lightning and the almost incessant threat and rumble of thunder far away. Out of the primeval origins of all human existence, liberated by this evil age, rose the earliest hatred of children for their parents. Youth against Age, recklessness against slow deliberation, blood against cold flesh.…
“I wanted to take it away without your knowing, but that, of course, was nonsense. It’s just as well to tell you everything once and for all—everything.… And after I’ve spoken I’ll take away the picture.”
“I won’t give it up,” she cried, jumping to her feet and standing in front of it. “No!”
“I’ll take it,” he said undaunted, and remained seated. “I’ll carry it off before your eyes and sell it, and Petra shall get the money, all of it.”
“You won’t take it by force!” There was fear in her voice.
“I shall take it by force,” he cried, “since I intend to have it. And you’ll be sensible. You know I want it, and that I’ll get it, too.”
“I’ll call the police,” she threatened, wavering between telephone and picture.
“You won’t call the police,” he laughed, “because you know quite well you gave me the picture.”
“Look at him, Minna,” cried Frau Pagel, and now she had forgotten that it was her son standing there. She saw in him the male, the male who always acted contrary to common sense, woman’s enemy from the beginning of time.
“Look at him! He can’t wait to get back to his girl! To deliver her from the police! It’s all lies and acting. She interests him as little as anything else. He only cares about money.” She mocked him. “Nice money, much money, dollars, pounds—but not for the dear, beautiful, good Petra in jail, for Fraulein Ledig; no, for the gaming table.”
She stepped aside, surrendering the picture, stood at the table, rapped it hollowly. “There, take it. That’s the worst I can do for you, to let you have it. Sell it, get money, a heap of money. And that will show your silly, obstinate, cantankerous mother to be in the right again—you won’t make the girl happy with it. You’ll lose the money gambling, just as you’ve gambled away everything else—love, decency, feeling, ambition, the power to work.” She stood there breathless, with flaming eyes.
“Anyhow, I thank you, Mamma,” said Wolfgang, suddenly dead tired of quarreling and talking. “And that’s the end of that, eh? And of everything else, too. I’ll send for my things this evening; I don’t want to burden you with them any longer. With regard to your prophecies, though—”
“Take everything,” she shouted, trembling in every limb as she watched him remove the picture from the wall. “Don’t you want some of the silver for the bride’s dowry? Take it. Oh, I know you Pagels,” she cried, and was once more the young girl she had been long, long before her betrothal and marriage. “Outwardly kind and gentle, but inwardly greedy and barren. Go! Go quickly! I don’t want to see you any more. I’ve sacrificed my life to you and in the end you’ve thrown mud at me, father as well as son, one the image of the other.… Yes, go, without a word, without a look. Your father was like that, too; he was too grand for arguments, and when he wanted to do anything at night which would give him a bad conscience, he used to creep out of the room in his stocking feet.”
Wolfgang was already going, the picture under his arm. He had looked round, intending to ask Minna for brown paper and string, but she stood stiffly in the doorway. And he was, above all, conscious of his mother’s voice, that shrill, merciless voice, like a cracked bell, eternally clanging since his childhood.
He would carry the picture as it was. He must get away before it rained.
But as he crossed the threshold of the room to the accompaniment of that wild raving voice, the old servant, that silly goose whom one could never please, burst forth in his very face: “Shame on you! Shame on you!”
He shrugged his shoulders. He had done it for Petra; it was Minna’s opinion also that he ought to have done something for the girl. But never mind, let them talk.
He was out of the flat, the door was closed. Once he had chipped a corner off its porcelain name plate. He went downstairs.
How much would he get for the picture?
IV
On this twenty-sixth day of July, 1923, the divorced Countess Mutzbauer
Quarkus was a man in his late forties, stocky, with dark curly thinning hair, fleshy forehead, and a roll of fat at the back of the neck; a married man for almost a quarter of a century, and the father of five children. At first he had regarded the inflation favorably, since it had made him richer and richer, a few months changing a man with a weekly turnover of a wagon-load of pigs and two dozen cattle into a wholesale dealer whose buyers traveled into South Germany and even into Holland. Before the cattle, paid for in advance, arrived in Berlin, indeed even before they were dispatched, their value had risen twofold, threefold, and even fivefold, and Quarkus had always proved to be right when he had told his buyers: “Pay what the people ask you—it’s little enough.”
At first, raking in the money had given Herr Quarkus undiluted pleasure, creating in him a distaste for the Schultheiss pothouses, the Botzow taverns and the Aschinger saloons; and he had become a generous, even popular, client of all the bars in the old Friedrichstadt and the new West End, asserting with conviction that one could eat really decently in only three of all Berlin’s restaurants. Thus, when it came about that a genuine countess embraced him, he felt that no earthly desire of his remained unfulfilled.
But the richer he grew and the less importance money held for him, the more thoughtful became cattle dealer Quarkus. His unscrupulous optimism which hitherto had relied, without worrying about the future, on the continued fall of the mark, became dashed at the sight of this currency leaping round the dollar in bounds which would have carried a flea over Ulm Cathedral.
“There’s a limit to everything,” he muttered when he learned that his pigs had brought him in twentyfold the purchase price. At a time when hundreds of thousands did not know where to find the money for a piece of bread, he became sleepless with the worry of how to invest his.
An expression whispered on many sides—real values—reached his ear. Nobody can free himself from his early training. The lad Emil (the name Quarkus had attained significance for the surrounding world only from his twenty- fifth year onwards) had had to drive one cow along many German highroads, and look after three pigs; he had been a cattle drover before he became a cattle dealer. Longingly the thin hungry youth had looked at the farmhouses beside the highroad, where the doors emitted such an alluring smell of fried potatoes and bacon. Whether it hailed, rained, snowed, or was cold enough to freeze your very eyelashes, the farms always sprawled comfortably along the roadside, their broad thatched or tiled roofs promising protection, warmth and comfort. Even the ox which Emil Quarkus drove could notice this; when it rained it lifted its head, stretched out its tail and lowed yearningly for the farmyards.
What for the boy had been the epitome of all security and comfort, now became a refuge for the man. At a time when the mark was bounding, leaping, crashing, nothing could be more secure than a farm—excepting five or ten farms. And Quarkus was resolved to buy them.
Countess Mutzbauer,
He was sure that if he went to a farm with a bag full of notes—better still with a trunk—asked to buy a cow, bought ten, threw his money around and bragged about it and used it as a bait, then no owner would be able to resist him. And after buying ten cows he would buy the cowhouse, the straw, the land on which the straw grew, and ultimately the whole farm. And when he told the owner that he could remain and carry on with the farming, doing what he liked with the produce, that farmer would think him cracked and would find other sellers for him, more than he wanted. Till the day dawned when the mark—well, nobody could conceive what the mark would be like on
Such were, roughly, Quarkus’s reflections as frequently outlined to the Countess. Actually, since the manor had been turned down, she took very little interest in the matter, but she was too wise to be disinterested enough to let her friend travel by himself. It was always better to be on the spot, for vulgar women, to whom money was as necessary as dung to the dung-beetle, were to be found everywhere. Moreover, if he bought ten farms, an eleventh might perhaps be thrown in as her pickings; and though the idea of her owning a farm was about as reasonable as her possessing a locomotive, yet it could always be sold—in fact, one could sell anything. (Countess Mutzbauer had
