The Lieutenant was possessed by a savage and reckless despair. It was now clear that the Reichswehr did not want to have anything more to do with them, that the sternest orders had been given not to associate with the outsiders. He was determined, however, that, whatever the circumstances, the man should enter into conversation. He wanted to quarrel with him and be taken into the barracks, if need be under arrest. Then he could ask the officer on guard what they had against them. And if he then heard something about an arms dump … Very well. All over. All—over!
It was a completely insane thought which was keeping him there in its power; as though the officer on guard would be inclined to give to an arrested person information which had been denied the comrades in liberty. But the Lieutenant was no longer rational. He had been quite right that his body’s cells could be infected by thought.… This time he let the sentry pass him unchallenged, but while his back was turned he lit a cigarette. Puffing away, he watched the man returning and enjoyed the astonished and slightly foolish expression on his face when he saw one who had just asked for a cigarette now smoking. The Lieutenant held out a second cigarette and said: “Here, comrade, a cigarette for you because you didn’t have one for me.”
The man came to a halt and said firmly: “Go away or I’ll call the guard.”
“I’ll go when you’ve taken it,” declared the Lieutenant.
The man looked at him, made no attempt to take the cigarette, but raised his carbine a little. “Do be sensible. Go away,” he said at last.
The Lieutenant also desired to win over the other. “Comrade,” he said, “take the cigarette. Oblige me and take it. So that I know you are still my comrade. There!” He held it toward him. “If you don’t take it, I’ll have to give you a punch in the mug,” he added threateningly.
The man scrutinized him, serious and watchful. He made no attempt to take the cigarette but waited to see what the other would do.
A sudden thought made the Lieutenant almost mad with rage. “Ah!” he shouted. “I can see you think I’m drunk.… I’ll show you how drunk I am!”
He dropped his cigarette and at the same moment hit out at the soldier’s face. But, Heaven only knew why, the Lieutenant, usually a very skillful boxer, had no luck today. With a dull sound his fist struck the wood of the carbine stock, and a burning pain shot through his hand and arm. Then the butt hit him on the chest with great force and he tumbled over backwards. He felt that he would never be able to breathe again.
And as he lay there, battling for breath, with the sentry’s watchful eye on him as if he were a savage beast, and considered that he had not been arrested or taken into the barracks or fired upon, and remembered in the hundredth of a second that in his pocket there was a pistol with which he could pay back the shameful blow—then he was pierced by the thought that he had not only deceived his comrades about the betrayal of the dump and made fresh difficulties for them quite unnecessarily, but that he was also nothing but a coward. He was doing all this only to delay the journey to the Black Dale, to postpone the discovery of the truth, to steal a few more hours of life. His outer varnish disintegrated, colour seemed to peel off him; his whole existence seemed like the rotten carcass of an old wooden shipwreck. This is what you are! said the voice within him.
And while he lifted himself gropingly from the earth, while he walked on with aching limbs, taking no notice of the sentry, not even thinking of him—so completely had his new understanding extinguished all that had just happened—he could not help recalling again and again that summer morning in the wood when he had driven little Meier before him with a pistol. How he had despised the pitiful coward; what disgust had overwhelmed him at his entreaties! And now the anxiety was gnawing at himself: Shall I be as cowardly? Will I even have the courage to press the trigger? How will I die?
This thought grew ever stronger in him, and in a few minutes was completely dominant.
How will I die? Like a man or a coward? Will my hand tremble perhaps? Will I shoot myself blind, as little Rakow did? God, how he screamed!
He shuddered, gripping the smooth pistol stock in his pocket as if it could give him that self-confidence which had never failed him his whole life long and which now, when death was near, so completely deserted him. I must be quick, he thought desperately. I must go quickly to the Black Dale, so that I can make certain. How can I live when I don’t even know if I am courageous enough to die?
And all the time, while every fiber in him seemed to be urging a decision, he was going painfully but persistently away from the Black Dale, from death, farther and farther away, toward the carrying out of a repugnant job of spying which was already of no purpose to him. But he was no longer aware of this. When he saw a small public-house which he had sometimes visited, it occurred to him that he could not possibly appear before the servant-girl Frieda in such soiled clothes, and he entered. Ordering a glass of beer from the landlord, he asked if he hadn’t some jacket which he could put on in place of his dirty one.
The landlord looked at him for a moment; he knew more or less, of course, whom the Lieutenant represented. He disappeared, to come back with a brand-new trench jacket. “I think it will fit you,” he said. “What’s happened to yours then?”
“Fell down,” muttered the Lieutenant. He had stripped off his own jacket and saw on the outside of the lower arm a large, highly-colored bruise. Without thinking he opened his shirt over the chest and found there the marks of the gun butt. Doing up the shirt again, he encountered the landlord’s eye.
“It hasn’t started already, has it?” whispered the man.
“No.” The Lieutenant put on the trench jacket. “Might be made for me.”
“Yes, I saw at once you’re about the same size as my boy. I bought him the jacket for tomorrow. My boy’s also going, Herr Lieutenant.”
“Good,” said the Lieutenant, taking a gulp of beer.
“You will see that I have the jacket back this evening, won’t you, Herr Lieutenant?” begged the landlord. “He wants to look decent when he goes tomorrow—it’s the first time he’s been in anything like this.”
“That’s all right,” was all the Lieutenant said. “What do I owe?”
“Oh, nothing,” replied the landlord quickly. “I’d like to ask, if you won’t think it—”
“Well?”
“Were you in the barracks?”
“No, I wasn’t in the barracks.”
“Oh! Then you won’t know, either. They say there’s something wrong there.” He looked expectantly at the other. Perhaps he was thinking of the blue-black patches on the Lieutenant’s body. “You don’t think, sir,” he went on earnestly, “that it’s likely to be serious tomorrow?”
“Be serious? How?”
“Oh, I only mean—serious. Fighting, shooting and so on. In that case I shouldn’t let my boy go.”
“Rubbish.” The Lieutenant laughed heartily. “What are you thinking of? Fighting, shooting! There’s nothing like that now. A
“I don’t know if you are in earnest,” explained the landlord, “but I ask completely in earnest, Herr Lieutenant. Because I have only the one boy, that’s why! If something happened to him, who’d take over this house? One doesn’t want to have worked all one’s life for nothing. You ought to have seen the place when I bought it twenty years ago. A pigsty! But now! No, if I knew that it might be serious tomorrow—it would be too much of a pity about my boy. Otherwise he can gladly go—it’s also good for business, because we have so many customers among the military.”
The Lieutenant repeated his assurance that everything was all right and not at all dangerous, and once again he promised to send back the jacket in proper time that evening. Then he left. He had lied to the landlord, but what did that matter? A few lies more or less were not important now. Seen close at hand, it was enough to make one sick, the motives leading such people to join in. But perhaps his own motives seen close at hand were equally nauseating to Herr Richter. The weakening of his self-esteem had already made such progress that the Lieutenant could conceive this.
The short halt in the public-house, the two gulps of beer, had done him good. Now he stepped out and soon came to the little street of villas which was his goal. Pulling his cap down over his brows, the Lieutenant hurried on; he did not wish to be seen and recognized, here where so many of the officers lived.
A colonel of the Reichswehr inhabited the villa he was making for. Socially the Lieutenant had every right to press the button where the notice read: “Visitors only.” However, he didn’t ring here but went ten paces farther, to a small iron garden door with the notice: “Tradesmen.” He walked along a flagged path—the visitors’ entry was laid
