he made it his business to be acquainted with all that went on, to see everything, to know everything. Hubert knew a great deal—he knew, for instance, exactly how the young Fraulein had spent her afternoon. Which madam didn’t know.
“Have you seen to Grandpapa’s geese this afternoon?” Hubert heard Frau von Prackwitz ask.
Frau Eva von Prackwitz was a very good-looking woman, perhaps a trifle plump, though one noticed it only when she stood beside the tall, lean Rittmeister. She had all the sensual charm of a woman who was glad to be a woman and who, in addition, loved country life, and whom the country seemed to reward for this with an inexhaustible freshness and cheerfulness.
Vi pulled a reproachful face. “But, Mamma, there was a storm this afternoon.”
Hubert understood. This evening Fraulein Violet was playing the role of a small girl, which she particularly liked to do whenever she had been up to some very grown-up mischief. This would stop her parents from thinking any wrong of her—that is, from thinking of her aright.
“You would really do me a favor, Violet, if you kept an eye on Grandpapa’s geese. You know Papa gets so annoyed when the geese get into his vetch. And the storm only started at six o’clock.”
“If I were a goose I wouldn’t like to be in Grandpapa’s old damp park with its sour grass,” declared Vi with a childish pout. “I believe the park stinks.”
Hubert, who well knew how often and how gladly the young Fraulein stayed secretly in the Geheimrat’s park, was enchanted by the naivete of this precautionary reply.
“But, Vi, the word ‘stink’—and at table!” Frau Eva’s calm and smiling glance passed over Rader’s wooden yet far from youthful face.
“All right, Mamma. I won’t go there, I think it st—smells of corpses.”
“Stop it, Vi!” Frau Eva knocked on the table very energetically with the handle of her fork. “That’s enough. Sometimes I think you might be a little more grown-up.”
“Yes, Mamma? Were you more grown-up when you were my age?” The girl’s expression was completely innocent—nevertheless the servant wondered if the artless young person had possibly heard a rumor of her mother’s youthful pranks. There was a story about the old Geheimrat thrashing a farmer’s boy out of his daughter’s bedroom window; and perhaps it was true. At all events, Hubert found that Frau Eva’s next question fitted in very well with the rumor. “What had you to say to Meier that took such a long time this afternoon?” she asked.
“Pooh!” said Vi disparagingly and pouted again. “Old Black Meier.” She laughed. “Imagine, Mamma, all the girls and women in the village are said to run after him, and yet he’s as ugly as—I don’t know, as old Abraham.” (Abraham was the he-goat they kept in the stable, in accordance with the old cavalry idea that he banished disease.)
“The dessert, Hubert!” admonished madam still calmly, but with rather dangerously flashing eyes.
Rader marched out of the room, not without regret. Fraulein Vi had made a slip. And now she would certainly get a good talking-to. She had been piling it on a little too much in her exuberance; madam was not a fool by any means. Hubert would have liked to hear what the mother said, and above all what the daughter answered. But Hubert was not one to eavesdrop; he marched straight away to the kitchen. Granted common sense, there were many ways of learning what one wanted to know. One needn’t shake, by eavesdropping, an employer’s confidence in an exemplary servant.
Old Forester Kniebusch sat at the kitchen table, waiting.
“Good evening, Herr Rader,” he said very politely, for the detached and taciturn manservant was regarded as a power in the land. “Is supper finished yet?”
“The dessert, Armgard,” said Rader, and started to arrange the plates on the tray. “Good evening, Herr Kniebusch. Whom do you want to speak to? The Rittmeister doesn’t come back till tomorrow.”
“I only wanted to see madam,” said Kniebusch cautiously. After long deliberation he had come to the conclusion that he had better lay his knowledge before the older generation. Fraulein was too young to be of any real use to an old man.
“I’ll announce you, Herr Kniebusch,” said Rader.
“Herr Rader,” asked Kniebusch, “could it be arranged that Fraulein Vi is not present?”
Rader’s face showed even more furrows. To gain time he snapped at the cook: “Get on, Armgard. I’ve told you a hundred times that you’re to arrange the cheese dish before I come.”
“In this heat!” sneered the cook, who hated him. “The butter balls would stick to each other.”
“You need not take the butter out of the refrigerator until the last moment. But if you’re still only cutting up the cheese!” And in low tones to the forester: “Why shouldn’t the young Fraulein be present?”
Kniebusch became visibly embarrassed. “Well, you know … I only thought … not everything is fit for a young girl’s ears.”
Rader regarded the embarrassed man with the inscrutability of an idol. “What’s not for young girls, Herr Kniebusch?” he asked, but without any noticeable inquisitiveness.
Kniebusch turned red with the sheer labor of inventing a lie. “Well, Herr Rader, you understand, when one is so young and the rutting season on …”
Rader gloated over his confusion. “There’s no rutting now,” he said contemptuously. “All the same, I understand. Thanks. Uniform—u-ni-form is the password.”
With expressionless fishy eyes he looked at the intimidated, confused forester. Then he turned to the cook. “Well, ready at last, Armgard! But if madam scolds, then I shall tell her whose fault it is. Don’t speak to me, I’ve nothing to say to you.” And he went away with the tray in his hand, grave, far from youthful, rather mysterious. “We’ll have a word later, Herr Kniebusch,” he said and vanished, leaving the forester in the dark as to whether he was to be announced or not.
“What a swelled head that donkey has!” grumbled the cook. “Don’t have anything to do with him, Herr Kniebusch. He pumps you—and afterwards tells everything to the Rittmeister.”
“Does he always behave to you like that?” inquired the forester.
“Always,” she exclaimed. “Never a good word to Lotte or me. The Rittmeister’s not nearly so grand as that ass. He won’t even eat at the same table with us.” She stared at the forester, who muttered something unintelligible. “No, he carries his plate to his room. I believe, Herr Kniebusch,” she whispered mysteriously, “he’s peculiar. He has no interest in women. He’s …”
“Yes?” The forester was curious.
“I don’t want anything to do with such a creature,” asserted Armgard. “Do you think he would as much as touch the Rittmeister’s cigarettes!”
“Yes, doesn’t he?” asked the forester hopefully. “All servants do. Elias always smokes the old gentleman’s cigars. I know the smell because the Geheimrat sometimes gives me one.”
“What? Is that true about Elias? I’ll rub it in to the old rascal. Fancy pinching cigars from the master and then storming at me because I haven’t wiped my boots properly at the Manor entrance!”
“For God’s sake, Armgard, please don’t say a word to him. I might have made a mistake.” The old man fell over himself with anxiety. “It’s probably quite a different cigar, and you’ve just said that Hubert smokes the Rittmeister’s cigarettes.…”
“I haven’t said anything of the kind. I said quite the opposite. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t listen at doors; he thinks himself much too grand for all that, the silly fool.”
“I’m much obliged to you,” a voice rasped, and the two looked intensely startled at Rader’s face. (Old Frog Face, thought Armgard furiously.) “So I’m a silly fool! It’s good to know what people think of you. Go to madam, Armgard; she wants to talk to you. Not that I should have told tales about the cheese, anyway; you’re too stupid for me to bother about. You can tell her, however, that in your eyes I’m a silly fool.… Come, Herr Kniebusch.”
And, obedient but very depressed by all the complications of domestic life, the forester followed with an embarrassed squint at the cook, who, crimson with rage, fought back her tears.
Rader’s room was only a narrow strip of floor in the basement, between the coal cellar and washhouse. It was another reason for his grudge against Elias, who had a proper large two-windowed room in the upper story of the Manor, very cozily furnished with antique furniture. Rader’s room contained only an iron camp bed, an iron washstand, an old iron folding chair from the garden and an old wobbly deal wardrobe. One couldn’t tell that a human being lived in the room. No article of dress was visible, nor the smallest utensil of the occupant’s, not even soap or towel in the washstand, for Hubert Rader washed himself in the bathroom.
“There,” he said. “There, you can sit down on the chair till she comes. Then you can get up and give her your
