“No!”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Let’s sit down!” suggested von Studmann. “Yes, you too, please, Herr Kniebusch. Pagel, give me the cigarettes from my jacket. Sit down, Kniebusch! That’s right. Cigarette, Fraulein Sophie? Yes, of course I know you smoke. We’re not as strict as the Rittmeister was in the train; we’re the younger generation. So you were specially ordered to confiscate our things, Herr Kniebusch?”
“I wasn’t! I always confiscate the things of people bathing here!” said the forester obstinately.
“Not those of Fraulein Sophie, for instance. Well, let’s drop that. How often have you confiscated clothes here, then, Forester Kniebusch?”
“I don’t have to tell you that. I’m employed by the Geheimrat, not the Rittmeister,” said the forester defiantly, squinting at the clothes, squinting at the forest, and feeling as if he were slowly roasting in hell—the heat from below supplied by Herr von Studmann, the heat above from the Geheimrat.
“I am only asking,” said Herr von Studmann, “because you must have already had a lot of unpleasantness with this confiscation, haven’t you?”
The forester maintained an obstinate silence.
“Or are you an auxiliary police official?”
Kniebusch remained silent.
“But perhaps you have been previously convicted. Then confiscating clothes without any legal right wouldn’t matter to you so much.”
Sophie burst out laughing, Pagel loudly cleared his throat, and the forester blushed to his eyes, which had become small and gloomy. He kept silent, however.
“You know us by name, you could have reported us for illegal bathing. If we had been convicted, we would, of course, have paid the fine. Why confiscation, then?”
The three of them looked at the forester fidgeting about, wanting to say something. Once more he looked at the forest close by. He half got up, but between him and the salvation of cover was young Pagel’s leg. The forester sat down again.
“Forester Kniebusch,” said Herr von Studmann, in the same pleasant, patient tone, as if he were explaining something to an obstinate child, “won’t you speak openly to us? Look, if you don’t tell us all about it, we shall go to Geheimrat von Teschow. I shall explain to him the situation in which we caught you here, and then we
The forester had lowered his head; his face could not be seen.
“But if you tell us the truth, I promise you on my word of honor that we shall keep it to ourselves. I think I can also answer for Fraulein Sophie’s keeping quiet?” Sophie nodded. “Yes, we should like to help you to get out of this situation honorably.”
The forester raised his head. He stood up. In his eyes were tears, and while he spoke these tears broke free and ran down into his beard. Others followed. Tears of old age, a graybeard’s tears, flowing of themselves.
“Yes, gentlemen,” said Forester Kniebusch, “but no one can help me. I understand that you are being very friendly to me, and I accept with gratitude your promise to say nothing. But I am a finished man. I’m too old—and when one is too old, nothing goes right for him any more. Everything that once pleased him is gone.… I recently caught the worst poacher, Baumer, and I want to tell the truth now. I didn’t do anything; he simply fell from his bicycle onto a stone and was knocked unconscious at once. Everything I said about a struggle was only to praise myself … I wanted to be clever, but an old man shouldn’t try to be clever.”
Sophie and Wolfgang stared in front of them. They were ashamed of the weeping old man who so shamelessly poured out his heart. Herr von Studmann, however, had directed his brown eyes attentively on him, and now and again he nodded.
“Yes, gentlemen,” continued the forester, “and now in the courts they want to twist a rope out of it for me, because Baumer has a high temperature. And the only one who can defend me is the Geheimrat, and if I don’t do what he wants, he won’t defend me, but will even take away my livelihood. And what will then become of me and my sick wife?”
The forester stood as if he had forgotten what he wished to say, but at Herr von Studmann’s glance he pulled himself together. “Yes, and today after lunch he phoned me up and told me that the gentlemen had gone bathing and that I was to be certain to take their clothes away, otherwise he wouldn’t help me. But Sophie was sitting there and it came to nothing. Why he is so angry with the gentlemen I don’t know; he didn’t say a word about that.” Kniebusch stared disconsolately before him.
“Well, Herr Kniebusch, there are other ponds here, aren’t there? We needn’t have come here,” said Studmann.
The forester reflected, a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “In this direction it’s difficult,” he said. “Here, apart from this, it’s all forest and sand.”
“Birnbaum,” said Sophie.
“Yes, the gentlemen might have gone to the Birnbaum ponds. But then the gentlemen mustn’t be home before seven, because it’s so far. Would they like to sit in the forest as long as that?”
“Oh, of course we’ll do that,” said Studmann pleasantly. “The men can feed the cattle without us for once.”
“Then I thank the gentlemen very much,” said the forester, no longer tearful. “You are being very kind to an old man. But still, it won’t help much. I ought sometime to bring a real success home, but that’s asking too much of an old man. No young person knows what an old man feels like.” He stood a moment longer in thought. “However, through the kindness of the gentlemen, it hasn’t been a failure.”
He raised his hat and went.
Studmann gazed after him. Then he called out: “Wait, Herr Kniebusch, I’ll come along with you for a bit!” And he ran after him, barefooted, in bathing costume, without any regard for his rather tender feet. A true nursemaid, however, doesn’t think of herself when she sees others who need comforting.
Sophie and young Pagel were alone, and very pleasantly they conversed, first about Forester Kniebusch and then about the harvest. And because that afternoon Sophie was rested and happy, it did not occur to her to impress young Pagel with feminine tricks or even to make eyes at him, so that Wolfgang was continually obliged to marvel how wrongly he had judged this nice, intelligent girl in the train. And he was now tempted to blame his Berlin eyes for this false judgment.
As to the harvest, however, her father had said that in Neulohe they were at least three weeks behind, and they would never do it unless a proper reinforcement of strong men came. And no one in the village understood why the Rittmeister did not order a gang from Meienburg. They were the most industrious and most submissive of men, as long as they were given enough to eat and smoke. But the Rittmeister had to remember that all the farms in the neighborhood already had their gangs, and the prison was half empty. That’s what her father said, for of course she knew nothing about it, she had only just come to the district herself. But she was sorry about the harvest.…
Pagel thought this very intelligently spoken and thought it very good of the girl to worry about the Neulohe harvest, which after all did not matter a jot to a Berlin lady’s maid. He resolved to discuss the matter with Studmann that evening. Since, however, Studmann had not yet returned, they decided to go into the water once more.
There he saw that Sophie swam excellently, and that it was an effort for him to keep up with her. But he was able to show her something new, a style of swimming which had just begun to spread in Berlin, and which was called the crawl. It always does a young man good when he can do something a little better than a young girl; and if he can teach this young girl something he finds her extremely likeable.
And Sophie also was very much pleased with her disinterested swimming instructor, whom otherwise she had found altogether ill-mannered; and so the two of them were the best of friends when finally a limping, thoughtful Studmann appeared out of the forest.
“Well,” he said, sitting down on the grass and lighting himself a cigarette, “it’s a strange world, Pagel. The earth sweats fear instead of corn, and its fear infects everything. A generation full of fear, Pagel. As I suspected this afternoon, the peace of the fields is an illusion, and someone is not hesitating to make us understand that as quickly as possible.”
