Under a Changing Moon, page 17
A few days after Adolf’s first meeting with the architect’s family, he fetched Fräulein Stritter and the nieces for afternoon coffee in the courthouse garden. The table was set on the terrace by the river in the shade of the acacia tree. It was easy to see that Fräulein Stritter was delighted to have some other middle-aged ladies to talk to at last. She clearly felt lonely out there in the enchanted garden, and on many days she was not well enough to go shopping in the town. Of course she would not consider letting her nieces go by themselves, and her young serving maid wasn’t an experienced shopper, either. Only yesterday evening a letter had come from the architect, by the mail coach, which was now traveling regularly once again, with the news that he could not join them for a holiday in the country as had been planned. One of his houses, which he normally rented for the summer to guests who took baths in the hot springs, had been requisitioned by the Prussians as an officers’ mess, and it was vital for him to stay in town to make sure everything was all right. Frau von Savigny’s house had been rented for the holidays chiefly because of the aunt. She was asthmatic and could not stand the heat of the summer in Wiesbaden. Under the shady trees of the old park, it was never oppressively warm, and even on the hottest days a fresh breeze blew off the river morning and evening.
Frau Margarete and the aunts urged her not to cut short her stay in the country. “We’ll gladly send you fresh fruit and vegetables from the garden every few days. Why else have we so many young people in the house? It will be a pleasure for the boys to bring you provisions from the baker or the butcher or grocer whenever you need anything.” Mother threw her sons a glance that said clearer than any words: Now don’t dare disgrace me! But miraculously they all declared themselves instantly available for the messenger service, although normally they were so busy that they had trouble finding time for their duties in the house and garden. The little ones were for rowing up in the boat, and Georg brazenly offered to ride over daily on Silver to inquire what was needed and how he might otherwise be of service to the ladies. This made Adolf speechless for a moment, especially as he already had his own plans. At the very next opportunity, he must make clear to Georg that it was he who groomed and fed Silver all by himself; so it was only fair that he was the one to decide who should ride him, and, anyway, Georg’s equestrian skill was so limited that Adolf would not have trusted him alone with the horse.
When the coffee table had been cleared, Ferdinand and Karl took the three girls into the house to greet old Babett and to visit Uncle Emmo in his library. They weren’t allowed to disturb Father in his office, but he had promised to come into the garden later on for half an hour.
“And now,” said Paula, who had fetched three baskets from the kitchen, “let’s go and pick some fruit.”
Followed by the Ippel girls and all the boys, she climbed up to the top terrace where the fruit trees were and where the grape arbor leaned on the graveyard wall. In this garden, there was no maze, no pool with a frog prince or a fat goldfish, only a few toads hopping around among the vegetable beds. Everything here was plain, orderly, useful, and without mystery. The beds were marked out in rectangles with flowering shrubs around the edges, the paths straight as a die; the rose garden without a single withered leaf. Two big mirabelle-plum trees were golden with ripe fruit, and the three little town girls went on eating them until they almost had stomach-aches. Georg obligingly climbed up to the highest branches to bring down the sweetest and ripest plums for them, so full of juice that their skins were already bursting. At last, Adolf seized the opportunity of slipping away with Toni. He had promised to show her the stable that smelled wonderfully of hay and horses. Swallows flitted swiftly in and out of the tiny windows; the Prussian horses were chewing peacefully at their evening meal of hay. Orje was away on duty. Adolf fed Silver and took Toni with him into the stall to show her how gentle and good-tempered he was. She stroked him more confidently this time and gave him a piece of sugar that Adolf had remembered to bring away with him from the coffee table. “Your hand must be stretched out absolutely flat,” he explained to her and Silver took the sugar lump carefully with his soft lips from the outstretched hand. Krimhilt and Vulcan, too, had their share of sugar. Next the goats had to be visited and the pig, lying fat and lazy in his sty. They reached the henhouse just as a hen was announcing to the world with a loud cackle that she had laid an egg. Adolf felt under the hen, which was still sitting on her nest, took out the warm brown egg, and put it into Toni’s hand. “If you don’t take it away from her, she starts brooding,” he explained, and the town child, who up till now had only seen eggs in the market women’s baskets or in the kitchen, fingered the newly made product in amazement.
“I guess you know almost everything,” she said, and her respect for Adolf’s profound knowledge made his heart swell.
“About Silver,” he said with feeling. “I’m the one that looks after him, and up till now Georg couldn’t have cared less about him. I’ll teach him a thing or two, the show-off.”
“He said he would teach me to ride,” said Toni.
“What? He can’t even ride himself. I’ll teach you, Toni. When I bring the fruit and vegetables, I’ll take you up on the saddle in front of me to see what it’s like. Nothing can happen to you then. And later on, you may try it by yourself. Don’t go with Georg, whatever you do, or you’ll fall off and break every bone in your body.”
“All right, Adolf,” she said docilely. “If I go on a horse at all, then I’ll go only with you.”
They climbed up into the hayloft from which they could see over the garden where the others were picking mirabelles. They talked about all sorts of things, and Adolf found out why these Nassau girls spoke such pure German without swallowing syllables and with only the slightest hint of local dialect. It was because they went to a private school in Wiesbaden where dialect was not allowed. A very exclusive school that must be!
“Later on,” said Adolf, “I’ll probably rent or buy the Savigny house. Will you marry me then, Toni?”
“I think I will,” she said at once. She was a sensible girl.
“That’s settled then!” said Adolf. “But we’ve got to keep it a secret.” That was all right with her, too. But now they were being called from the garden. The baskets were full, and Aunt Käthchen wanted to go home on foot with her nieces. In the cool of the evening, she always enjoyed taking a walk. The boys went with them to take turns carrying the baskets of mirabelles, peas, and beans. Paula took the third basket and started off in the opposite direction toward the town.
“Don’t forget to take a few flowers to Frau Mauser,” Mama had reminded her. She never sent a gift to her little old women without a spray of flowers from the garden, or a fresh branch of spruce in winter, or a piece of cake, and Paula had come to understand that it was this little touch of luxury—not the necessities—that made the recipient happy.
The long shadows cast by the willow trees lay like black beams across the yellow gravel of the river path; on the water, a few families of ducks were swimming, inconspicuous brown females with their brood, each accompanied by a magnificent drake. Water hens with their red beaks and a red tuft of feathers on their foreheads dived among the reeds for insects and other small water creatures. Their families, too, were out of the nest by now and took to the water just as confidently as the old ones. Paula stood there watching them for a few minutes before going on her way again. Her long skirt swung to and fro over her black-buttoned boots; the broad rim of her straw hat with its bright band of red poppies, blue cornflowers, and golden ears of corn shaded her face; and since she was going into the town, she wore gloves, white summer mittens crocheted by Aunt Stina.
Frau Mauser, to whom she was taking the basket, was one of a dozen or so of her mother’s protégées who had to be regularly visited and cared for. She lived in one of the narrow-fronted houses in Fish Market, high up under the pointed gable. The staircase leading up to her room was so steep and narrow that the old woman only came down it on Sundays to go to Mass, when some of the other inmates of the house helped her. The landlady’s children saw to it that there was always enough wood on her hearth and brought up her quarter-liter of milk in the morning and the two rolls that the baker’s boy put into one of the white bags that were hung up for that purpose in the ground-floor hall.
“How are you today, Frau Mauser?” asked Paula as she came into the room in which the old woman spent her day from the moment she got up in the morning till she went to bed at night.
“Thanks, Fräulein Paula, quite well,” she said. She was one of those contented people who find something to give them pleasure in every one of their hard days. Her room was neat and clean, and it wasn’t difficult to like her. Not all Mama’s protégées were like this. “When I heard you on the stairs, I thought: Here comes the Frau Amtmann,” she said, and Paula heard the politely suppressed disappointment in her voice. What was it that made them all so pleased to have Mama visit them? Certainly not just the material assistance that she brought. Yet she was no softer with her poor wards than with her own children. She let no one pull wool over her eyes; she asked awkward questions; any little trick to get something out of her was noticed immediately. Women who did not keep their houses clean or who let their children run wild knew she would have something to say about it. Once Paula had been with her when she had hauled a drunken father over the coals. The man was a carter and earned enough for the modest needs of his family. But he drank his money away and even took from his hard-working wife the little she earned by cleaning in various houses in the town. The big, heavy fellow, who could have crushed her with one of his hands, stood there like a schoolboy in disgrace in front of the little woman with the flashing blue eyes, promising that he would reform. He had even kept to it, these last few weeks at least. Probably even his thick skull had sensed the love behind the reproof, which was what Father Meinert had meant when he recommended the practice of charity to Paula as her penance.
“Mama sends her good wishes,” she said, “and wants you to have what’s in the basket. Only eat it up soon, while it’s still fresh. There’s more where that came from.”
“Thank you indeed,” said Frau Mauser, and, “Oh, the beautiful flowers!” Her wrinkled face lit up. “I’m sure I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve all this in my old age. Your good mother sends me food and flowers, and the Women’s Guild pays my rent. And there’s no better room in the whole town, either. Just you take a look out of that window, Fräulein Paula. I can even see a little piece of the river down there. And the Herr Ratsschreiber’s canary next door here sings all day long for me. If I lean right out of the window, I can push a lettuce leaf in his cage sometimes. I’m mighty glad the mail is traveling again and the carters with their wagons, too. There’s always a to-do when they have to squeeze their way through the narrow street. I never get tired of looking down.”
Paula sat and listened, throwing in a question from time to time, but she wasn’t as good at it as Mama. It was oppressively hot under the slate roof, even though it had grown much cooler outside. And Father Meinert was right: poverty didn’t smell nice, even when it was clean poverty. But precisely because of that, she stayed a little longer than she had meant to and listened to Frau Mauser’s accounts of her children and grandchildren, some of whom lived in Wiesbaden and some in Giessen and did not often find time to visit her.
When Paula finally set out for home, the shadows of the willow trees had lengthened, and there were red and yellow streaks across the blue-green of the western sky. On the top of the cathedral tower further up the river, a blackbird was singing in the peace of the evening. The water lapped drowsily around the roots of the willows. No one was to be seen, for it was suppertime all over the town. Since there was no chance of meeting anyone, Paula took off her hat and swung it by its ribbon as she went along. It was good to feel the cool evening air on her forehead. But suddenly she heard footsteps behind her. A man’s footsteps! Her first impulse was to put the hat on again quickly, but before it was properly back on her head, the man had overtaken her. Who should it be but Lieutenant von Quitzow!
“Good evening, mademoiselle,” he greeted her. Perhaps he had thought she would give him her hand, but she couldn’t do that because she was still fussing over her hat, and probably she wouldn’t have thought of it anyway.
“Do leave it as it is,” he said. “You look delightful. The shadow of the brim across your face is simply ravishing . . .”
“All right, make fun of me if you like,” said Paula. “At table, you always look at me as though I had a hole in my stocking.”
“But neither at table nor anywhere else can I see your stockings, oh gracious lady!”
She glanced up quickly at him with her big eyes, which were almost black in the shade of the hat, saw his young laughing face, and had to laugh herself. “No, of course you can’t see my stockings, Herr von Quitzow. Can one see the ladies’ stockings in Berlin?”
“That depends on the ladies,” he said. One of the tower clocks struck three times. “A quarter to seven!” he exclaimed. “I know enough of the rules of your parents’ house to realize that unpunctuality is one of the unforgivable sins. If we don’t hurry, we’ll be put in the corner together. However much I would welcome the rendezvous, it would go against my honor as an officer to get a young lady into trouble.”
“Enfin: allons!”
“Allons or quick march, just as you command. Amazing how much French you still hear in the streets here in the Rhineland!”
“That’s because of the nearness of the frontier,” she said as they hurried along the river path between the willows on one side and the thick undergrowth on the other. For him with his long legs, it was no trouble at all, but Paula, who had been taught that a young lady should walk slowly and modestly in the street, had become unused to running. Suddenly, she stumbled, and though she caught herself immediately, he had already grasped her hand and held it firmly until they were near the courthouse. Breathless, with glowing face and disheveled hair, hat still awry, Paula hurried into the house. The lieutenant pressed her hand quickly, with a conspiratorial glance as if they had been stealing apples together, and went to his room to wash his hands. She intended to put her empty basket back in the kitchen but ran straight into Aunt Rikchen’s arms on the way.
“Good evening, Tantchen,” she said. “I’m . . . I’ve . . . I had to hurry terribly not to be late for supper.”
“One can see that,” said her aunt dryly. “Completely échauffée! You have still time to put your hair straight and run a cold sponge over your face. It’s poison for your complexion to get so hot, simply poison!”
Late that evening in the boys’ room, the inevitable fight between Adolf and Georg took place.
“You want to give Toni riding lessons when you scarcely know how to sit on a horse, you old show-off!” Adolf began the dispute.
“Show-off yourself. Do you think you have a monopoly on the Ippels just because you took Papa’s letter to them? I knew them long before you.”
“Disguised as a guide! It’s enough to make a cat laugh.”
“A cat perhaps, but not intelligent people. The ladies were pleased that a person of culture could show them around the town, I can tell you.”
“Did you say culture! Well, culture or not, you’re not riding Silver. You never bothered yourself one bit about him, and now suddenly you want to swank with him. Keep your dirty hands off my horse and off the girls; they’re far too good for you.”
Dirty hands was too much for Georg to swallow, considering he used so much soap on his well-shaped hands that it was sheer extravagance. “You can talk about dirty hands, you and your beastly warts.”
This hit Adolf on a tender spot. He jumped out of bed, took Aquarius by the collar, and led him over to Paula. The dog had been growling the whole time, and if it came to blows between Adolf and Georg, he would certainly not remain neutral.
“Look after him for me a few minutes, will you?” he said as he pushed the dog into Paula’s room, and before she could ask any questions, he had disappeared again.
Georg was already waiting for him. “Say dirty hands just once more, old wart hog!”
“Dirty hands, three times!”
They went at one another like fighting cocks. “Just a minute!” said August from his bed. “You can fight it out between you; it’s been coming for a long time. But keep it fair and clean; and when I shout stop, there’s an end to it.”
They fought silently and savagely, and the other boys watched in silence, too. If there was any noise, Paula would come over or, even worse, Mama would come up from downstairs.
First Georg was down, then Adolf. Blood was already dripping from Adolf’s mouth, and Georg’s left eye was starting to swell. Suddenly, Georg was sitting on Adolf’s chest. “Who rides Silver now?” he gasped. “Say I can ride him and I’ll let you go.”
“Not you, even if you knock me out cold.”
“Say it.”
“I won’t. I won’t.”
“Idiot!”
“Even . . .”
At this moment, Adolf managed to throw off the overconfident Georg. They were both up on their feet again, wrestling fiercely. Another two minutes passed, and then Adolf had Georg in a stranglehold. He was bent double, his head in a vice between Adolf’s muscular legs, while Adolf seized his arms and twisted them up on his back in a double nelson. No one can stand that for long.
“One, two, three . . .” August counted slowly.
“Say you’ll leave Silver in peace or I’ll press tighter. The horse and the Ippels, too. Toni, anyway. What about it?”
“You miserable rotter,” groaned Georg. “You can keep your wretched horse . . . and your Toni.”
“Finish,” said August. “He’s turning blue.” The two combatants went over to the washbowls, still gasping for breath, and washed of the blood and sweat with cold water. No further word was spoken.
