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 set off for the Riviera, for Nice, to the Hotel Barblan.

Along the Tiergartenstraße the horses tore past. Beautiful women, veils streaming around their top-hats, the gentlemen bare-headed or in round hats. Along the Tiergartenstraße the officers were walking in service-tunic with broad red stripes down the trousers, on their way to the Great General Staff. It was quiet. Now and then children’s laughter rang out 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 crocus next year. Snowdrops and spring snowflakes we have rather too many of. And here comes Fräulein Winkel. Well, Fräulein, how are things? Yes, let’s try it on once more.”

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

“I don’t like it at all, my girl, that you always take the pins in your mouth. Frieda, bring Fräulein Winkel a pin-cushion. Fräulein Winkel, you look quite wretched! What is the matter? Come, you can speak to me. Up here a bit higher, no? And this gathering a little fuller. Trials, now, in spring — or worries? Perhaps I can help you?”

“Yes, if I am really to speak. But please stand still, ma’am, or I’ll prick you. I had a gentleman, ma’am will understand, he was a handsome gentleman, and I could have told myself from the first that nothing would come of it. But that’s how one is — one never quite believes it. And then he married. Well, that’s how it is, and I had always imagined he loved me, and one knows after all how the rich gentlemen marry — money and the same station, and then it’s 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 the man those rights before marriage? I mean — she sinks in men’s esteem.”

“Perhaps that’s so. You are probably right.”

“Don’t cry, Fräulein Winkel, dear child, just speak.”

“Well, I’d told myself: he must be unhappy, his wife is very ugly, he’ll surely betray her.”

“And now?”

“And now I have met him. And she is so beautiful, it can’t be described how beautiful she is, and there was a Spreewald nurse with them too, with a perambulator. And as they walked past, I just heard him say: ‘Ah, Annettchen, what happy people we are, the whole of nature is smiling at us.’”

“Annettchen, he said? Well, well. Yes, that is bitter. Is there no one who loves you? We always want to be the one who loves, and we are never grateful enough when someone loves us.”

“Yes, that is probably so. Now just one more stitch at the shoulder, Madam, and the clasp like this?”

“No. Better like this, no?”

“Yes, like that. We’ve a new young man in the shop just lately, Lehmann, he keeps the books, and he runs after me and goggles so, and my friend Lischen and I, we always have to laugh — he twists his hat into a sausage when he speaks to me.”

“One should only ever marry men who goggle. I shall take the dress off and you can sew here directly. You know the Stadtrat, you know how clever and good he is, but he has never been handsome, and I know you find me very beautiful. You will sometimes have thought, perhaps, that I married my husband for money. But I had no need at all of that. I had had a great disappointment before. We in Russia are not so strict as here, where it is frowned upon if a young girl so much as goes out for a walk. I had met, at a great carnival ball, a strikingly handsome Guards officer. And we had the chance to meet alone, and he was in love and reckless, and in short, he kissed me, and as is only natural 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 if it were yesterday — ‘we shall meet.’ I went, and — in vain. Around me lay snow and ice, and I kept thinking he must come into the Stadtwald. But he did not come. I went through every hell in that moment, and then I had a little letter from him: he did not know, and whether he might venture, and responsibility — it was a very honest and decent letter — and would I see him just 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 Fräulein, the sky is clouding 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 make up my mind at once, it was with me as it is with you. I loved the other one. But then I let myself be loved, and I have grown very happy in it. When one is the one who loves, one trembles always and is afraid and lonely and needs women friends to confide in. But when one is loved, then one knows, whatever may happen, one has someone one can rely on — and now think it over about Lehmann.”

“Yes, ma’am, let’s try the dress on once more. But there’s this too: when one has nothing, it is hard, I should like to set up on my own, and my former friend has said I could come to him at any time, but one doesn’t want that — it’s painful, to owe him something in the end.”

“How much would you need to begin with?”

“I have worked it out, around two thousand marks, but that’s a great deal of money, and if I am to pay such high interest from the start, it can’t be done, even if anyone lent it me.”

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

“But that’s — what am I to say!” cried Käte Winkel.

“Take them and earn money with them.”

“Oh, such kindness, such kindness.”

“My husband says the childless woman has the most children, and one must care for them — and so I’ll always give you a bundle of thousand-mark notes that we won’t speak of and won’t account for.”

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

“Yes, I have them here.”

“Very good. Frieda, put them in the glove-box at once.”

“Will Madam recommend custom to me when I set up on my own, or even come herself?”

“But, my dear, I know what you can do. Of course, it goes without saying.”

Käte Winkel took a few winter things from the lady’s-maid and went out, 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 wobbly writing-desk, took up an agate pen-holder, 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 Frauenliebe und -leben; Since first I saw Thee, I think I have gone blind, always as in dream I see Thee alone. When will You come to us again? I do not dare to ask Theodor.”

And then she addressed an envelope and asked Anna, white-armed and red-cheeked, to take the letter. The letter went to 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 will go later with the girl into the Tiergarten.”

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

The Guard was changing! At a window of the University stood Privatdozent Waldemar Goldschmidt — he saw the Opera House, the Linden, the curving baroque façade of the Library, saw the Guard, the marching step, white summer trousers, blue jackets, bright buttons, red collars, white plumes, the drum-major out in front — “fifers and drummers, warlike sound.” An immense crowd. At his window stood the old Kaiser, as he did every day at noon, when the Guard was changing.

Popular enthusiasm, thought Waldemar — today for the right man, tomorrow for the wrong. The law? The law would have to be made wholly anew. The law of the Romans, cut to fit slaves and property, had many defects. How far could one do without it in the new Civil Code?

The door opened.

“Herr Kollege, what an honour!”

“I heard at the Library that you have out the volume of the Monumenta that I myself need.”

“It is at your disposal, of course.”

“You were watching the popular enthusiasm just now?”

“The same expression came into my mind. Our universally revered aged sovereign may deserve it. But on Bismarck you know where I stand. The larger the man, the larger the shadow.”

“Young friend,” said the old historian, “I was lately in my own country, to study Hessian folk-expressions. It is good to refresh one’s boyhood memories of the narrower homeland before they are wholly absorbed into the handsomely articulated Kaiserreich.”

“I had no idea you were a Federalist!”

“I have always been one. Centralism is wholly un-German. We are doing our utmost to surrender a part of the freedom Germany possessed before the war. It is an historical principle that the victors always become the cultural imitators of the vanquished.”

“We have won our serfdom by conquest. This bequest of the defeated Caesar is in my eyes the greatest crime he committed against humankind. I could forgive Napoleon the Second of December — I cannot forgive 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 books, the world-famous scholar sat opposite him in the gleam of long, snow-white hair.

“I wonder, young friend, that you see France that way. I know you have all manner of relations over there.”

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

“In France, where centralisation has been carried to so high a degree, no one was promoted who did not swear in verba magistri. Our political fragmentation has fortunately, so far, protected us from the general operation of such ruinous influences, which penetrated down into the smallest matters. With us in Germany it is precisely the reverse. If we have any outstanding man, we make a point above all things of showing ourselves independent of his influence, and each of us, however insignificant he may otherwise be, takes a pride in choosing his own line — even an admittedly worse line — purely to demonstrate that independence in fact. I speak,” he said all at once more vividly, “in the present tense, but I should speak in the imperfect. I tell you here, on the 16th of March 1887, if matters in the new German Empire go on as they are going, 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 is happening with you? When will you be made a full professor?”

Waldemar shrugged.

“The Faculty wishes it, so I hear.”

“Oh no,” said Waldemar. “If I let myself be baptised, I should be admitted to the consecrated circle. But quite apart from that, I am suspect. The great are not well-disposed toward anyone who wants to blow the dust off privilege, to destroy it. — For the rest, one may have oneself baptised because one holds Christianity to be a development of the old prophetic religion, a milder, gentler ethic, simply centuries later. But all such considerations must give way the moment baptism brings advantages. It is repulsive when an act of the finest movements of conscience, of the most personal kind of reflection, leads to a position. A premium upon want of character.”

“You are right.”

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

He had gone only a few paces down the Linden when, close beside him, a coupé drew up.

“Waldemar.”

“Oh Susanna, life is fine after all.”

“Will you get in?”

“No, on the contrary — get out. I have a fancy to introduce the spring to a beautiful woman. Let us lunch together at Hiller’s. Agreed?”

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

“The Count? He won’t hold.”

“Why?”

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

“But a faithful lover.”

“Perhaps.”

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

There was hardly a seat to be had. Officers sat there, beautiful women, a few landowners, Junkers up from the provinces.

“Back there sits old Count Perponcher, and over there Count Waldersee, a coming man, Court General,” said Waldemar. “Lobster, then rump steak, I think — or what else, Susanna?”

“I’m starving, but that suits me very well.”

“And what shall we drink? A Moselle?”

“No, I’d rather a Rhine wine.”

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

“And if that is what I want?”

“Then it suits me too.”

An hour later.

“Shall we take coffee here, or at your place?”

“At mine, I think.”

“Good, Susanna, good.”

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

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

“And I, Susanna?”

He rose, pulled her to him, kissed her on the mouth. They knew each other. Susanna had been longing for him. He led her the few steps to the bedroom. Ah, how she loved him — this swift storm, this deep indifference to refusals and resistance, this contempt for all untruth!

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

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

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

“Waldemar, are you angry if I kiss you like that?”

“But Susanna! Are there men who are angry?”

“Not angry — disappointed; they want the pure woman.”

“Oxen, in the true sense. Hence this silly worshipping of the young girl.”

In the fireplace the fire burned.

“Our coffee is going cold,” said Susanna.

They fetched the coffee from the next room, crouched down before the embers, drank the mocha. Susanna pulled on a dressing-gown, went to the piano, and sang: Die Lotosblume ängstigt …

Waldemar was dressing. What sang there was love, was passion. Susanna loved him. But he had had bad experiences with her once before. Not to go through all that again. She was not to be held. He had always believed that one day it would work, but it did not work.

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

Closing time on the Chausseestraße. Children hopped over chalk-lines, or played marbles in the hollow between four paving-stones. Father was stringing twine on the balcony for the wild vine, or tinkering at the pigeon-cot. Mother was sewing.

“I’ll just slip out to the Frischer Hammel, a beer, just the one beer.”

“Paule, must you?”

“Aw, leave it be, I’ll be back soon.”

“He’ll just drink up his week’s wages again!”

“If I had a little wife like that, something steady, I’d not go to the pub,” said the lodger.

“You — what’s got into you! You haven’t hired me along with the room — let go!”

“I only meant it, seeing how tight your man keeps you. You’d do better with me.”

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

The freckle-faced apprentice announced the insurance agent Mayer to Paul.

“Ah, good day, Herr Mayer.”

“Good day, Herr Effinger. I’ve come in person for once. It’s easier to talk things over when one knows the other face to face. Misunderstandings mostly creep in by letter.”

“Now then, here is the insurance contract. There were various points I wished to raise.”

“You’ve built up a fine little works here, Herr Effinger. I’m a wreck myself.”

“But Herr Mayer, how can you say such a thing! You look perfectly well!”

“Ah, I’m an old man, Herr Effinger, no one sang at my cradle 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 should say it is chiefly because the office of insurance agent was quite unknown in the year of my birth. I was born in 1822. I have known the world. I have known the Paris of the Second Empire. He who never knew that does not know what living means. The sixties in Paris — that was one continuous cancan, of the spirit too. You are still young, Herr Effinger, but I feel you have 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 fifty-nine. I financed the Luxembourg railway.”

“Well, well — a great firm, a rich house.”

“All gone. The house of Emmanuel Oppner was built by my father. I’ll say nothing against Oppner & Goldschmidt, but they were small people in those days. It breaks my heart now when I sometimes walk past. During the renovations I went and looked, on the sly, old fool that I am. That is no longer my house. They’ve painted it all wrong. And over the light wall-paintings of enchanting delicacy these barbarians have pasted dark leather wall-hangings. Incredible, really.”

“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 did go bankrupt, after all, thought Paul.

“The Gotthard tunnel is on my conscience.”

“A great deal of money was lost on that.”

“I could sing you a song about it — but I’ve paid off all but ten per cent of my debts. I am still paying. I owe that to my name and to my daughter. She is just coming to fetch me, the poor girl gives piano lessons. Won’t you walk with us a little way?”

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

“You haven’t an easy time of it, Fräulein Mayer,” said Paul.

“No, no — but at least I earn.”

“It’s hard for a young girl. The other day a young girl came to me about letter-copying. But young girls in the office do not do. A woman is best off at home.”

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

“Then it is dreadful, certainly. But for the most part the females of the family are needed at home. There’s a child to bring up, a sick relative to nurse.”

“But if a girl doesn’t want that?”

“Then she is overwrought.”

“You think so?”

“In my view, yes.”

“Papa, you’re falling right behind. One quite loses sight of one another. And in this quarter, on top of it.”

The wide Friedrichstraße at the Weidendammer Brücke. Railway over the river, a small omnibus with its little horses, a one-legged man crying “Wax matches, wax matches,” and whores hitching up their skirts, many flounces rustling. Gentleman with monocle, and carriages driving to the theatre.

“We turn off here. Perhaps you’ll come and see us sometime.”

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

“Adieu.” “Adieu.” “Adieu.”

“A nice man, Amalie, no?”

“A bit dry.”

“You mustn’t always be finding fault with the young men.”

“I’m only saying. Mother’s piecework has been cut down again. Twenty pfennigs for sewing a skirt. That comes to perhaps ten marks in the week. And the oil and the thread not counted in.”

“Amalie, you break my heart.”

“But Papa, I’m only saying how it is. The middleman, a nasty piece of work, says the firm is squeezing him too. I should like to know whom he supplies. He won’t say. Which is proof he gets a great deal more for the skirt than he lets on.”

Wool-market in the Klosterstraße. The Königstraße, between the Alexanderplatz and the Schloß, was choked with covered wagons. The wool was stored in the ancient palace of the Brandenburg margraves. Beside it stood the Graues Kloster — Bismarck’s old school.

“Can’t get through, once again.”

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

“Man, don’t curse like that!”

“Don’t speak to me with that tarted-up mug!”

“Amalie, come — leave the rabble.”

“God, Papa — if I could speak to the middleman like that, he’d 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 stairwell! How ugly the flat smelled, of all the woollens, of the lodgers! If only one could at least have had it new-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 was waiting outside the Opera House. For a 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 peignoir and elegant little slippers.

One evening Waldemar had come upon Theodor at her place. Theodor was crouched on a tabouret at her side, kissing her dangling hand without pause.

Theodor was waiting. Several other enthusiasts were waiting with him at the stage door. But waiting with him too was a coupé, upholstered in white silk, on whose box footman and coachman sat motionless. What he had feared came to pass. Theodor saw the Widerklee step quickly, in her evening cloak, into the coupé. Theodor was almost out of his mind with jealousy. He had never reflected on this affair, never thought of its end. He loved — not platonically, as most of his friends did, but as a man.

Now he stood, cast out, abandoned, without explanation, on Unter den Linden, in the rain, in the dark. What now? Wait outside the Widerklee’s house? But she was certainly driving to the other man. Who was it? And if he knew, what then? Shoot him down? Challenge him? Kill himself?

He walked on, on and on, this way and that, crossing and recrossing.

A bold girl spoke to him, drew him into a little shop, before whose curtained windows a red lantern burned. The wine-tavern of Erna Schmidt. The girl was quite young, scarcely seventeen. She took Theodor into a back room, lay down without ceremony on the red woollen chaise-longue, drew a curtain across. The girl, who proved very beautiful, enchanted him. She comforted him. Her boldness, her depravity fell away for a brief time. She was called Wanda and was an orphan. Pushed around among foster-parents, she had been seduced, at scarcely fourteen, by a lodger. She had worked too. But this way was easier. Only the brothel-keeper took advantage of her. On the grubby sofa a soft pity bloomed in Theodor for this child, slender and velvet-skinned as a fawn.

“Shall I see you again?”

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

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

Here, with this strange street-girl, he opened himself; here he could say how forsaken he was, that he loved a clever, beautiful, important woman, a great artist, and that he was being deceived.

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

“But I can’t live without her.”

“Well, perhaps you’ll get her back.”

So, in a shop with a red lantern, in the east of Berlin, the Erna Schmidt wine-tavern.

The girl was dressing.

“Are you going out again?” asked Theodor.

The girl nodded.

Theodor gave a gold piece. “Don’t go out again tonight,” he said. “Rest yourself.” He gave her a kiss.

Idiot! she thought, and waited until he was out of sight. Twenty marks was a great deal of money — but how long was one young?

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