Chapter 25

Spring

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

Eugenie stood beside her maid, who was packing. Tomorrow they were to leave for the Riviera, for Nice, for the Hôtel Barblan.

Down the Tiergartenstraße the horses galloped. Beautiful women on horseback, veils streaming around their top hats, and the men bareheaded or in bowlers. Down the Tiergartenstraße the officers walked in undress uniform, broad red stripes down their trousers, on their way to the General Staff. It was quiet. From the gardens, now and then, came the sound of children laughing.

“Really, it is a shame to be going,” said Eugenie. “Berlin is so beautiful in March. I’ve already told Kniep he ought to plant more crocus next year. Snowdrops we’ve rather a lot of, and the spring snowflakes too. Ah — here is Miss Winkel. Well, my dear, how are we? Yes, we shall try it on once more.”

Eugenie stood in her evening gown. Miss Winkel knelt, her mouth full of pins, adjusting something at the hem.

“I do hate it, my dear, when you keep the pins in your mouth like that. Frieda, bring Miss Winkel a pincushion. Miss Winkel, you look so miserable today. What is it? You may speak to me, you know. Up here a little higher, don’t you think? And the gather a touch fuller. Is it temptations, now spring’s come? Or troubles? Perhaps I can help.”

“Well, if I really am to speak — but please stand still, ma’am, or I shall stick you. There was a gentleman, ma’am, you understand, a handsome gentleman, and I always knew of course that it would come to nothing. But you know how one is — one never really believes it. And now he has gone and married. Well, that is how it goes; I always made myself believe he loved me, and one knows perfectly well how rich gentlemen marry — money and the same rank, and there is the matter settled.”

“Tell me, Miss Winkel — I don’t want to hurt you — but doesn’t a woman give something away when she — well, how shall I put it — when she grants the man his rights before the wedding? I mean, she sinks in men’s regard.”

“Perhaps that is so. I suppose you are right.”

“Don’t cry, my dear, dear child — only go on, speak.”

“So I made myself believe he must be unhappy, that his wife must be plain, and that he would surely be unfaithful to her.”

“And now?”

“And now I have seen him. And she is beautiful — you cannot describe how beautiful she is — and there was a country nursemaid in her costume pushing a pram. And as they walked past I heard him say, ‘Ah, my little Annette, what happy creatures we are — all of nature is smiling at us.’”

“Little Annette, he called her? I see. Yes — that is bitter. Is there no one who loves you? We always want to do the loving ourselves, and we are never quite grateful enough when someone loves us.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true. Just another stitch at the shoulder, ma’am — and the agraffe like this?”

“No. Better like this, don’t you think?”

“Yes, like that. We have a new young man in the shop, Lehmann — he keeps the books — and he comes after me, always goggling, and my friend Lischen and I, we can’t help laughing when he wrings his hat into a sausage talking to me.”

“One should only ever marry men who goggle. I shall take the dress off, and you can sew here straight away. You know the Councillor, you know how clever and how kind he is, but handsome he never was, and I know you find me very beautiful. Perhaps you have sometimes thought I married my husband for his money. But I had no need to. Only I had had a great disappointment beforehand. In Russia we are not as strict as people are here, where they are scandalised if a young girl so much as goes out for a walk. At a great carnival ball I met a Guards officer, beautiful as a picture. We had the chance to meet alone; he was in love and reckless, and, in short, he kissed me, and as one does, I thought the earth must stop turning. He took me in his arms and said: ‘What is the world to me — and tomorrow’ — ah, I hear it now as if it were yesterday — ‘tomorrow we meet again.’ I went to the place — and waited in vain. There was snow and ice all about me, and I kept thinking he must come into the woods outside the town. But he did not come. I went through every hell in that hour, and then a little note arrived: he did not know, and whether he dared, and responsibility — it was a very honest, very decent letter — and would I see him once more. I wrote ‘yes,’ and we went out walking. I saw that he loved me, I felt it; but he said, ‘I think we ought to part here,’ or, ‘Please, my dear young lady, the sky is closing over; it might snow.’ He had not the courage of his love. So I ran home — and at home sat my present husband. I could not bring myself to choose at once; it was just as it is for you. I loved the other one. But I let myself be loved, and I have been very happy in it. When one does the loving oneself, one is always trembling and afraid, one is lonely, one needs friends to confide in. But when one is loved, then one knows that whatever happens one has someone to rely on. Now think it over — about Lehmann.”

“Yes, ma’am, let us try the dress on once more. But there is this too: when one has nothing it is hard, I should so like to set up on my own, and my former gentleman has said I might come to him any time, but one does not want that, it is awkward at the end of it all to owe him something.”

“How much would you need to begin?”

“I worked it out, about two thousand marks. But that is a great deal of money, and if I am to pay high interest from the start it cannot be done, even if someone lends it to me.”

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

“That is — what am I to say?” cried Käte Winkel.

“Take it, and make money with it.”

“Oh, such kindness, such kindness.”

“My husband says a childless woman has the most children, and someone must take care of them; and so he keeps giving me a packet of thousands which we don’t speak of and don’t reckon up.”

Eugenie looked once more in the glass. “This fashion is too silly. How many bustles are we to tie on at the back? And what does Frau Koller say? Long yellow gloves?”

“Yes, I have them here.”

“Lovely. Frieda, put them straight into the glove drawer.”

“Will madam recommend me to her friends if I set up on my own — or even come to me herself?”

“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 with the boxes under her arm.

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

Sofie sat in her room at the little wobbly writing-desk, took an agate pen, and wrote:

“I love you. I dream of you. Why did you tell me I am sweet? I sat at the piano and played Schumann’s A Woman’s Love and Life: ‘Since I saw you, I believe myself blind, / always as in a dream I see only you alone.’ When will you come to us again? I dare not ask Theodor.”

And then she addressed an envelope and asked Anna — the one with the white arms and red cheeks — to take the letter. The letter went to Arnold Kramer.

“You look so flushed, Sofie — aren’t you well?”

“Nothing, Papa, nothing at all. I have perhaps been at the piano a little too much.”

“Don’t overdo it, my daughter, don’t overdo it — keep a noble measure. Miss Kelchner, will you take her 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 being changed! At a window of the University stood Waldemar Goldschmidt, the young lecturer; he saw the Opera House, Unter den Linden, the curved baroque front of the Library; he saw the guard and the marching step, white summer trousers, blue tunics, gleaming buttons, red collars, white plumes, and the drum-major at their head — fife and drum, a martial sound. A vast crowd. At his own window stood the old Emperor, as he did every day at noon when the guard was changed.

The public enthusiasm, Waldemar thought — today for the right man, tomorrow for the wrong. And the law itself? Law would have to be made wholly new. Roman law, cut to fit slaves and property, had many faults. How much of it could be done without 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 I happen to need.”

“It is at your disposal, naturally.”

“You were watching the public enthusiasm?”

“The same expression went through my mind. Our universally revered aged Sovereign may perhaps deserve it. But you know how I stand on Bismarck. The greater the man, the greater the shadow.”

“My young friend,” said the old historian, “I have just been home in Hesse to collect dialect expressions. It is good to refresh one’s boyhood memories of the smaller homeland before they vanish altogether into our well-articulated Empire.”

“I had no idea you were a federalist!”

“I have always been one. Centralism is wholly un-German. We are doing our utmost to lose part of the freedom Germany possessed before the war. It is a historical axiom that the conquerors become the cultural imitators of the conquered.”

“We have conquered our own servitude into existence. This legacy of the defeated Caesar is, in my view, the greatest crime he committed against humanity. I could forgive Napoleon the Second of December — the German reaction after the victory I cannot!”

Waldemar stood with his back to Unter den Linden, where the military marches still sounded. Across from him, in the high room hung with the black leather spines of books, sat the world-famous scholar in the glow of his long snow-white hair.

“I am surprised, my young friend, that you see France in that way. I know you have many relations on the other side.”

“That has never kept me from seeing France more clearly than people who spend a few blessed weeks in Paris.”

“In France, where centralism was carried to so high a pitch, no one was promoted who would not swear in verba magistri. Our political disunity has happily preserved us until now from the general operation of those corrupting influences — they penetrated down into the smallest matters. With us in Germany it is precisely the reverse. Once we have any pre-eminent man among us, our first concern is to show ourselves independent of his influence; and every one of us, however insignificant in himself, piques himself on choosing his own line — even an admittedly worse one — only to demonstrate this independence in fact. I speak,” he said with sudden vigour, “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 so in the new German Empire, clinics and libraries will be turned back into barracks. The spirit is in danger; it is being eaten up by the state and by the machines. And what of you? When will you be made full professor?”

Waldemar shrugged.

“The Faculty wishes it, so I hear.”

“Ah, no,” said Waldemar. “If I had myself baptised they would let me into the sacred circle. And even apart from that, I am suspect. Whoever wants to blow off the dust, to break up the privileges, is no favourite of the great. One may have oneself baptised, of course, because one believes Christianity to be a development of the old prophetic religion, a milder, gentler ethic, centuries later in time. But all those considerations must fall silent the moment baptism brings advantage. There is something hateful in it when an act of the most delicate conscience, of the most personal reflection, opens a way to a post. A premium on lack of character.”

“You are right.”

The great man left the room. Goldschmidt took up his hat, coat, and stick. The commentary could simmer a while longer; § 1378 of the draft of the new Civil Code could wait yet for its perfected form.

He had walked a few steps down Unter den Linden when a coupé stopped close beside him.

“Waldemar.”

“Oh, Susanna — what a beautiful thing life is.”

“Will you get in?”

“No, on the contrary — get out. I should like to show a beautiful woman the spring. Shall we go to Hiller’s for lunch?”

“Agreed. What do you say to my success?”

“The Count? He will not last.”

“Why?”

“Because you are an artist, not a mistress.”

“But a faithful lover, all the same.”

“Perhaps.”

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

There was hardly a place to be had. Officers were seated about, beautiful women, a few landowners, Junkers up from the country.

“Old Count Perponcher is over there, and there Count Waldersee — a coming man, a general at court,” said Waldemar. “Lobster, then rumpsteak, I think — or what else, Susanna?”

“I have a wolf’s hunger. That suits me.”

“And to drink? Moselle?”

“No, rather a Rhine wine.”

“That’s a heavy one, Susanna,” and he looked into her eyes.

“And if that is what I want?”

“Then it suits me.”

An hour later.

“Shall we have coffee here, or at yours?”

“At mine, I think.”

“Good, Susanna, good.”

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

“The Count,” she said, “is very charming.”

“And I, Susanna?”

He stood up, took her into his arms, kissed her on the 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 resistance, this contempt for any pretence!

“Oh — don’t — please don’t,” said Susanna.

“Why do you say no when you mean yes?” She felt that he did not like that. “Be ashamed of being ashamed!”

What a relief, thought Susanna as she lay beside him, to be allowed to be honestly sensual.

“Waldemar — are you cross when I kiss you like that?”

“My dear Susanna — are there men who get cross?”

“Cross, no — but disappointed. They want the pure woman.”

“Oxen, in the true sense of the word. That is the source of all that silly worship of the young girl.”

In the fireplace the fire burned.

“Our coffee will be cold,” said Susanna.

They brought the coffee in from the next room, crouched in front of the embers, drank the mocha. Susanna pulled on a wrapper, went to the piano, and sang: “The lotus flower trembles…”

Waldemar dressed. What was singing there was love, was passion. Susanna loved him. But he had had bad experiences with her once before. Not to go through all of that again. She could not be held. He kept on believing it must work out one day, but it would not.

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

Knocking-off time in the Chausseestraße. Children playing hopscotch, or shooting marbles into the hole between four paving-stones. Father putting up strings on the balcony for the wild vine, or tinkering with the pigeon-loft. Mother sewing.

“Just off down to the Frischer Hammel — one beer, only the one.”

“Paul, love, must you really?”

“Aw, leave off, I’ll be straight back.”

“He’ll drink the week’s wages again!”

“If I had a little wife like that, something steady, I wouldn’t be off down the pub,” said the lodger.

“Hey — what’s got into you? You didn’t rent me with the room — hands off!”

“I’m only saying — seeing as your man keeps you on such short rations. With me you could have it better.”

“Don’t you say a word against my husband. It’s only because we’ve got the one room. That’s all it is.”

The freckled apprentice came in to announce Mr Mayer, the insurance agent.

“Ah, good day, Mr Mayer.”

“Good day, Mr Effinger. I thought I would come and see you in person. It is easier to talk things through face to face. In letters, misunderstandings tend to creep in.”

“Well — here is the insurance contract. There were a few points I wanted to raise.”

“You have built up a fine concern here, Mr Effinger. I am a wreck of a man.”

“But Mr Mayer, how can you say so! You look the very picture of health!”

“Ah, I am an old man, Mr Effinger. No one sang it over my cradle that I should end as an insurance agent.”

“Life!” said Paul.

“How right you are. If I still had the sarcasm of my younger days I should say it lies chiefly in the fact that the office of insurance agent was still quite unknown in the year of my birth. I was born in 1822. I knew the world. I knew the Paris of the Second Empire. He who has not known that does not know what life is. The Paris of the sixties — it was one continual cancan, of the spirit as well. You are still young, Mr Effinger, but I sense you have understanding for a man who has come to grief. I had the banking house Mayer, Lamprecht & Co.”

“Oh!” said Paul, in admiring surprise.

“Yes — you know what that meant. We handled the Sardinian war loan in ’59. I financed the Luxembourg railway.”

“Yes, yes — a great firm, a rich house.”

“All gone. The Oppner house — Emmanuel Oppner’s — my father built it. I don’t want to speak against Oppner & Goldschmidt, but they were small people in those days. It breaks my heart when I sometimes go past now. During the alterations I went and looked at it in secret — old fool that I am. That is no longer my father’s house. They have painted it all wrong. And over the light frescoes — of such enchanting lightness — these barbarians have hung dark leather wallpaper. Incredible, really.”

“I don’t understand much about that sort of thing, Mr Mayer.”

“No, no — I don’t want to bore you with it. I am an aesthete; yes, I know something of art.”

Paul thought: he went bankrupt too, after all.

“The Gotthard tunnel is on my conscience.”

“A great deal of money was lost there.”

“I could tell a tale of it. But I am down to ten per cent of the debts now. I am still paying them off. That I owe to my name and to my daughter. She is coming to fetch me now, poor girl — she gives piano lessons. Will 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 teeming throng on the Chausseestraße!

“It is hard for you, Miss Mayer,” said Paul.

“No, no — but I do earn.”

“It is hard for a young girl. The other day a young girl came to me asking to copy letters. But young girls don’t belong in an office. The woman is best off at home.”

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

“That is dreadful, of course. But mostly the female element is needed in the family. There is a child to bring up, a sick person to nurse.”

“And if a girl doesn’t want that?”

“Then she is overwrought.”

“You think so?”

“In my opinion, yes.”

“Papa, you are falling right behind. One can lose someone in a crowd — and in this district at that.”

The broad Friedrichstraße at the Weidendammer Bridge. The railway crossing the river, a little omnibus and its ponies, a one-legged man crying, “Wax matches — wax matches!” and prostitutes lifting their skirts, the ruffles rustling. A gentleman with a monocle, and the carriages going to the theatre.

“We turn off here — perhaps you will come and see us some time.”

“Gladly, Mr Mayer — though I always have a great deal to do.”

“Adieu.” “Adieu.” “Adieu.”

“A nice fellow, Amalie — don’t you think?”

“A little dry.”

“You mustn’t always find fault with young people.”

“I am only saying it as it is. Mother’s had her piecework cut again. Twenty pfennigs to sew a skirt. That comes perhaps to ten marks a week. And that doesn’t reckon the lamp-oil or the thread.”

“Amalie, you tear at my heart.”

“But Papa, I only tell you how it is. The middleman, a nasty piece of work, says the firm squeezes him too. I should like to know who he supplies. He won’t say. Which is proof that he gets a great deal more for the skirt than he says.”

The wool market in the Klosterstraße. The Königstraße between the Alexanderplatz and the Palace is blocked by the wool wagons. In the ancient palace of the Margraves of Brandenburg the wool is stored. Beside it stands the Grey Cloister — Bismarck’s old school.

“Can’t get through again.”

“You silly cow, somebody ought to give you a thrashing so you’d see there’s a horse standing here.”

“Sir — don’t carry on so!”

“Don’t talk to me with that tarted-up mug of yours!”

“Amalie — come — leave the rabble.”

“Lord, Papa, if I could talk like that to the middleman, he would perhaps give us fifteen pfennigs more for the skirt.”

“My child — don’t forget who you are.”

Good, unsuspecting Papa! thought Amalie.

How it stank in the hallway! How ugly the flat smelled — of all that wool, of the lodgers! If only one had been able to have the place repapered before moving in!

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

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 she had a charming three-room flat near the Opera. There she received her friends in an elegant wrapper and elegant little slippers.

One evening Waldemar had come upon Theodor at her place. Theodor was perched on a low stool at her side, ceaselessly kissing her hand as it hung down.

Theodor waited. With him, at the stage door, waited several enthusiasts. With him, too, waited a coupé lined with white silk, on which a manservant and coachman sat motionless. What he had feared came. Theodor saw Widerklee, in her evening wrap, step quickly into the coupé. Theodor was almost out of his mind with jealousy. He had never thought about this affair, never considered the end of it. He loved — not platonically, as most of his friends did, but as a man.

Now he stood there, cast off, abandoned, with no explanation, under the lindens in the rain, in the dark. What now? Wait outside Widerklee’s flat? But she was driving to the other one, of course. Who was he? And if he knew who, what then? Shoot him down? Challenge him? Kill himself?

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

A brazen girl spoke to him, drew him into a small shop with a red lantern burning before its curtained windows. Erna Schmidt’s Wine Room. The girl was very young, hardly seventeen. She took Theodor into a back room, lay down on the red woollen chaise-longue without ado, drew a curtain across. The girl, who turned out to be very beautiful, charmed him. She comforted him. Her brazenness, her depravity, fell away for a little while. Her name was Wanda, and she had no parents. Pushed about among foster families, hardly fourteen, she had been seduced by a lodger. She had also worked. But this was easier. Only the madam took advantage of her. On the grimy sofa a gentle pity blossomed in Theodor for this child, delicate and velvet-skinned as a fawn.

“Shall I see you again?”

“I don’t know,” said Theodor, and began to cry.

The girl crouched down beside him. “Why are you crying?” she asked. She stroked him.

Here, with this strange streetwalker, he poured himself out: how forsaken he was, that he loved a clever, beautiful, distinguished woman, a great artist, and that he had been betrayed.

The girl said: “Nah, don’t go killing anyone — you’d just get life for it. You mustn’t take it so hard.”

“But I cannot live without her.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get her back.”

So, in a shop with a red lantern in the East End of Berlin — Erna Schmidt’s Wine Room.

The girl dressed.

“Are you going out again?” Theodor asked. The girl nodded. Theodor gave her a gold piece. “Now don’t go out any more today,” he said. “Rest yourself.” He gave her a kiss.

The idiot! 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!