Under a Changing Moon, page 27
“It is hardly a good basis for a happy family life if the mother and children go to one church on a Sunday and the father to another,” said Franziska in her sensible way. “On such fundamental matters as religion, there should be conformity in a marriage. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that such a passionate first love is enough to last you a lifetime, as you said a minute ago. A lifetime is long, child, and it would be a poor thing if it was all over after the very first love. You may not believe me now, but there can easily be more than one love in your life, even if it isn’t necessarily the same kind of love.”
Paula sighed. Those were the views of a mature older woman, who was comfortably settled in a happy marriage. She found it difficult to believe that she herself would ever be so reasonable. “Do you think that the parents noticed anything?” she asked.
“They’re not precisely blind, you know. But in our family, emotional things aren’t talked about more than they have to be. What isn’t discussed isn’t given any more importance than it deserves.”
So that was the reason, Paula thought, Mama agreed so quickly when she had asked her if she could go to Montabaur with Papa. “I’ve already told our parents that I’d like to go to the Ursulines’ training college in Wiesbaden and prepare for my teachers’ exam,” she said, “so that I can earn my own living. I like children and get on well with them. Besides, I find it humiliating just to sit and wait till a man comes along and has the goodness to marry you.”
Look at the little sister now, thought Franziska. There she sat, working out her own solutions. Out of the immature convent girl she had seen in March, a young adult person had developed, taking her life into her own hands. For the time being, at any rate, her plan sounded sensible enough. “Up till now, there hasn’t ever been an unmarried daughter in our family who had to ‘earn her living,’ as you put it,” Franziska said. “That’s one of these modern ideas, but there may be something to be said for it. You’ll be reasonably occupied for the next year, and by the end of it, perhaps you’ll think differently about marrying.”
“What else should I do all day long in Wiesbaden?” Paula said. “A little town apartment, no garden, three of the boys away from home—how will Mama find enough to use up her own vast energy? She hasn’t even said a single thing against my suggestion.”
Franziska would have liked to ask a few more questions, but she let the matter rest there. About this young Herr Overberg, for example, of whom two elderly ladies had been whispering in the mail coach. He had been paying court to the Amtmann’s daughter lately, they had said, but with him you could never tell. . . . She wouldn’t be the first he had left in the lurch after he had turned her head.
And then on the morning of Paula’s birthday, there came a box from the big flower shop in Wiesbaden; the postillion had put it down at the posting station, and the stableboy had brought it to the courthouse. By the afternoon, the whole of Limburg would know that the Amtmann’s daughter had received a box from the flower shop in the former ducal residence.
The box was opened and revealed twelve yellow roses, still almost buds, each wrapped individually in a soft sheath of tissue paper; roses of such perfection that Mama, the aunts, and Franziska, who were all standing around when Paula opened the package, breathed an enraptured Ah! “They must have cost a small fortune!” said Aunt Rikchen, who was the first to come down to earth again.
“How nice of Herr Overberg!” said Paula. “We really must invite him to have coffee with the family this afternoon. He is almost always with Uncle Emmerich about that time, anyway.”
By now Aunt Rikchen could keep her anxieties to herself no longer. “Nice of him, certainly, providing you don’t run away with the wrong idea because of it, dear heart. Probably he only wants to show he’s grateful for the tea he has so often with Uncle Emmo. After all, you’re the one who has the extra work to prepare it.”
The four women held their breaths in anticipation of Paula’s reply to this. Perhaps it was a good thing that Aunt Rikchen had seized the opportunity to take the bull by the horns, after all.
“You can set your minds quite at rest as far as I’m concerned,” Paula said and gazed with delight at the exquisite roses. “I’m well aware of what’s said about him, and he himself knows better than anyone. We’ve spoken about it quite frankly. He’s told me that he probably won’t ever marry, and I told him that he’d never need to set out on another journey because of me.”
“You told him that . . .” said Aunt Stina, flabbergasted. Well, these young people nowadays! It seemed she still had a lot to learn as far as her writing was concerned.
“Of course,” answered Paula without a trace of embarrassment. “If you see as much of one another and dance together as much as we do, you have to have everything clear, don’t you?” And she went off to find a suitable vase for her roses.
“Well, I declare!” said Aunt Rikchen, and Mama expressed the opinion that it was a good thing the family was moving, so that all that would come to an end of its own accord.
But, “Who can tell?” Aunt Stina, the old romantic, murmured hopefully. “They look so perfectly matched when they dance together.”
Once on her own and no longer under the inquisitive eyes of her relatives, Paula picked up the roses one by one and held them in her hand for a moment before arranging them with care in a pale green vase—those yellow roses that brought back to her so vividly the farewell in Assmannshausen. How would she ever have survived that day except for Konrad’s understanding, for the masculine calm and strength that had emanated from him and that had given her strength, too. He had been silent then, and he had never since spoken so much as a word about it. And now he sent her the roses that said gently, “I remember.” Hidden among the leaves was a white card with only his name—“Konrad.”
November was passing, wet, cold, and dark; the month of fogs lived up to its reputation. The flames of autumn had been extinguished. The whole world was gray.
The sun seemed to have deserted the world; it shone dully for only a few short hours each day over the veiled mountains and left the little town with its narrow streets to the gloomy atmosphere of late autumn. The narrow, high-gabled houses in the old quarter of the town seemed to have huddled up closer together, freezing in the darkness and cold.
And to add to the general gloom, the cod-liver oil bottle in the courthouse had been filled to the top again at the chemist’s.
In Uncle Emmerich’s room, it was always cozy and warm, even though here, too, they had to economize on light during the hours when dusk was falling. The flames on the hearth danced and crackled, and the candles on the table were sufficient for her uncle and Konrad to talk by. Since the weak light was not enough to read by, they would now sometimes recite poems they knew by heart or share the parts of a play. So it happened that Paula, when she brought in the tea tray, would hear the first act of Faust, and it needed no great feat of the imagination to change the room with its bookshelves up to the ceiling and the open fire glimmering red on the hearth into the study of a medieval scholar.
Uncle Emmo spoke the first of Dr. Faust’s monologues, Overberg the voice of the Erdgeist, then Wagner, and at last the second Faust monologue when the doctor prepares to drink the poison. Paula, who heard all this for the first time, was completely carried away. She felt as if she could never be the same person again after this encounter with overwhelmingly powerful poetry. The two men, also, forgot about the tea getting cold, and when they finally shook themselves free of the enchantment, Paula had to go back to the kitchen and make some fresh tea.
With December came the beginning of Advent, and how many times in later years the children from the courthouse would tell their own children of the magic of these days leading up to Christmas and how they had been spent in the old house, which had been their home in their happiest childhood days.
Electricity had not yet replaced the more intimate warm light of candles and oil lamps, and even the street lamps still ran on oil, although in the big towns they had had gas lamps in the streets for several years now. In Limburg, the lamplighter still went through the streets every evening to make sure the people of the town didn’t have to take their own lanterns with them when they went out after dark. Like little friendly islands of light, the lamps shone out every evening through the mist that billowed up from the river, though their circle of light did not reach very far into the darkness. In the window of Mergel’s, the baker, there stood an almost life-size Father Christmas made of gingerbread, which the children of the town looked forward to seeing every year as the first sign of the Christmas season. It was always the same splendid figure, never for sale, with a rod of gorse twigs bound around with three ribbons of shiny colored paper, with his beard and hair made of thick icing, with prunes for his eyes, and with shelled almonds for his buttons, as elegant as genuine ivory. His coat was sprinkled with stars of raisins, sultanas, and candied orange peel. The children squashed their noses against the cold pane, which was covered with delicate tendrils and flowers of icy crystals whenever there was an early frost. The clockmaker Mehlhaus in Grabenstrasse had put rows of candles behind his window, as they did in the big towns, to prevent its freezing up and hiding all the fine things laid out there: little bracelets and pocketknives, tiny ladies’ watches and big fob-watches, each with its appropriate chain, a few rings with sparkling stones. “If only I had some money!” groaned Georg, who would have liked to give princely presents all around at Christmas, and not only to his own family either. But his brothers were now always in a hurry to get home, for there, in the living room, was the Advent wreath hanging over the table, fresh and green and smelling of the forest. The boys had made it themselves and fixed the four candles to it. Every Sunday a new one was lit, until in the last week before Christmas all four were burning. Until suppertime, the only light in the living room was from the candles, for the oil lamps burned only for three or at the most four hours at a time, and it would have been dangerous to try to refill them during the evening.
“The range in the kitchen is glowing all day long now,” Aunt Rikchen wrote to her relatives in Montabaur. “The house smells of cinnamon and cardamom, lemon and rum, ‘all the spices of Arabia’ says our Ferdinand when he comes home from school and starts sniffing around to see if he can’t snatch up a gingerbread man or an almond star, ‘because they taste so much better before Christmas,’ the little monkey says. Paula is being initiated into the secrets of the Christmas baking this year, and even her mother has admitted that she is doing it quite well. Stina and I are still vainly doing all we can to teach the dear child the fundamentals of skin care, but she insists that cold water is quite good enough for her. It is true she has a perfect complexion, if only she weren’t so pale—even the cod-liver oil doesn’t seem to make any difference.
“At dusk all work stops, even in this busy house. Then we sit around the big table in the living room and knit—the Advent candles give enough light for that. Margarete is always urged to tell stories—she has such a talent for storytelling. Even the big boys want to hear the same old fairy tales over again about the fellow who went off to learn fear, about Jorinde and Joringel and Tom Thumb. I think their favorites are still the Christmas legends—about the wintry forest that burst into blossom on Christmas Eve, or about the animals in the stable talking about their good or bad masters while an angel sits up in the rafters and writes it all down. Often I sit down at the piano and we sing Advent carols together, and when Jacob hears us from his office, he comes up and joins in.
“Ah, my dears, Stina and I often grieve to think that this will be the last time we spend these happy weeks of the year in the big family circle that has been our own for so many years now. But Wiesbaden would not be the right place for us, and it is a comforting thought that He who has each one of us in mind should lead us back at the end of our long lives to the place where we came from. We know that it will be lovely with you all and just like home again for the short time that still remains to us.
“As soon as the lamp is lit and supper is over, we all take out our sewing. The five boys are each having a new suit for Christmas, the same as every year. Margarete has had one of these newfangled sewing machines for the past two years, and for Stina and me it is still a miracle that you need only to turn a wheel by hand and the needle will make beautiful, regular stitches of its own accord along the thick woolen material that Isidor brought back for us again this year from the autumn fair in Frankfurt. One day, what with all these new inventions, I can see that a woman’s work in the house will be made so easy that she won’t know what to do with all her spare time.
“Stina sends her fondest greetings to you all. She is writing another novella at the moment. With her great talent, I just can’t understand why none of the magazines will ever publish any of her wonderful stories.”
The last Christmas Eve in the courthouse! Candles were burning in the big Christmas tree that Papa picked out every year at the Christkindel market. The boys had painted nuts with gold, polished red apples till they shone, and made chains of colored paper as decorations for the tree. Laid out on the white-decked tables were the presents, with sprigs of fir and ilex scattered between them. This year Emmerich’s waistcoat had been embroidered with rosebuds in petit-point. “Because I grow younger every year,” he said and kissed the aunts; and the two old ladies dabbed away a few tears, for there was an unspoken agreement between them not to let the sadness of leave-taking spoil their last Christmas in the courthouse.
When the maids and Holwein had gone downstairs with their presents to eat a piece of Christmas stollen and drink a glass of punch at the kitchen table, and when the boys had been sent off to bed to get an hour’s sleep before the family would set off for Midnight Mass, the others watched in silence, each with his own thoughts, as the candles on the tree burned down one after the other.
Paula read for a while in the old leather-bound volume of Goethe’s poems that was Uncle Emmerich’s present to her; then she closed it and thought back over the year that had changed the course of her life, no matter what might happen to her from now on. She thought of the letter from Mère Celeste that had arrived the day before, a friendly, motherly letter, in complete agreement with her plan of going back to school again next year. Her friends had written to her, too, and each had disclosed a little piece of her life; how much they had told her and how much they had kept to themselves, it was hard to tell. Paula herself had not felt able to tell her friends, who had once been such intimate confidantes, of all her experiences of the past year, of joys and sorrows, of renunciation and self-knowledge gained. The neatly folded handkerchief with the little crown still lay under her pillow, and from time to time she would press it to her face, but the smell of horse and leather and eau de Cologne was all but gone.
She had a purpose in life now, and that counted for a good deal—a temporary goal, which left the distant future open. She did not want to ask yet what might be waiting for her around the next corner.
The time between Christmas and Twelfth Night came, a time of ghosts and magic dating back to pagan days. In the kitchen, on an earthenware plate, smoked an incense candle, for these were the nights when one had to ward off the Wild Hunter who came storming over the roofs with his army. The more dreadful the neighing of the ghostly horses, the louder the croaking of old Woden’s two ravens, the more fruitful the next year would be, but it was frightening to behold.
Even for those who did not believe in ghosts and witches, time seemed to stand still in these twelve days, the days between the years as they were called. Following the rule of tradition, there was no washing done, no scrubbing or sweeping, no new work begun. It was a time for visiting and being visited by neighbors; there were evening gatherings and coffee parties, and in the courthouse, preparations had already started for the New Year’s party, which this year was going to be a farewell party as well, for soon afterwards packing would have to begin, even though there was still much time before the move was due to take place.
As on every New Year’s Eve, the family had an early supper, so that the maids could get away for the dancing in the Golden Goose. Around nine o’clock, the guests arrived. To fill the time before the traditional Silvester salad would be served, there were big bowls of cinnamon stars and Nürnberger Lebkuchen, gingerbread and macaroons, and dainty little hearts and fruits of marzipan. The boys, who had been allowed to stay up until the beginning of the New Year, helped eagerly to finish the rest of the Christmas goodies. The big salon had been opened up, the white tile stove heated, and the parquet floor waxed and polished. Two prelates and the worldly dignitaries with their wives joined for a while in the party games and charades, for which young Kaplan Knodt served as master-of-ceremonies. Later, the older people retired to the living room for a quiet talk or a game of whist, along with a glass of rum punch. In the meantime, the younger set moved tables and chairs in the salon to the wall to get space for dancing. Aunt Rikchen sat down at the piano, which had been moved into the salon beforehand, and accompanied the young peoples’ dancing untiringly, playing waltzes and polkas or whatever they asked for. Even a quadrille was organized, with Overberg calling the figures as he danced with Paula. Aunt Rikchen, caught up in the enthusiasm of the youngsters, smiled reminiscently as she played, moving her gray head with the dainty lace cap in the rhythm of the melodies, her old fingers dancing over the keys. When she looked up, she saw shining eyes, a hand pressed, a tender smile, overheard a whispered word. Young folks, she thought; some things at least haven’t changed much in half a century. We were the actors of the eternal play then, and it seems only yesterday.
