he could. “Aaaaquaaa!” At the same moment, he heard footsteps very close to him, though he could still see no one they might belong to. Then there came a nerve-shattering shrill barking, and from nowhere a tiny white dog appeared, jumping about at his feet, yapping for all he was worth as though Adolf had been a burglar. A second after, Aqua came bounding around the corner—it had been easy enough for him to follow his master’s scent. The big dog pulled up with a jerk, evidently disgusted by the sight of this ludicrous little thing that leaped at him as though it were intending to eat him.
“Help!” cried a voice, which presumably belonged to the footsteps Adolf had heard, and Ariadne appeared. “Help! He’s eating Powder Puff!”
A little girl emerged out of the tangle of hedges, bent down, picked up the yelping little dog, and held it high above her head, as though to defend it from the knightly Aquarius, who would never have dreamed of attacking a dog smaller than himself “Call him off!” she begged. “What are you two doing here, anyway?”
“Come here, Aqua, down!” said Adolf. “You’d ruin your digestion if you swallowed so much cotton wool. I’ve a letter here for Herr Baumeister Ippel.”
“Oh, I see!” said the girl. She must have been about eleven, a slender little thing with a mass of shining brown hair that flowed over her shoulders and down her back in a thick mane, held back from her forehead by a silken ribbon. Now that her dog was no longer in danger, she looked at Adolf with laughing eyes. Ariadne could not have appeared more charming to Theseus than this small girl in her white dress, which was short enough to show quite a stretch of white stocking, did to Adolf. She wore black strap shoes and a red coral necklace around her neck. Obviously she thought it a great joke that Adolf had lost his way so completely.
“This is a la-by-rinth,” she said importantly.
“I almost guessed it,” he said, but the irony was lost on her.
“Please keep tight hold of your monster and see he doesn’t bite my dog,” she went on.
The little dog was still growling fiercely down at Aquarius, who did not so much as look at him. “What? Do you suppose a real dog would attack a thing like that?” said Adolf.
She cuddled the thing tenderly to her. “His name is Powder Puff. Isn’t he sweet? We call him Püffchen. What about yours?”
“Aquarius.”
“That’s a funny name! Come on, I’ll take you up to the house. Look, you only had to take this turning here, and then this one, and there we are.”
“How was I to know that?”
They actually had merely turned two corners of the maze when it opened up and they were standing on a lawn in front of the house. (Big enough for a gypsy encampment, Adolf decided.) Steps led up to a veranda, where an elderly lady was sitting in a garden chair. At the edge of the lawn, a swing had been slung between two trees, and there were two more girls sitting in it, also in white, one a little bigger than Adolf’s rescuer, the other a little smaller.
“Who’s that with you, Toni?” asked the elder. “And what’s that terrifying dog doing?”
“The boy said he wouldn’t do anything. He’s called Aquarius. The dog, not the boy.” She looked at him questioningly, and he said, “Adolf’s my name.”
The two sisters came over. “You remind me of that good-looking boy who was so nice to us and showed us all the sights of the town the other day. Doesn’t he?” the youngest one asked, and all three girls stared at him.
A thought came into Adolf’s mind. “Would you mind telling me this good-looking boy’s name?” he asked.
“Georg,” replied Toni. “And these are my two sisters, Lina and Emmi. Come on. You can give the letter to Aunt Käthchen. Her name is Fräulein Stritter. Papa only brought us here last week, and then he went back to Wiesbaden. And now we’re stuck here with Aunt Käthchen and can’t go back to Papa, and he can’t come to us because that horrid general has forbidden all journeys.”
“Well, that’s only a temporary thing,” said Adolf. “My brother August says they always do that in occupied territory at first.”
Toni took his hand and led him up to the veranda where her aunt was sitting, knitting something red. Gosh, she’s a hunchback, thought Adolf. But her face was so friendly and serene that he forgot the hunchback. He noticed that the house had many more bay windows and turrets and little decorations than he had been able to see from over the wall. It looked jolly but a little odd.
“He lost his way in the maze,” Toni explained, and the aunt joined in the girls’ gay laughter. On a table beside the garden chair stood a big jug of lemonade and a plate with thin bread and butter. Adolf had never seen anything so thin. “You must be thirsty,” said Fräulein Stritter. Lina ran into the house to fetch another glass, and Toni poured out lemonade for everybody. Adolf sipped his cool drink and ate some bread and butter, or rather inhaled it—there was nothing there to chew. Then he had to tell them the story of how Aquarius received his funny name, and they all listened attentively. Afterwards, the conversation came back to the “good-looking boy” who had taken the aunt and her nieces around the town. Or rather, dragged them around, thought Adolf. They had been to the bishop’s palace and the bishop’s chapel and to the fish market, where he had told them that a man with a trumpet always had to walk in front of the mail coach and any other heavy carts to warn the butchers and the bakers to move their wares back from the street. Here in Limburg was the narrowest point on all the main cross-country road from Cologne to Frankfurt, and there was an ordinance about the exact width the loads on the carts could be—if they were any wider, they could not get past. Then he had taken them up to the cathedral and shown them the beautiful Romanesque font and his family’s arms above one of the choir stalls. Adolf could well imagine how he had made himself seem important and shown off all his knowledge in front of them. “He knew everything,” said Toni. “Don’t you think Adolf looks rather like him, Aunt Käthchen?”
Adolf put one foot on the other with embarrassment. His left hand he kept tightly stuffed into his pants pocket, so that at least they couldn’t see his warts. What a rotten fellow and show-off he was, that Georg! And he had dragged this poor old lady, hunchback and all, up the hill to the cathedral. It was a miracle she hadn’t dropped dead with the effort in the boiling heat they’d had last week! “That’s my brother,” he said gloomily. “If I’d taken you around, I’d have taken you in the carriage.”
