Chapter 25
Spring
What a spring day, this Saturday in March of 1887! What sweetness, at ten in the morning!
Eugenie stood beside her lady’s maid, who was packing. The next day they would set off for the Riviera, to Nice, to the Hotel Barblan.
Down the Tiergartenstraße the horses raced. Beautiful women, veils streaming around their top hats; gentlemen bare-headed or in round hats. Down the Tiergartenstraße the officers walked in their service coats, broad red stripes on their trousers, bound for the Great General Staff. It was quiet. Now and then children’s laughter drifted up from the gardens.
“It really is a shame to be going away,” said Eugenie. “Berlin is so beautiful in March. I’ve already told Kniep he must plant more crocuses next year. We have rather too many snowdrops and snowflakes. Why, here comes Fräulein Winkel. Well, Fräulein, how are you? Yes, let’s try it on once more.”
Eugenie stood in her Casino gown. Fräulein Winkel knelt with her mouth full of pins, adjusting something at the hem.
“I really don’t like it, child, the way you always put pins in your mouth. Frieda, bring Fräulein Winkel a pin-cushion. Fräulein Winkel, you look so wretched. What is it? Come, you can talk to me. A little higher up here, no? And this gathering a little fuller. Trouble of the heart, with spring at the door? Or some worry? Perhaps I can help you.”
“Well, if I really am to talk. But please stand still, madam, or I’ll prick you with a pin. I had a gentleman — madam will know what I mean — he was a handsome gentleman, and I told myself from the very start that nothing would come of it. But the way one is, you never really believe it. And then he married. Well, there it is, and I’d always imagined he loved me, and yet one knows perfectly well how rich gentlemen marry — money, the right station, and there it is, settled.”
“Tell me, Fräulein Winkel, I don’t mean to wound you, but doesn’t a woman give something of herself away when she… yes, how shall I put it… when she grants a man certain rights before marriage? I mean to say, she sinks in men’s esteem.”
“Perhaps so. You’re probably right.”
“Don’t cry, Fräulein Winkel, dear child, go on, talk.”
“So I imagined he was sure to be unhappy, that the wife was very plain, and that he was bound to be unfaithful to her.”
“And now?”
“And now I’ve met him. And she’s so beautiful, you can’t describe how beautiful, and there was a Spreewald nurse with them too, pushing a perambulator. And as they passed by I caught him saying: ‘Oh, Annette dear, what fortunate people we are, all of nature smiles upon us.’”
“He called her ‘Annette dear’? I see, I see. Yes, that is bitter. Is there no one who loves you? We always want to do the loving, and we’re never grateful enough when someone loves us.”
“Yes, that’s how it is. Just one more stitch at the shoulder, madam, and the clasp like this?”
“No. Rather like this, don’t you think?”
“Yes, like that. We’ve a new young man at the shop, Lehmann, he keeps the books, he chases after me and gawks so, and my friend Lischen and I can’t help laughing when he twists his hat into a sausage talking to me.”
“One should only ever marry men who gawk. I’ll take the dress off and you can sew it right here. You know my husband — you know how clever and good he is, but he was never a handsome man, and I know you find me very beautiful. You may sometimes have thought I married my husband for the money. But I had no need of that whatsoever. Only, I’d had a very great disappointment beforehand. We in Russia aren’t as strict as you are here, where it’s a disgrace for a young girl even to go for a walk alone. I had met a strikingly handsome Guards officer at a great carnival ball. And we had the chance to meet alone, and he was in love and reckless, and, in short, he kissed me, and of course I thought the earth must stand still. He took me in his arms and said, ‘What is the world to me? Tomorrow’ — oh, I hear it as if it were yesterday — ‘we’ll meet again.’ I went there — and nothing. Snow and ice all about me, and I kept thinking he was sure to come through the city park. But he didn’t come. I went through every hell in that moment, and then I got a little letter — he didn’t know, could he dare, and responsibility — it was a very honest, decent letter — and would I see him just once more. I wrote back: ‘Yes,’ and we walked out together. I saw that he loved me, I felt it, but he said: ‘I think it would be best if we parted now,’ or, ‘Please, my dear young lady, it’s clouding over, it may snow.’ He hadn’t the courage of his love. So I ran home, and at home sat my present husband. I couldn’t bring myself to decide right away; it was with me as it is with you. I loved the other man. But then I let myself be loved, and that has made me very happy. When you do the loving, you’re forever trembling and afraid and alone, and you need girl-friends to pour your heart out to. But when you are loved, you know that whatever happens, you have someone you can rely on. So think it over, this Lehmann.”
“Yes, madam, let’s try the dress on once more. But it’s like this too: when one has nothing, things are difficult. I’d love to set up on my own, and my former gentleman friend said I could turn to him any time, but one doesn’t want to, does one — it’s so awkward, owing him something at the end of it all.”
“How much would you need to start?”
“I’ve worked it out: about two thousand marks. But that’s a lot of money, and if I’m to pay high interest from the very start it won’t work, even if anyone will lend it me.”
Eugenie took two thousand-mark notes from her dressing-table.
“But this is — what am I to say!” cried Käte Winkel.
“Take it, and make money with it.”
“Oh, such kindness, such kindness.”
“My husband once said: the childless woman has the most children, and one must look after them — so I’ll give you a bundle of notes from time to time, which we shan’t speak of and shan’t reckon up.”
Eugenie looked once more into the mirror. “This fashion really is too silly. How many more bustles are we to strap on behind us? And what does Frau Koller say? Long yellow gloves?”
“Yes, I have them here.”
“Very good. Frieda, put them away in the glove-box now.”
“Will madam recommend me to her acquaintance when I set up on my own — perhaps even come to me yourself?”
“My dear, I know what you can do. Of course, that goes without saying.”
Käte Winkel took a few winter things from the lady’s maid and went on her way, the boxes piled in her arms.
What a spring day, this Saturday in March of 1887! What sweetness, at eleven in the morning!
Sofie sat at the small wobbly writing-desk in her room, picked up an agate pen-holder, and wrote:
“I love you. I dream of you. Why did you tell me I was sweet? I have been sitting at the piano, playing Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben: Since I have seen you, I think I must be blind; always, as in a dream, I see only you. When are you coming to us again? I don’t dare ask Theodor.”
Then she addressed an envelope and asked Anna, the white-armed, red-cheeked maid, to deliver the letter. The letter was for Arnold Kramer.
“You look so flushed, Sofie. Aren’t you feeling well?”
“It’s nothing, Papa, nothing at all. Perhaps I’ve played the piano a little too long.”
“Don’t overdo things, my daughter, don’t overdo things — keep a noble measure. Fräulein Kelchner, you’ll take the girl into the Tiergarten this afternoon.”
What a spring day, this Saturday in March of 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 on the Opera House, the Linden, the curving baroque façade of the Library; he saw the guard, the marching in step, the white summer trousers, the blue tunics, the bright buttons, the red collars, the white plumes, the drum-major in the lead — fifes and drummers, the martial sound. A vast crowd. At a window across the way stood the old Kaiser, as he did every day at the noon hour when the guard mounted.
Popular enthusiasm, Waldemar thought — this once for the right man, tomorrow for the wrong. The Law? One would have to make the law over from the ground up. Roman law, cut to fit slaves and property, had many defects. How much of it could one do without in the new Civil Code?
The door opened.
“My dear colleague — what an honor!”
“I heard at the library that you are using the volume of the Monumenta I happen to need.”
“It is entirely at your disposal.”
“You were watching the popular enthusiasm just now?”
“The same expression came to my mind. Our universally revered, white-haired sovereign may deserve it. But you know how I stand on Bismarck. The greater the man, the greater the shadow.”
“Young friend,” said the old historian, “I have just been back home, looking into Hessian dialect expressions. It does one good to refresh one’s boyhood memories of the narrower homeland, before they vanish altogether into our elegantly articulated Empire.”
“I had no idea you were a federalist!”
“I have always been one. Centralism is utterly un-German. We are, with all our might, in the process of forfeiting a part of the freedom Germany possessed before the war. It is a historical principle that the victors always end up the cultural imitators of the vanquished.”
“We have won our serfdom by victory. This bequest of the defeated Caesar is, in my eyes, the greatest crime he committed against mankind. I could forget Napoleon’s second of December — never the German reaction after the victory!”
Waldemar stood with his back to the Linden, where the military marches were still sounding. In the high room, lined with the black leather spines of the books, sat opposite him, in the radiance of his long snow-white hair, the world-famous scholar.
“I am surprised, young friend, that you see France in this light. I know perfectly well that you have all sorts of relations over there.”
“That has never prevented me from seeing France more clearly than people who only spend a few blessed weeks in Paris.”
“In France, where centralization was driven to such a high degree, no one was promoted who did not swear in verba magistri. Our political disunity has fortunately so far protected us from any general effect of such pernicious influences, which there worked their way down into the smallest affairs. With us in Germany it is just the reverse. If we have any outstanding man among us, the first thing we all do is make a point of showing that we are independent of his influence; and each one of us, however insignificant otherwise, prides himself on choosing his own direction, even an avowedly worse one, simply to make that independence good. — I am speaking,” he said, suddenly more animated, “in the present tense, but I ought to be speaking 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 by the machines. — And what of you? When will you become full professor?”
Waldemar shrugged.
“The faculty desires it, I hear.”
“Oh no,” said Waldemar. “If I were to be baptized, they would let me into the sacred circle. And apart from that, I am suspect. Anyone who wants to blow the dust off, do away with privileges — the great ones are not well-disposed to him. As for the rest, one may be baptized because one regards Christianity as a further development of the old prophet-religion, a milder, gentler ethic — simply some centuries later. But all such considerations have to step aside the moment baptism brings advantages with it. It is repellent when an act of the finest stirrings of conscience, of reflections of the most personal kind, leads to a position. A premium paid on want of character.”
“You are right.”
The great man left the room. Goldschmidt took his hat, coat, and stick. Let the commentary simmer; §1378 of the draft of the new Civil Code could wait a while longer for its perfected wording.
He had walked a few steps down the Linden when a coupé drew up close beside him.
“Waldemar.”
“Oh, Susanna — life is beautiful after all.”
“Won’t you get in?”
“No, on the contrary — get out. I have a mind to introduce a beautiful woman to the spring. Let’s lunch together at Hiller’s. Agreed?”
“Agreed. What do you say to my conquest?”
“The Count? It won’t last.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re an artist and not a mistress.”
“A faithful lover, though.”
“Perhaps.”
Ah, what sweetness there was about that March day! Soft was the red carpet, soft the sofa that received Susanna Widerklee, soft the armchair in which Waldemar sat.
The place was almost full. Officers were there, beautiful women, a few landowners, Junkers from the provinces.
“At the back there sits old Count Perponcher, and over there Count Waldersee — a coming man, a court general,” said Waldemar. “Lobster, then a rump steak, I think — or what do you say, Susanna?”
“I’m ravenous, but that suits me.”
“And what shall we drink? A Mosel?”
“No, a Rhine wine rather.”
“That’s heavy, Susanna,” and he looked into her eyes.
“And what if I want it?”
“Then it suits me.”
An hour later.
“Shall we have our 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 Feuerzauber.
“The Count,” she said, “is very charming.”
“And I, Susanna?”
He stood up, pulled the woman to him, kissed her on the mouth. They knew each other. Susanna longed for him. He led her the few steps to the bedroom. Oh, how she loved him — this quick storm, this deep indifference to resistance and refusal, this contempt for all untruth!
“Oh, no — please, no,” said Susanna.
“Why do you say no when you mean yes?” She felt he didn’t like it. “Be ashamed of being ashamed!”
What a blessing, Susanna thought, as she lay beside him — to be allowed, at last, to be honestly sensual.
“Waldemar, are you angry with me when I kiss you like that?”
“But Susanna! Are there men who get angry?”
“Not angry — but disappointed. They want the pure woman.”
“Oxen, in the true sense. Hence this absurd worship of the young girl.”
The fire was burning in the grate.
“Our coffee is going cold,” said Susanna.
They fetched the coffee from the next room, crouched down before the embers, and drank the mocha. Susanna pulled on a morning-gown, went to the piano, and sang: The lotus-flower fears…
Waldemar dressed. What was singing there was love, was passion. Susanna loved him. But he had had a bad experience with her once before. He couldn’t go through all that again. There was no holding her. He kept thinking it would work out one day, but it didn’t.
What a spring day, this Saturday in March of 1887! What sweetness, at five in the afternoon!
Knocking-off time on the Chausseestraße. Children hopped along chalk lines, or played marbles in a hole between four cobblestones. Father was tying twine across the balcony for the wild vine, or tinkering with the pigeon-loft. Mother sewed.
“I’m just going round to the Frischer Hammel, a Molle, just one Molle.”
“Paule, do you have to?”
“Oh, leave off, I’ll be back in a bit.”
“He’ll go and drink another week’s wages!”
“If I had a little wife like that, something steady, I wouldn’t go to the pub,” said the lodger.
“You — what’s got into you? You didn’t take me when you took the room — let go!”
“I’m only saying, the way your husband keeps you short. You’d have it better with me.”
“Don’t you say nothing about my husband, that’s only because we’ve just got the one room. That’s the only reason.”
The freckled apprentice announced the insurance agent Mayer to Paul.
“Ah, good afternoon, Herr Mayer.”
“Good afternoon, Herr Effinger. I thought I’d come in person this time. Things are easier to discuss when you know each other personally. Misunderstandings creep in when one writes.”
“So — here is the insurance contract. There are various points I wanted to take up.”
“You’ve built up a fine works here, Herr Effinger. I’m a wreck myself.”
“Come now, Herr Mayer, how can you say such a thing? You look excellent.”
“Oh, I’m an old man, Herr Effinger. No one sang at my cradle that I would end up as an insurance agent. I was born in 1822. I have known the world. I have known the Paris of the Second Empire. Anyone who didn’t know that doesn’t know what life is. The 1860s in Paris — one long cancan, of the spirit too. You’re still young, Herr Effinger, but I feel you have an understanding for a man who has come to grief. I had the banking house of Mayer, Lamprecht & Co.”
“Oh!” said Paul, with surprised admiration.
“Yes, you know what that name stood for. We had the Sardinian war loan in our hands, in ’59. I financed the Luxembourg Railway.”
“Indeed, indeed — a great firm, a wealthy house.”
“All gone. Emmanuel Oppner’s house — my father built it. I don’t mean to say anything against Oppner & Goldschmidt, but in those days they were small people. It breaks my heart now, sometimes, when I walk past. During the renovation I had a secret look at it, old fool that I am. It is no longer my house. They have painted it all wrong. And over the bright wall-paintings of bewitching lightness, those barbarians have plastered dark leather wallpaper. Unbelievable, truly.”
“I don’t know much about it, Herr Mayer.”
“No, no, I don’t want to bore you. I am an aesthete, yes — I understand a little about art.”
He went bankrupt himself, all the same, thought Paul.
“The Gotthard Tunnel is on my conscience.”
“A great deal of money was lost on that.”
“I could sing you a song of it. But I have only ten per cent of my debts left. I keep paying them down. I owe it to my name and to my daughter. Here she comes now, to fetch me — the poor girl gives piano lessons. Won’t you walk along with us a little way?”
What a spring day, this Saturday in March 1887, at six in the evening! What a swarm of people on the Chausseestraße!
“You don’t have an easy time of it, Fräulein Mayer,” said Paul.
“No, no — but I do earn a living.”
“It’s hard for a young girl. The other day a young girl applied to me for copy work. But young girls in an office are no good. A woman is best off at home.”
“But if she has no one who can offer her a home?”
“Then it is dreadful, of course. But for the most part the women-folk are needed in the family. There is a child to bring up, an invalid to nurse.”
“But what if a girl doesn’t want to?”
“Then she’s overwrought.”
“You think so?”
“In my opinion, yes.”
“Papa, you’re falling behind. We’ll lose you — and in this neighborhood, at that.”
Broad Friedrichstraße at the Weidendammer Brücke. Railway across the river, little omnibus with its little horse, the one-legged man crying “Wax matches, wax matches!”, and whores lifting their skirts, the rustling of many flounces. Gentlemen with monocles, and carriages driving to the theater.
“We’re turning off here. Perhaps we’ll see you at our place sometime.”
“Gladly, Herr Mayer — though I am always very busy.”
“Adieu.” — “Adieu.” — “Adieu.”
“A pleasant fellow, Amalie, don’t you think?”
“A little dry.”
“You mustn’t always find fault with the young men.”
“I’m only saying. Mother had her piece-rate cut again. Twenty pfennigs for sewing a skirt. Perhaps ten marks a week — and that’s not counting the paraffin and the thread.”
“Amalie, you break my heart.”
“But Papa, I’m only telling you how it is. The middleman, an unpleasant fellow, says the firm is squeezing him too. I’d like to know who he supplies. He won’t say. Which proves he gets a great deal more for the skirt than he lets on.”
Wool market on the Klosterstraße. The Königstraße between Alexanderplatz and the Schloß is blocked with wagons. In the ancient castle of the Brandenburg margraves the wool is stored. Beside it stands the Grey Cloister, Bismarck’s school.
“Can’t get through, again!”
“You stupid cow, somebody ought to give you what-for, then you’d see there’s a horse standing here!”
“My good man, please don’t carry on like that!”
“Don’t you talk to me with that primped-up face of yours!”
“Amalie, come, leave the rabble alone.”
“God, Papa, if I could talk to the middleman like that, perhaps he’d give me fifteen pfennigs more for the skirt.”
“My child, do not forget who you are.”
Good, unsuspecting Papa! thought Amalie.
How the hallway stank! How nasty the flat smelled, of all that wool, of the lodgers! If only one could at least have repapered the rooms before moving in!
What a spring day, this Saturday in March of 1887! What sweetness, at eight in the evening!
The Widerklee was singing the page in Figaro. Theodor waited outside the Opera House. For the past year and a half he had gone almost daily to the Charlottenstraße, where she had a charming three-room flat near the Opera. There she received her friends in an elegant dressing-gown and elegant little slippers.
One evening Waldemar had come upon Theodor there. Theodor had been perched on a tabouret at her side, kissing again and again her drooping hand.
Theodor waited. At the stage door several enthusiasts waited with him. But waiting too was a coupé lined with white silk, footman and coachman sitting motionless on the box. What he had feared came to pass. Theodor saw the Widerklee, in her evening cloak, step quickly into the coupé. Theodor was almost out of his senses with jealousy. He had never thought about this affair, never thought about its ending. He loved — not platonically, like most of his friends, but as a man.
Now he stood, cast off, abandoned, with no explanation, under 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, then what? Shoot him down? Challenge him? Kill himself?
He walked on, on and on, this way and that, criss-cross.
A brazen girl spoke to him, drew him into a little shop with curtained windows and a red lamp burning in front. Wine-Bar of Erna Schmidt. The girl was very young, scarcely seventeen. She took Theodor into a back room, lay down without further ado on the red wool chaise-longue, and drew a curtain across. The girl, who turned out to be very beautiful, delighted him. She comforted him. Her brazenness, her depravity, fell away for a little while. Her name was Wanda; she had no parents. Shunted from one foster-home to another, she had been seduced at barely fourteen by a lodger. She had worked, too. But this way was easier. Only the procuress took advantage of her. On the grimy sofa a soft pity for this child — dainty and velvet-skinned as a fawn — bloomed in Theodor.
“Shall I see you again?”
“I don’t know,” said Theodor, and he began to weep.
The girl crouched down beside him. “What are you crying for?” she asked. She stroked him.
Here, with this strange streetwalker, he poured himself out — here he could say how forsaken he was, that he loved a clever, beautiful, distinguished woman, a great artist, that he was being betrayed.
The girl said: “Nah, don’t kill yourself — you’d maybe get life for it. You shouldn’t take it so hard.”
“But I can’t live without her.”
“Well, maybe you’ll get her back.”
So in a shop with a red lantern in the east of Berlin: Wine-Bar Erna Schmidt.
The girl got dressed.
“Are you going out again?” Theodor asked. The girl nodded. Theodor gave her a gold piece. “But don’t go out again tonight,” he said. “Rest.” He kissed her.
The chump! she thought, and waited until he was out of sight. Twenty marks was a lot of money, but how long was one young?
What a spring day, this Saturday in March of 1887! What sweetness at three in the morning!