Chapter 25

Spring

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

Eugenie stood beside her maid, who was packing. The next day they were to set off for the Riviera, for Nice, to the Hotel Barblan.

Along the Tiergartenstraße the horses came racing. Beautiful women, veils streaming about their top hats, and the gentlemen bareheaded or in round hats. Along the Tiergartenstraße the officers walked in undress uniform, broad red stripes down their trousers, into 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 plant more crocuses next year. We have a few too many snowdrops and spring snowflakes. And here comes Fräulein Winkel. Well, Fräulein, how are you? Yes, let's try it on once more."

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

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

"Well, if I'm really to speak. But please stand still, ma'am, or I'll go and prick you. I had a gentleman — Madam understands — he was a handsome gentleman, and I could tell myself straight off that it would come to nothing. But the way one is, one never does believe it. And then he married. Well, yes, that's how it is, and I'd always imagined he loved me, and you know how 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 doesn't a woman give something of herself away if she … well, how shall I put it, if she grants a man his rights before marriage? I mean, she sinks in men's esteem."

"Perhaps it is so. You're probably right."

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

"So I'd imagined he was surely unhappy, the wife was very ugly, and he'd certainly be unfaithful to her."

"And now?"

"And now I've met him. And she's so beautiful, there's no describing how beautiful she is, and there was a Spreewald nursemaid along with them, too, with a perambulator. And as they passed, I just caught him saying: 'Ah, Annettchen, what happy people we are — all of nature laughs to greet us.'"

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

"Yes, that's true enough. Now one more stitch at the shoulder, ma'am — and the clasp like this?"

"No. Better like this, don't you think?"

"Yes, like that. We've got a young man at the shop now, Lehmann, he keeps the books, and he runs after me and goes all goggle-eyed, 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 go goggle-eyed. I'll take the dress off, and you can sew it right here. You know the councillor — you know how clever and good he is, but handsome he has never been, and I know that you find me very beautiful. You may sometimes have thought I married my husband for money. But I had no need of that whatsoever. The thing is, I had suffered a very great disappointment before. We in Russia are not so strict as here, where it's frowned upon for a young girl so much as to go out walking once. At a great carnival ball I had met a strikingly handsome Guards officer. 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 — 'we shall meet.' I went — in vain. All around me was snow and ice, and I kept thinking he must come into the town woods. But he did not come. I suffered all the torments of hell in that moment, and then I received a little note: that he did not know, and whether he might dare, and responsibility — it was a very honest and decent letter — and whether I should care to see him once more. I wrote: 'Yes,' and we went walking. I saw that he loved me, I felt it, but he said: 'I think we should part now,' or: 'Please, my dear young lady, it's clouding over, it might 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 decide at once; it was with me as with you. I loved the other man. But then I let myself be loved, and I became very happy in it. When you do the loving yourself, you tremble all the time and are afraid and lonely and need women friends to pour your heart out to. But when you are the one loved, then you know that, whatever happens, you have someone you can rely on — and now think it over, about Lehmann."

"Yes, ma'am, let's try the dress on once more. But it's also this way: when you have nothing, that's hard too. I'd like to set up on my own, and my former gentleman friend said I could turn to him at any time, but one doesn't want that, it's mortifying, to end up owing him something after all."

"How much do you need, then, to begin?"

"I've worked it out at something like two thousand marks, 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 were to lend it to 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 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 speak of and won't reckon up."

Eugenie looked once more into the mirror. "This fashion really is too silly. How much more padding are we to strap on back there? 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 customers 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 from the maid as well, and went off, the boxes over her arm.

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at eleven o'clock 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 sat at the piano and played Schumann's A Woman's Love and Life: 'Since I saw you, I believe I am blind; always, as if in a dream, I see only you.' When will you come to us again? I dare not ask Theodor for it."

And then she addressed an envelope and asked Anna — the white-armed, red-cheeked one — to deliver the letter. The letter reached Arnold Kramer.

"You look so flushed, Sofie — aren't you well?"

"Nothing, Papa, nothing at all. Perhaps I played the piano a little too much."

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

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at one o'clock at midday!

The guard was changing! At a window of the university stood the Privatdozent Waldemar Goldschmidt, and saw the opera house, Unter den Linden, the curved baroque façade of the library; saw the guard, the lockstep, white summer trousers, blue tunics, gleaming buttons, red collars, white plumes, and the drum major out in front — "fifers and drummers, a martial sound." A crowd beyond counting. At his window stood the old Kaiser, as he did every day at the noon hour, when the guard was changing.

Popular enthusiasm, thought Waldemar — here for the right man today, for the wrong one tomorrow. The law? The law would have to be made wholly anew. Roman law, cut to fit slaves and property, had many flaws. How far could one dispense with it in the new Civil Code?

The door opened.

"My dear colleague — what an honor!"

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

"It is of course at your disposal."

"You were just now watching the popular enthusiasm?"

"The very same expression was going through my mind. Our universally revered, aged sovereign may deserve it. But as for Bismarck, you know where I stand. The greater the man, the greater the shadow."

"My young friend," said the old historian, "I was lately in my homeland, studying Hessian folk-expressions. It is good to refresh the memories of one's boyhood in the narrower homeland, before they are wholly absorbed into the finely ordered Empire."

"I had no idea you were a federalist!"

"I always have been. 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 historical principle that the victors always become the cultural imitators of the vanquished."

"We have won our own servitude. This legacy of the defeated Caesar is, in my eyes, the greatest crime he committed against humanity. I could forgive Napoleon the Second of December — the German reaction after the victory, never!"

Waldemar stood with his back to the Linden, where the military marches still sounded. In the lofty room, filled with the black leather spines of the books, there sat across from him, in the gleam of his long, snow-white hair, the world-famous scholar.

"It surprises me, my young friend, that you see France so. I know, after all, that you are related to a good many 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 carried to so high a degree, no one was promoted who would not swear in verba magistri. Our political fragmentation has so far, happily, protected us from the general operation of such pernicious influences, which there penetrated down into the smallest circumstances. With us in Germany it is just the reverse. If we have any eminent man, we seek above all to show ourselves independent of his influence, and each of us, however insignificant he may otherwise be, piques himself on choosing his own — even avowedly inferior — direction, merely to demonstrate that independence in fact. I am speaking," 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, that if things go 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 about you? When are you to be made full professor?"

Waldemar shrugged.

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

"Ah, no," said Waldemar. "If I were to have myself baptized, they would let me into the sanctified circle. But even apart from that I am suspect. Whoever wants to blow away the dust, to abolish privileges — toward him the great are not well disposed. For that matter, one may have oneself baptized because one holds Christianity to be a further development of the old religion of the prophets — a milder, gentler ethic, one merely centuries later. But all such considerations must give way the moment baptism brings advantages. It is repugnant, surely, when an act of the finest stirrings of conscience, of the most personal reflection, 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 cane. 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, close beside him, a coupé drew up.

"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. We'll lunch together at Hiller's. Agreed?"

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

"The Count? He won't last."

"Why?"

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

"But a faithful lover."

"Perhaps."

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

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

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

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

"And what shall we drink? Moselle?"

"No, a Rhine wine rather."

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

"And if that's what I want?"

"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 "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 coyness and resistance, this contempt for every untruth!

"Ah, no, please don't," said Susanna.

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

What a blessing, thought Susanna, as she lay beside him, to be allowed to be honestly sensual!

"Waldemar, are you angry if I kiss you like this?"

"But Susanna! Are there men who get angry?"

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

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

The fire burned in the hearth.

"Our coffee is getting cold," said Susanna.

They fetched the coffee from the next room, crouched before the embers, drank the mocha. Susanna pulled on a dressing 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 once already had bad experiences with her. Not to go through all that again. She was not to be held. He had always believed it would work one day after all, but it did not work.

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

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

"I'm just going round to the Fresh Mutton for a Molle, just the one Molle."

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

"Aw, leave off, I'll be back soon enough."

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

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

"Here, what's got into you! You never rented me along with the place — let go of me!"

"I only mean, seeing as your man keeps you so short. With me you could have it better."

"Don't you say nothing about my man — it's only 'cause 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 in person for once. Things are more easily discussed when one knows the other personally. In writing, misunderstandings mostly creep in."

"Well, here is the insurance contract. There were various things I wanted to query."

"You've built up a fine works here, Herr Effinger. I, for my part, am a wreck."

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

"Ah, I'm an old man, Herr Effinger; and no one sang at my cradle, either, that I'd end up an insurance agent."

"Such is life!" said Paul.

"How right you are. If I still had the sarcasm of my youth, I'd say it is chiefly because the office of insurance agent was still quite unknown in the year of my birth. I was born in 1822. I have known the world. I knew the Paris of the Second Empire. Whoever did not know that does not know what living means. The sixties in Paris — it was one long cancan, of the spirit too. You are still young, Herr Effinger, but I feel that you have an understanding for a man who has failed. I once had the banking house of Mayer, Lamprecht & Co."

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

"Yes, you know what that counted for. We had the issue of the Sardinian war loan in hand, in '59. I financed the Luxembourg railway."

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

"All gone. The house of Emmanuel Oppner — my father built it. I don't wish to say anything against Oppner & Goldschmidt, but in those days they were little people. It breaks my heart when I pass by it sometimes now. During the alterations I had a secret look at it, old fool that I am. It is no longer my house. They've painted it all wrong. And over the light wall-paintings, of an enchanting airiness, these barbarians have pasted dark leather hangings. Unbelievable, truly."

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

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

Paul thought: And he went bankrupt, too.

"The Gotthard Tunnel has me on its conscience."

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

"I could tell you a thing or two about that — but I'm down to ten per cent, I've no more debts beyond that. I'm still paying it off. That I owe to my name and to my daughter. She's just coming 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 o'clock in the evening! What a throng on the Chausseestraße!

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

"No, no — but at least I earn my own money."

"That's hard for a young girl. The other day a young girl applied to me for letter-copying work. 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 be raised, a sick woman to be nursed."

"But if a girl doesn't want that?"

"Then she is overstrung."

"Do you think so?"

"In my opinion, yes."

"Papa, you're falling right behind. One gets separated. And in this neighborhood, of all places."

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

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

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

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

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

"A bit dry."

"You mustn't always find fault with the young men."

"I'm only saying. Mother's had her piecework rate cut again. Twenty pfennig to sew the skirt. That's maybe ten marks in a week. And the petroleum isn't counted in that, nor the thread."

"Amalie, you're tearing my heart to pieces."

"But Papa, I'm only telling 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 great deal more for the skirt than he lets on."

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

"No getting through again."

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

"Man, don't carry on so!"

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

"Amalie, come — leave the rabble."

"Lord, Papa — if I could talk to the middleman like that, maybe he'd give fifteen pfennig more for the skirt."

"My child, don't forget who you are."

Good, unsuspecting Papa! thought Amalie.

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

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887, at eight o'clock 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 an enchanting three-room flat. There she received her friends in an elegant dressing gown and elegant little slippers.

One evening Waldemar had come upon Theodor at her place. Theodor was perched on a stool at her side, ceaselessly kissing her dangling hand.

Theodor waited. Several enthusiasts waited with him at the stage door. But waiting with him too was a coupé lined with white silk, on which footman and coachman sat motionless. What he had feared came to pass. Theodor saw the Widerklee climb quickly, in her evening cloak, into the coupé. Theodor was nearly out of his mind with jealousy. He had never reflected on this affair, never considered its end. He loved — not platonically, like most of his friends, but as a man.

Now he stood there — cast out, abandoned, without 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, what then? Shoot him down? Call him out? Kill himself?

He walked on, ever on, back and forth, this way and that.

A brazen girl accosted 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 with her 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 brazenness, her depravity fell away for a short while. Her name was Wanda, and she was without parents. Knocked about among foster parents, she had been seduced, scarcely fourteen, by a bed-lodger. She had worked, too. But this way was easier. Only the madam took advantage of her. On the grubby sofa there blossomed in Theodor a gentle compassion for this child, who was as dainty and velvet-skinned as a fawn.

"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 streetwalker, he poured himself out; here he could say how forsaken he was, that he loved a clever, beautiful, and remarkable woman, a great artist, that he was being betrayed.

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

"But I can't live without her."

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

Thus, in a shop with a red lantern in the east of Berlin, Erna Schmidt's wine room.

The girl dressed.

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

The ninny! she thought, and waited until he was out of sight. Twenty marks was a lot of money — but how long is one young?

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