“No, Else,” I say, and get up. “It is very nice of you to try to cheer me up a bit, but I had better get over to the office as well. If I should miss my wife, please tell her that I have gone to the office.” I turn to go. Suddenly it is hard for me to leave the kitchen and this friendly girl. I notice how pale her face is, and how well her high-arching eyebrows suit it.
“I have many worries, Else,” I say abruptly, “and I have nobody to stand by me.” Emphatically, I repeat, “Nobody, Else. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Herr Sommer,” she answers softly.
“Thank you, Else, for being so nice to me,” I add. And I go. Only as I am getting ready in the bathroom does it occur to me that I have just betrayed Magda. Betrayed and deceived. Deceived and defrauded. But at once I shrug my shoulders: that’s right! Lower and lower. Deeper and deeper into it. Now there’s no holding back!
6
I made my way cautiously to the office, cautiously, because at all costs I wanted to avoid meeting Magda in the street. I stood on the other side of the street in the shadow of a doorway, and looked across at my firm’s five ground-floor windows. Two of them belonging to my main office, were lit up, and occasionally through the ground glass I saw the silhouettes of two figures: that of Magda and of my book-keeper, Hinzpeter. “They’re going through the books!” I said to myself with a deep sense of shock, and yet this shock was mingled with a feeling of relief, for now I knew that the conduct of the business was in Magda’s capable hands. That was just like her, immediately on hearing the bad news, to give herself a clear picture of the situation by going through the books. With a deep sigh I turned away and walked right through the town and out of it, but not towards my home. What should I do in the office, what should I do at home? Invite the reproaches that were bound to be made? Try to justify what was utterly unjustifiable? Not at all. And while I walked out again into the countryside, which was slowly growing darker and darker, it became painfully clear to me that I was played out. I had nothing left to live for, I had lost my footing in society, and I felt I had not the strength to look for a new one, nor to fight to regain the old. What was I to do now? I went on, I walked away from office, wife, home town, I left everything behind—but I would have to go home again eventually, wouldn’t I? I would have to face Magda, listen to her reproaches, hear myself rightly called a liar and a cheat, have to admit that I was a failure, a failure of the most disgraceful and cowardly kind. The thought was unbearable, and I began to play with the idea of not returning home at all, but of going out into the world, of submerging myself in the darkness somewhere, in some darkness where a man might disappear without trace, without a final cry. And while I was outlining this to myself, with some feeling of self-pity, I knew that I was deceiving myself, that I would never have the courage to live without the security of hearth and home. I would never be able to give up the soft bed I was used to, the tidiness of home, the punctual, nourishing meals. I would go home to Magda, in spite of all my fears, I would go back to my own bed this very night—never mind about living in the darkness, never mind about a life and death in the gutter.
“But,” I asked myself again, and I quickened my hasty steps, “but what’s the matter with me? I used to be a fairly energetic and enterprising man. I always was a little weak but I knew so well how to conceal that, that up to now even Magda probably hadn’t noticed it. Where does all this weariness come from that has been growing on me for the last year, paralysing my limbs and brain, and making me, till now a fairly honest man, into a deceiver of my wife, and the kind of character who looks lustingly at a servant-girl’s breasts? It can’t be the alcohol. I never drank schnaps before today, and this lassitude has been hanging over me for such a long time now. Whatever can it be?” I tried this theory and that. I reflected that I was just over forty. I had heard talk of the change of life in men, but I knew no man of my acquaintance who, on passing forty, had changed as much as I. Then I recalled my loveless existence. I had always longed for love and appreciation, secretly of course, and I had had it in full measure, from Magda as well as from my fellow-citizens. Then gradually I had lost it. I didn’t know how it had all happened. Had I lost love and appreciation because I had grown so bad, or had I grown so bad because I had lost its encouragement? I found no answer to these questions: I was not accustomed to thinking about myself. I walked faster still. I wanted to get to the place where I would find rest from all these torturing problems. At last I stood before my goal, before that same country inn I had visited this fatal morning. I looked through the bar-room window for the girl with the pale eyes, who had passed such a contemptuous judgment on my manhood after one insolent glance. I saw her sitting under the dim light of a single little bulb, busy with some needlework. I looked at her for a long time, I hesitated, and with a painful and voluptuous sense of self-abasement, I asked myself just why I had come to her. And I found no answer to this question, either.
But I was tired of all these problems. I almost ran up the paved path to the inn, groped in the dark passage for the door-handle, entered quickly, and with a pretence of cheerfulness I cried: “Here I am, my pretty one!” and sat down in a wicker chair beside her.
All that I had just done resembled so little my usual behaviour, was so different from my former sedateness, that I watched myself with unconcealed astonishment, almost with anxious embarrassment as if watching an actor who has taken on too daring a role, and who is unsure whether he will be able to play it convincingly to the end.
The girl looked up from her sewing, for a moment the pale eyes were turned on me, the tip of her tongue appeared briefly at the corner of her mouth. “Oh, it’s you,” was all she said, and these three words conveyed once more her judgment of myself.
“Yes, it’s me, my beauty,” I said quickly, with the glibness and arrogance that came so strangely to me, “and I would like one or two or maybe half a dozen glasses of that excellent schnaps of yours, and if you like, you can drink with me.”
“I never drink schnaps,” countered the girl coolly, but she got up, went to the bar, got a little glass and a bottle, and poured out a drink by the table. She sat down and put the bottle on the floor beside her.
“Anyway,” she added, taking up her sewing again, “we’re closing in a quarter of an hour.”
“Then I’ll have to drink all the quicker,” I said, put the glass to my lips and emptied it. “But if you won’t drink schnaps,” I continued, “I’d gladly buy you a bottle of wine or champagne even, if there is such a thing here. Regardless of cost.”
In the meantime she had re-filled my glass, and I emptied it again in one go. I had already forgotten all that had happened and all that lay ahead, I lived only for the moment, for this reserved yet knowing girl who treated me with such obvious contempt.
“We’ve got champagne all right,” she said, “and I like to drink it, too. But I’ll have you know that I don’t intend to get drunk, nor go to bed with you just for a bottle of champagne.”
Now she looked at me again, accompanying her immodest words with a bold insolent look. I had to go on playing my part. “Whoever would think of such a thing, my sweet,” I said lightly. “Go and get your champagne. You’ll be allowed to drink it quite unmolested. To me,” I added, more firmly after I had had another drink, “you’re like an angel from another planet, a bad angel whom fate has set in my path. It’s enough for me just to look at you.”
“It costs nothing to look,” she said with a short evil-sounding laugh. “You’re a pretty queer saint, but before the night’s out I think I’m going to find out what you’re so excited about.”
With that, she poured me another drink, and got up to fetch the champagne. This time she was away longer. She drew the curtains, then went outside, and I heard her close the shutters, and lock the door. As she went through the barroom again, she said “I’ve locked up, nobody else will be coming. The landlady’s in bed already.” She said this in passing, then stopped, and added in an ironic tone, “But don’t build your hopes on that.” Before I could answer, she had gone again. I used her absence to pour myself out two or three drinks straight off. Then she came back with a gold-topped bottle in her hand.
She put a champagne glass on the table before her, skilfully unbent the wire and twisted the cork out of the bottle without letting it pop. The white foam rushed up. She poured, waited a moment, poured again, and lifted the glass to her mouth.
“I’m not going to drink your health,” she said, “because you would want to drink with me, and for the time being, you’ve had enough.”
I didn’t contradict her. My whole body was so full of drunkenness, it seemed to hum like a swarm of bees. She put down her glass, looked at me with narrowed eyes and asked mockingly, “Now then, how many schnapses did you have while I was away? Five? Six?”
