Chapter 25

Spring


What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten in the morning!

Eugenie stood beside her lady's maid, who was packing. The next day they were to leave for the Riviera, for Nice, for the Hotel Barblan.

Along the Tiergartenstraße the horses raced. Beautiful women, veils streaming about their top hats, and the gentlemen bareheaded or in round hats. Along the Tiergartenstraße the officers walked in undress tunic, broad red stripes down the trousers, to the Great General Staff. It was quiet. Now and then children's laughter rang out from the gardens.

"It's really a shame to go away," said Eugenie. "Berlin is so lovely in March. I've already told Kniep he's to set more crocuses next year. We're a little overstocked with snowdrops and spring snowflakes. Why, here comes Fräulein Winkel. Well, Fräulein, how are you? Yes, let us try it on once more."

Eugenie stood there in the casino gown. Fräulein Winkel knelt, her mouth full of pins, setting something at the hem.

"I don't like it at all, child, your always taking the pins in your mouth. Frieda, bring Fräulein Winkel a pincushion. Fräulein Winkel, why, you look so wretched! What is the matter? Come, you can speak to me. A little higher up here, don't you think? And this gathering a little fuller. Temptations of the heart, now, in the spring — or troubles? Perhaps I can help you?"

"Well — if I'm really to speak of it. But please stand still, or I'll go and prick madam. I had a gentleman — madam understands — he was a handsome gentleman, and I could tell myself straight off it would come to nothing. But the way one is, one never believes it. And then he married. Well, yes, that's how it goes, and I'd always fancied he loved me, and one knows, doesn't one, how the rich gentlemen marry — money and the same standing, and then it's all settled."

"Tell me, Fräulein Winkel — I don't mean to wound you — but does a woman not give something of herself away when she … yes, how shall I put it, when she grants a man his rights even before marriage? She sinks, I mean, in the men's esteem."

"Perhaps it is so. You are probably right."

"Don't cry, Fräulein Winkel, dear child, just go on."

"So I fancied to myself: he's certainly unhappy, and the wife is very ugly, and he's sure to be unfaithful to her."

"And now?"

"And now I have met him. And she is so beautiful, there's simply no describing how beautiful she is, and there was a Spreewald nurse along too, with a pram. And as they passed, I heard him say, just then: 'Ah, dear little Annette, what happy people we are — all of nature laughs to greet us.'"

"Dear little Annette, he said? Well, well. Yes, that is bitter. Is there no one, then, who loves you? We always want to do the loving ourselves, and we are never grateful enough when someone loves us."

"Yes, that's true enough. Now one more stitch at the shoulder, your ladyship, and the clasp so?"

"No. Better so, don't you think?"

"Yes, like that. We've a young man in the shop now, Lehmann, he keeps the books, he's always after me and goggling so, and my friend Lischen and I, we can't help laughing the way he twists his hat into a sausage whenever he talks to me."

"One should only ever marry men who goggle. I'll take the dress off, and you sew right here. You know the councillor, you know how clever and good he is, but handsome he has never been, and I know you find me very beautiful. You will have thought, perhaps, now and then, that I married my husband for his money. But I had no need of that whatever. Only I had suffered a very great disappointment beforehand. We in Russia are not so strict as here, where it is frowned upon for a young girl so much as to take a single walk. I had met a strikingly handsome guards officer at a great carnival ball. And we had occasion to meet alone, and he was in love and reckless, and, in short, he kissed me, and — as goes without saying — I thought the earth must stand still. He took me in his arms and said: 'What is the world to me — and tomorrow' — ah, I hear it as though it were yesterday — 'tomorrow we shall meet.' I went, and — in vain. All round me was snow and ice, and I kept thinking he must surely come into the town woods. But he did not come. I suffered every torment of hell in that hour, and then I had a little letter: that he did not know, and whether he might dare, and his responsibility — it was a very honest and decent letter — and whether I would see him once again. I wrote: 'Yes,' and we went walking. I saw that he loved me, I felt it, but he said: 'I think we had better part now,' or: 'Please, my dear young lady, it is clouding over, it could snow.' He had not the courage for his love. So I ran home, and at home sat my present husband. I could not bring myself to it at once; it was with me as it is with you. I loved the other man. But then I let myself be loved, and I grew very happy in it. When you love, yourself, you are forever trembling and afraid and alone, and you need women friends to pour your heart out to. But when you are loved, then you know that, whatever may happen, you have someone you can rely on — and now think it over, about Lehmann."

"Yes, madam, let us try the dress on once more. But there's this too: when one has nothing, it's hard, I'd dearly like to set up on my own, and my former gentleman said I could turn to him at any time, but one doesn't want that, does one, it's so awkward, to end by owing him something on top of it all."

"How much would you need to start?"

"I've reckoned it up, some two thousand marks or so, but that's a great deal of money, and if I'm to pay such high interest from the start, then it can't be done at all, even if someone lends it me."

Eugenie took two thousand-mark notes from her dressing table.

"But that's — what am I to say!" cried Käte Winkel.

"Take it, and make money with it."

"Oh, such kindness, such kindness."

"My husband says the childless woman has the most children, and one must provide for them, so I'll always give you a bundle of thousand-mark notes — that we won't talk about and won't reckon up."

Eugenie looked once more into the glass. "This fashion really is too silly. How much more padding are we to strap on behind? And what does Frau Koller say? Long yellow gloves?"

"Yes, I have them here."

"Very good. Frieda, put them straight into the glove box."

"Will madam recommend custom to me, when I set up on my own — or even come to me herself?"

"But my dear, I know what you can do. Of course — that goes without saying."

Käte Winkel took a few winter things besides from the lady's maid and went off, the boxes over her arm.


What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at eleven in the morning!

Sofie sat in her room at the little rickety writing desk, took up an agate penholder, and wrote:

"I love You. I dream of You. Why did You tell me that I am sweet. I have been sitting at the piano playing Schumann's 'A Woman's Love and Life'; 'Since I saw You, I think myself blind; always, as though in a dream, I see only You.' When will You come to us again? I dare not ask Theodor for it."

And then she wrote out an envelope and asked Anna — the white-armed, red-cheeked Anna — to see the letter sent. The letter was for Arnold Kramer.

"You look so flushed, Sofie, are you not well?"

"It's nothing, Papa, nothing at all. Perhaps I've played the piano a little too much."

"Don't overdo it, my daughter, don't overdo it — keep a noble measure. Fräulein Kelchner, you'll take the child to the Tiergarten later."


What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at one in the afternoon!

The guard was mounting! At a window of the university stood the Privatdozent Waldemar Goldschmidt, looking out at the Opera House, the Linden, the curved baroque façade of the Library; he saw the guard, the lockstep, white summer trousers, blue jacket, bright buttons, red collars, white plumes, and the drum major at the head — "fifers and drummers, a martial sound." A vast, uncountable crowd. At his own window stood the old Kaiser, as every day at the noon hour when the guard was mounted.

Popular enthusiasm, thought Waldemar — here, for once, for the right man; tomorrow for the wrong one. The law? The law would have to be created entirely anew. The law of the Romans, cut to fit slaves and property, had many a flaw. How far could one do without it in the new Civil Code?

The door opened.

"My dear colleague — what an honour!"

"I heard at the Library that you have out the volume of the Monumenta that I happen to need."

"It is entirely at your disposal, of course."

"You were watching the popular enthusiasm just now?"

"The very same expression went through my mind. Our universally revered aged sovereign may deserve it. But where Bismarck is concerned, you know how I stand. The greater the man, the greater the shadow."

"My young friend," said the old historian, "I was lately in my home country, to study some Hessian folk-expressions. It is well to freshen the memories of one's boyhood in the narrower homeland, before they are swallowed up altogether in the finely articulated Empire."

"I had no idea you were a federalist!"

"I have always been one. Centralism is utterly un-German. We are doing our utmost to forfeit a part of the freedom Germany possessed before the war. It is a principle of history that the victors always become the cultural imitators of the vanquished."

"We have won ourselves our own servitude. This bequest of the defeated Caesar is, to my eyes, the greatest crime he committed against mankind. I could forget Napoleon the Second of December — the German reaction after the victory I cannot!"

Waldemar stood with his back to the Linden, where the military marches still sounded. In the high room, full of the black leather spines of the books, the world-famous scholar sat facing him in the glory of his long, snow-white hair.

"It surprises me, my young friend, that you should see France so. I know you are related to all manner of people over there."

"That has never hindered me from seeing France more clearly than people who spend only a few blissful weeks in Paris."

"In France, where centralization was driven to so high a pitch, no one was advanced who did not swear in verba magistri. Our political dividedness has, happily, protected us thus far from the general working of such ruinous influences, which there reached down into the smallest circumstances. With us in Germany it is just the reverse. Let us have any outstanding man, and the first thing we do is to show ourselves independent of his influence, and every one of us, however insignificant he may otherwise be, prides himself on choosing his own — even his admittedly inferior — line, simply to demonstrate that independence in fact. I speak," he said, suddenly more animated, "in the present tense, but I ought to speak in the past. I tell you here, on the sixteenth of March 1887: if it goes on like this in the new German Empire, clinics and libraries will be turned back into barracks. The spirit is in danger; it is being devoured by the state and the machines. And what of you? When are you to be made a full professor?"

Waldemar shrugged.

"The faculty wishes it, so I have heard."

"Ah, no," said Waldemar. "If I let myself be baptized, they would admit me into the consecrated circle. But I am suspect on other counts as well. The great ones bear no love for a man who would blow off the dust, who would do away with privileges. For the rest — one may have oneself baptized because one holds Christianity to be a development of the old religion of the prophets, a milder, gentler ethic, later by some centuries. But all such considerations must stand aside the moment baptism brings advantages. It is a repellent thing when an act of the finest stirrings of conscience, of reflections of the most personal kind, leads to a post. A premium on want of character."

"You are right."

The great man left the room. Goldschmidt took up hat, coat, and stick. Let the commentary stew, and let § 1378 of the draft of a new Civil Code wait a while longer for its finished wording.

He had already gone a few steps down the Linden when a coupé drew up close beside him.

"Waldemar."

"O Susanna, life is beautiful after all."

"Will you get in?"

"No — on the contrary, get out. I have a mind to introduce a beautiful woman to the spring. Let us lunch together at Hiller's. Agreed?"

"Agreed. What do you say to my conquest?"

"The Count? He won't last."

"Why not?"

"Because you are an artist and not a kept woman."

"But a faithful mistress."

"Perhaps."

Ah, what sweetness there was about that March day! Soft was the red carpet, soft the sofa that took Susanna Widerklee, soft the armchair in which Waldemar sat.

There was scarcely a place to be had. Officers sat there, beautiful women, a few landed proprietors, Junkers from the provinces.

"Back there sits the ancient Count Perponcher, and over there Count Waldersee, a coming man, a general at court," said Waldemar. "Lobster, then rump steak, I think — or what else, Susanna?"

"I'm hungry as a bear, but that suits me very well."

"And what shall we drink? Moselle?"

"No — a Rhine wine, rather."

"It's heavy, Susanna," and he looked into her eyes.

"And if that is what I want?"

"It suits me."

An hour later.

"Shall we take coffee here, or at your place?"

"At mine, I think."

"Good, Susanna, good."

Susanna had the curtains drawn, the lamp lit. Waldemar sat down at the grand piano and played the "Magic Fire Music."

"The Count," she said, "is very charming."

"And I, Susanna?"

He rose, pulled the woman to him, kissed her mouth. They knew each other. Susanna longed for him. He led her the few steps to the bedroom. Ah, how she loved him — this swift storm, this deep indifference to all resisting and demurring, this contempt for every untruth!

"Ah, no, please, no," said Susanna.

"Why do you say no when it is yes you want?" She felt that he did not like it. "Be ashamed that you are ashamed!"

What a blessing, thought Susanna, lying beside him, to be allowed to be honestly sensual!

"Waldemar, are you angry, when I kiss you so?"

"But Susanna! Are there men who take it amiss?"

"Not angry, but disappointed — they want the pure woman."

"Oxen, in the true sense of the word. Hence this absurd idolizing of the young girl."

The fire burned in the hearth.

"Our coffee is going cold," said Susanna.

They fetched the coffee from the next room, crouched before the embers, drank the mocha. Susanna pulled a dressing gown over herself, went to the piano, and sang: "The lotus flower fears …"

Waldemar dressed. What sang there was love, was passion. Susanna loved him. But he had had bitter experiences with her once before. Not to go through all that again. There was no holding her. He always believed it would come right one day after all, but it never did.


What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at five in the afternoon!

Knocking-off time in the Chausseestraße. Children hopped along chalk lines or played marbles in the hole between four paving stones. Father strung twine on the balcony for the wild vine, or tinkered at the dovecote. Mother sewed.

"I'll just step over to the Fresh Mutton for a beer, just the one beer."

"Paule, does it have to be, then?"

"Now, leave off, I'll be back soon."

"He'll go and drink up a week's wages again!"

"If I had a little wife like that, something steady, I wouldn't go to the pub at all," said the lodger.

"You there, what's got into you! You didn't rent me along with the room — let go!"

"I only mean — seeing how short your husband keeps you. With me you could have it better."

"Don't you say a word against my husband, that's only because we've just the one room. That's the only reason it is."

The freckled apprentice announced the insurance agent Mayer to Paul.

"Ah, good day, Herr Mayer."

"Good day, Herr Effinger. I've come myself, for once. Things are easier to discuss when one knows the other in person. In writing, misunderstandings mostly creep in."

"Well, here is the insurance contract. There were several points I wanted to take up."

"You have built up a fine works here, Herr Effinger. I am a wreck, you know."

"But Herr Mayer, how can you say such a thing! You look splendid!"

"Ah, I am an old man, Herr Effinger; and no one sang it over my cradle, either, that I should end as an insurance agent."

"Such is life!" said Paul.

"How right you are. If I still had the sarcasm of my youth, I would say it is chiefly because the office of insurance agent was still quite unknown in the year I was born. I was born in 1822. I have known the world. I have known the Paris of the Second Empire. A man who never knew that does not know what living means. The sixties in Paris — it was one long cancan, of the mind as well. You are still young, Herr Effinger, but I feel that you have an understanding for a man who has come to grief. I had the banking house of Mayer, Lamprecht & Co."

"Oh!" said Paul, full of admiring surprise.

"Yes, you know what that meant. We had the issue of the Sardinian war loan in our hands, in '59. I financed the Luxembourg railway."

"Well, well — a great firm, a rich house."

"All gone. Emmanuel Oppner's house — my father built it. I'll say nothing against Oppner & Goldschmidt, but in those days they were small people. It breaks my heart when I pass by it now and then. During the rebuilding I had a secret look at it, old fool that I am. That is no longer my house. They have painted it all wrong. And over the light frescoes of an enchanting lightness these barbarians have pasted dark leather wallpaper. Unbelievable, truly."

"I don't understand much of that, Herr Mayer."

"No, no, I don't mean to bore you. I am an aesthete — yes, I understand something of art."

He went bankrupt too, thought Paul.

"The Gotthard Tunnel has me on its conscience."

"A great deal of money was lost on that."

"I could tell a tale of it. But I have no debts left now save ten per cent. I am still paying them off. That I owe to my name and to my daughter. Here she comes to fetch me — the poor girl gives piano lessons. Won't you walk a little way with us?"


What a spring day, this Saturday in March 1887, at six in the evening! What a swarming in the Chausseestraße!

"You don't have it easy, Fräulein Mayer," said Paul.

"No, no, but I do earn, after all."

"That is hard for a young girl. The other day a young girl applied to me for letter-copying. But young girls in the office — that's no good. A woman is best off at home."

"But if she has no one to offer her a home?"

"That, to be sure, is then dreadful. But for the most part the female creatures are needed in the family. There's a child to raise, an invalid to nurse."

"But if a girl does not want that?"

"Then she is overwrought."

"Do you think so?"

"In my opinion, yes."

"Papa, you're falling right behind. One loses the other in all this. And in this part of town, of all places."

The broad Friedrichstraße at the Weidendamm Bridge. The railway over the river, a little omnibus with its small horses, a one-legged man crying: "Wax matches, wax matches," and whores hitching up their skirts, a great rustling of flounces. A gentleman with a monocle, and carriages driving to the theatre.

"We turn off here now — perhaps we'll see you at our place sometime."

"Gladly, Herr Mayer, though I always have a great deal to do."

"Adieu." "Adieu." "Adieu."

"A nice fellow, Amalie, isn't he?"

"A little dry."

"You mustn't always find something to fault in the young people."

"I only say so. Mother's had her piecework cut again. Twenty pfennigs to sew the skirt. That comes to perhaps ten marks a week. And that's without reckoning the paraffin and the thread."

"Amalie, you tear my heart."

"But Papa, I'm only saying it as it is. The middleman, a nasty piece of work, says the firm squeezes him too. I'd like to know whom he supplies. He won't say. Which is proof that he gets a good deal more for the skirt than he lets on."

The wool market in the Klosterstraße. The Königstraße between the Alexanderplatz and the Schloss is choked with the covered wagons. In the ancient castle of the Brandenburg margraves the wool is stored. Beside it stands the Grey Cloister, Bismarck's school.

"No getting through, once again."

"You daft goat, somebody ought to give your mutton-legs a good haul, so you'd see there's a horse standing here."

"My man, don't carry on so!"

"Don't you talk to me with that prettied-up snout of yours!"

"Amalie, come, leave the rabble."

"Heavens, Papa, if I could talk to the middleman like that, perhaps he'd give fifteen pfennigs more for the skirt."

"My child, do not forget who you are."

Good, unsuspecting Papa! thought Amalie.

How it stank in the entrance hall! How ugly the flat smelled, of all the wool-stuff, of the lodgers! If only one could at least have had it freshly papered before moving in!


What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887, at eight in the evening!

The Widerklee was singing the page in "Figaro." Theodor waited outside the Opera House. For a year and a half now he had gone almost daily to the Charlottenstraße, where, near the Opera, she had a bewitching three-room flat. Here she received her friends in an elegant dressing gown and elegant little slippers.

One evening Waldemar had met Theodor at her place. Theodor was perched on a tabouret at her side, ceaselessly kissing her hand as it hung down.

Theodor waited. Several enthusiasts waited with him at the stage door. But there waited with him, too, a coupé lined with white silk, on which footman and coachman sat motionless. What he feared came to pass. Theodor saw the Widerklee step quickly, in her evening cloak, into the coupé.

Theodor was almost out of his senses with jealousy. He had never reflected on this affair, never thought of how it would end. He loved — not platonically, as most of his friends did, but as a man.

Now he stood, cast out, abandoned, without a word of explanation, on the Linden in the rain, in the dark. What now? Wait outside the Widerklee's house? But surely she was driving to the other man. Who was he? And if he knew — what then? Shoot him down? Call him out? Kill himself?

He walked on, on and on, this way and that, criss-cross.

A bold girl spoke to him, drew him into a little shop, before whose curtained windows a red lantern burned. Erna Schmidt's wine room. The girl was very young, scarcely seventeen. She took Theodor into a back room, lay down without ado on the red woollen chaise longue, drew a curtain across. The girl, who proved to be very beautiful, delighted him. She comforted him. Her boldness, her depravity gave way for a little while. Her name was Wanda, and she was an orphan. Knocked about among foster parents, she had been seduced, scarcely fourteen, by a lodger. She had worked, too. But this way was easier. Only the madam exploited her. On the grimy sofa a gentle compassion blossomed in Theodor for this child, who was as dainty and velvet-skinned as a doe.

"Shall I see you again?"

"I don't know," said Theodor, and began to weep.

The girl crouched down beside him. "Why are you crying, then?" she asked. She stroked him.

Here, with this strange street girl, he poured out his heart; here he could say how abandoned he was, that he loved a clever, beautiful, remarkable woman, a great artist, that he was being betrayed.

The girl said: "Nah, don't go killing anyone, you'd likely get life for it. You mustn't take it so hard."

"But I can't live without her."

"Well, maybe you'll get her back."

So it was, in a shop with a red lantern in the Berlin east, Erna Schmidt's wine room.

The girl dressed.

"Are you going out again?" asked Theodor. The girl nodded. Theodor gave her a gold coin. "But don't go out again today," he said. "Rest yourself." He gave her a kiss.

The great fool! she thought, and waited until he was out of sight. Twenty marks was a lot of money, but how long does one stay young?


What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at three in the morning!