“Take another look now, Hubert. Go there immediately and let me know at once.”
“But it’s useless, Fraulein. He doesn’t come into the village in the daytime.”
“Do you keep a good look-out at night, Hubert? It’s impossible that he hasn’t come at all! He gave me his solemn promise! He was going to be here on the second night, no, the next night.”
“He has definitely not been here. I would have met him, and I would also have heard about it if he had been here.”
“Hubert, I simply can’t stand it any longer … I see him day and night, as if he were really here, but if I try to touch him, there’s nothing, and I seem to fall down a hundred stairs.… I feel quite different, it’s as if I’ve been poisoned, I can’t sleep any more.… And then I see his hands, Hubert. They hold you so tightly, they send a thrill through you.… Oh, what can be the matter with me?” She stared at servant Hubert Rader with wide-open eyes. But it was not certain that she saw him at all.
Rader stood by the door like a stick. His gray complexion took on no color, his eye remained gray and lusterless even though he did not turn his gaze away from the soft, confiding girl.
“You mustn’t think anything about it,” he said in his usual didactic tone. “It is so!”
Vi looked at her confidant, her only confidant, as if he were a prophet bringing salvation.
Rader nodded significantly. “Those are physical processes,” he explained. “That is physical desire. I can give you a book about it, written by a doctor, a specialist. In it everything is exactly described, how it comes, and where its seat is, and how it is cured. It is called deficiency-phenomena or abstinence-phenomena.”
“Is that really so, Hubert? Is that in the book? You must bring it me, Hubert.”
“That is it. Nothing to do with—the man.” Hubert narrowed his eyes and observed the effect of his words. “It is just the body—the body is hungry, Fraulein!”
Vi, although as foolish and pleasure-seeking as any girl in those days, still had her illusions about love, and not every pleasant fancy was swept away by the tearing of a single veil. Only gradually did she grasp the full significance of Hubert’s revelations; she shrank as if from a sudden pain; she moaned.
But then she drew herself up. “How disgusting!” she cried. “You are a swine, Rader, you dirty everything. Go away—don’t touch me! Out of my room, at once!”
“But please, Fraulein! Please calm yourself—madam’s coming! Tell some lie; if the Rittmeister finds out, the Lieutenant is lost.”
He glided out, vanishing into the adjoining bedroom of Frau von Prackwitz, and stood behind the door. He heard the hurried step; then the door of Violet’s room was shut. He could hear the mother’s voice, and Violet sobbing …
That’s the cleverest thing she can do, he thought with satisfaction. Cry! I was probably a bit too soon and too strong. Well, when she’s been a week without news of the Lieutenant …
He heard the Rittmeister’s footstep on the stairs and cowered well back between Frau von Prackwitz’s bathrobe and dressing gown. However contemptible the Rittmeister was in his stupidity and temper, he remained almost the only person of whom one had to be afraid. He was quite capable of throwing someone out of the window—through the glass.
“I tell you you’re exaggerating,” he heard the Rittmeister say angrily. “The child is simply nervous. She must get into the fresh air. Come, Vi, let’s go for a little walk.”
Rader nodded. He slipped through the bathroom and the Rittmeister’s bedroom to the stairs, down which he vanished into his own bare room. He unlocked the cupboard. With a second key he opened a suitcase from which he took out a well-thumbed book—
VI
Sophie Kowalewski, ex-maid to the Countess Mutzbauer, had said to her parents this Sunday morning: “I’m going over to Birnbaum to see Emmi. Don’t keep dinner waiting for me; perhaps I won’t be back until evening.” Her kind-hearted old father had nodded his head. “Ride along the main road, Sophie, not the forest path. There are such a lot of fellows knocking around the district now.” And her tremendously fat mother, interested only in food and digestion, had said: “Emmi has made a wonderful match. They already have a cow and two goats. They kill three pigs for their own use. They don’t have to go around with hungry bellies; there’s always something to eat. They’ve also got chickens and geese. If you would only have such luck!”
Sophie did not stay to hear it all. She duly let her friend, who was lending her the bicycle, admire her blue costume, swung on to the saddle and pedaled slowly through the village with bell ringing, so that all should see her. She turned into the quiet mossy forest path along which the cycle ran as silently as on velvet, a firm and very narrow path, close to the rutted cart track. Heather and broom kept brushing the pedals, casting drops of morning dew on to the toes of her shoes. The beautiful pillars of old pine trees wandered past her, tinged reddish by the morning sun—and sometimes the path went so narrowly between two trunks that she had to grip the handle bars firmly in order not to knock against them. The bilberries were thick and their berries already turning blue. The forest grass was still green, and the junipers stood dark and silent in the bright undergrowth; there was an incessant fluttering and twittering of little forest birds.
Here Sophie had passed her childhood; every sound was familiar to her. As a child she had heard the distant vague soughing of the forest, which came close, but could never come closer. The sun shone on her hair as it had shone on the child’s. As she glided by, there opened and closed almost immediately glades which seemed to lead into the heart of the forest.
No one is all bad, and Sophie isn’t either. Sophie was filled with a gaiety which had nothing in common with the boisterous merriment of a night spent drinking in a bar. It was as if her body had received new blood; joyful, serene thoughts streamed through her with every fresh breath she took; instead of a dreary dance hit she hummed the song of “May has come.” … The clouds—they wander—in the canopy of heaven.… Oh, wonderful!
Suddenly Sophie laughed. She remembered how her mother once took her to pick berries in the forest. At that time she was eight or nine years old. The laborious picking soon bored her. Playing, humming to herself, she wandered away from her busy mother; ten times she heard herself being called, without paying any heed; the eleventh call no longer reached her. Singing softly, laughing with happiness, she wandered deeper and deeper into the forest, aimlessly on and on, from the sheer joy of movement, into the little valleys where the trees descended from flat hills like silent pilgrims. For a long time she listened to the gurgling of a hurrying brook. For a still longer time she watched a butterfly which flew from blossom to blossom in the heat of a forest clearing—and was not tempted to try and catch it.
At last she reached a beech wood. The trees towered high and silver-gray. The green above was so bright. They stood far from each other; everywhere sunbeams penetrated into the golden warm shadows; her bare feet sank deep into the soft brownish-green moss. Singing softly, almost without knowing what she was doing, Sophie stripped off her clothes. There lay her little dress; over a tree stump the bright patch of her little knickers; now her chemise fell upon the moss—and gaily whooping, the child danced naked through sun and shade, laughing.
It was the joy of living on this earth, of wandering in the light—the joy of life! The little heart in the thin body throbbed. Dancing into ever new greenness, into ever different worlds, into ever deeper mystery. With sounds such as the birds sing, interrupted to watch a beetle lost in a wheel track … and begun again, all without thinking, like breathing.…
It was the joy of life, the happiness of being—that for which grown-up people eternally yearn, whether they know it or not. Happiness—for which they are always seeking, and which they will never find again. Joy which vanishes with childhood—only to be glimpsed afterwards in the weak reflection of a lover’s embrace, in the joy over some work.
The bicycle sang softly along the path, the chain grated. Passing over a root, the rear mudguard clattered and the saddle springs sighed. Sophie, wishing to sing, could not succeed, and remembered only how to the child the sun had suddenly become cold, and the familiar forest strange. She had burst into tears—she was lost. Everything was hostile: prickly brambles, pointed stones on the path, a swarm of horseflies blowing over from a herd of cattle. At last a woodsman, old Hofert, had found her …
“Aren’t you ashamed, Sophie, to run around naked like that?” he had scolded her. “You’re a human being, you know, not a little pig.” And he had taken her back to her mother. Oh, her mother’s anger. The long search for her
