“Oh, do be quiet, Minna.” This time it was Petra who stamped her foot. “Why is he sending you, then? I thought he would have become a bit different, but that’s the way he always was. If he found anything unpleasant to do, he got others to do it.”
“You mustn’t excite yourself so, Petra. That can’t be good for it.”
“I’m not excited in the least!” said Petra, growing ever angrier. “But can you expect anyone not to be annoyed if he never learns anything and never changes? I suppose he’s crept under his mother’s skirts again. It’s all just as Ma Krupass said it would be.”
“Ma Krupass?” asked Minna jealously. “Is that the widow whose name is on the fence outside? Do you tell her all the doings of our Wolfi? I would never have thought it of you, Petra!”
“One must have someone to talk to,” said Petra firmly. “I couldn’t go on waiting for you. What’s he doing now?” And she motioned with her head toward the street.
“So you are really afraid of him and don’t want to see him?” said Minna, terribly angry. “After all, he is the father of your child!”
But suddenly it seemed as if some thought had wiped all doubt, all fear and worry from Petra’s face. Its former clear character traits were apparent again; in times of greatest distress at Madam Po’s Minna had never seen that face look either angry or tearful. And there was the old tone in her voice, the old ring. It was the ring of the old bell—trust, love, patience. Petra quietly took Minna’s shaking hand between her own and said, “You know him, too, Minna, you saw him grow up, and you know that one can’t be angry with him when he laughs and cracks his jokes with us poor women.… Your heart goes out to him straight away, you feel happy and think no more of anything he might have done to you …”
“Yes, God knows!”
“But, Minna, now he’ll have to be a father and think of others. It mustn’t just be that everyone should look happy when he is there; he must help in sharing troubles and work and also put up with an angry face sometimes, instead of running off at once for the day. And Ma Krupass is right, I’ve thought of it hundreds of times these past weeks: he must become a man before he can be a father. At present he’s merely a child whom we’ve all spoiled.”
“You are right, Petra, God knows.”
“And if I stand here with you and go all hot and cold, it isn’t because I’m angry or bear him a grudge or want to punish him! If he came in here, Minna, and gave me his hand and smiled at me in his old way, I know that the first thing I’d do would be to hug him, I’d be so happy. But, Minna, that must not be. I’ve realized that I mustn’t make things so easy for him again. In the first hour it would be wonderful, but in the next I should be thinking: Is my child to have such a spoiled darling for its father, one for whom I have no proper respect? No, Minna, God forbid! Even if I have to run away from here, run away from him and from my own weakness! I promised Ma Krupass and myself: he must first be something. Even if it’s only something quite small. And anyway I don’t want to see him at all for six months.” She paused for a moment. “But now he’s again crept under the skirts of you old women!”
“But he hasn’t, Petra!” cried old Minna joyfully. “What silly ideas you’ve got! He hasn’t done that at all.”
“Now you’re lying, Minna. You just told me yourself.”
“I said nothing of the sort! No, just come out with me now. I’ve had enough of your stink and dust.”
“I’m not going out. I’m not going to him!”
“But he isn’t outside! You’re just imagining it.”
“You said it yourself, Minna—please, let us stay here.”
“I said I wanted to write to him that you are expecting a baby. How can I want to write to him if he’s standing outside? You’re just imagining it all, Petra, because you are afraid, afraid of your own heart and afraid for the child. And because you’re afraid, everything’s all right. And now just let anyone, madam or anyone else, say anything against you—I know different. I’m glad you’ve spoken this way. I know now what I have to write to him, not too much and not too little. Now ask for an hour off and come out, there must be something like a cafe in the neighborhood. I pinched his letter for you, and madam didn’t say a word although she saw me. But you must give it back; you can copy it quickly if you like. Well, where shall we go? Can you get the time off?”
“Why shouldn’t I get the time off?” said Petra with bravado. “I take time off when I like! Everything you see here,” and she went with Minna to the hut door, “everything, the rags, the paper, the old iron and the bottles—it’s all under my management, and the men working here too, of course. Herr Randolph,” she said to an old man, “I’m going up to my room for a bit with my friend. If there’s anything special you’ve only got to call me.”
“What do you call special, Fraulein? Do you think they’ll be bringing in Kaiser Bill’s crown this afternoon? You go and have a lie down. If I was you I wouldn’t stick all afternoon among the rags!”
“Very well, Herr Randolph,” said Petra happily. “After all, it’s the first time I’m having a visitor here.”
And the two of them went up to Ma Krupass’s little flat, sat down, talked, and talked more.
When the time came for Minna to go home to make supper for her mistress, she did what she had not done since time immemorial; she went to the telephone and announced that she was not coming, that the key of the larder was in the right drawer of the kitchen sideboard behind the spoons, and that the key to the right drawer was in the pocket of her blue apron hanging up with the tea towels. And before Frau Pagel had quite grasped these clear instructions, Minna had already hung up. “Otherwise she’d start pumping me on the telephone, and she can wait for once. Now go on telling me about your Ma Krupass—pinches cuff links and yet has a good heart. Such things are neither in prayer book or bible. How long has she got, did you say?”
“Four months—and that’s just as if the court had known, for I’ll be confined at the beginning of December and she’ll be coming out at the end of November. She didn’t appeal—her lawyer said she ought to be glad. But still, it’s a pity when an old woman like that is up before the judge. I was there, and he told her off properly, and all the time she was crying like a child.”
It was half-past ten before Minna came home. She saw the light in her mistress’s room, but “You can wait!” she told herself, and crept quietly to her bed. But not quietly enough. For Frau Pagel called out: “Is that you, Minna? Well, thank God for that. I was beginning to think you were taking to night life in your old age.”
“Seems like it, madam,” said Minna staunchly. And then, with affected innocence: “Is there anything else madam would like?”
“Why, you deceitful cat!” cried Frau Pagel angrily. “Are you pretending you don’t know what’s itching me? What have you found out?”
“Oh, nothing special,” said Minna off-hand. “Just that madam will soon be a grandmother.” And with that she fled into her room with a speed that one would never have thought possible in such an old bag of bones, and slammed the door, as if to say: “Consulting hours are over for this evening.”
“Well, I never!” said old Frau Pagel, vigorously rubbing her nose and looking dreamily at the spot on the carpet where her vixen of a servant had been standing. “That’s a nice way to tell me! Grandmother! A moment ago a widow without any encumbrances, and now suddenly a grandmother.… Oh, no, we shan’t swallow that medicine, even if you do give it to me so craftily, you spiteful old devil!”
With that Frau Pagel shook her fist at the empty passage and withdrew into her room. But she could not have thought the news too bad, for she fell asleep so soundly that she did not hear Minna creeping out of the house with a letter. And it was now past midnight!
This letter was the beginning of that correspondence which, even though it did not contain a line from Petra Ledig, turned Wolfgang Pagel into a young man who, in Herr Studmann’s words, looked as if he wanted to embrace the world.
III
When Wolfgang Pagel bicycled to the prisoners on his own, and Violet von Prackwitz agreed to this without demur, although she would rather have spent the morning with the young man herself, it was because a higher will prevailed to which everyone had to agree: That of the Principal Warder Marofke. This ridiculous, conceited little man with a potbelly not only made the faces of his convicts sullen—whenever he entered the farm office with one of his never-ending requests, Frau von Prackwitz groaned: “Lord, here he is again!” and Studmann frowned. The workers, the chief guards and their assistants cursed the principle—but quietly. The girls in the kitchen cursed “the conceited clown”—only very loudly.
Marofke was always finding something wrong. First the mutton was too fat, then the pork was too scanty. There had been no peas for three weeks, but white cabbage had been cooked twice a week. The men didn’t return punctually from work, and the meals were not punctual. That window had to be walled up, otherwise the prisoners
