The echo of the shot interrupted this quarrel. The Lieutenant started out of his thoughts. “He has fired a pistol!” he cried and began running.
“Who?” she asked, received no answer, and ran after him.
Their course took them over the moonlit park. Its long grass wetted her stockings; then through bushes, across paths, right through flower beds. Vi panted, wanted to call out and could not, since she had to keep on running.
Then the Lieutenant paused and signaled to her to be quiet. She peered over his shoulder through lilac and guelder-rose bushes and just caught sight of the weeping poultry maid disappearing in the direction of the Manor. Bailiff Meier was standing motionless outside the house.
“Hasn’t hit her, thank God!” whispered the Lieutenant.
“Then what’s she crying for?”
“Fright.”
“The fellow must go to jail,” exclaimed Vi.
“Don’t be so silly, Vi. Then he’d let his tongue wag a bit, wouldn’t he? I suppose you’d like that?”
“Well, and now?”
“Now we’ll wait and see what he’s going to do.”
The little dark figure went quickly up to the staff-house; even in the bushes they could hear the noise of the vigorously slammed door. Bailiff Meier was gone.
“Now he’s gone,” said Fraulein von Prackwitz disconsolately. “And from now on I shall have to be particularly polite to him, so that he won’t tell Papa.”
“Just wait a bit,” was all the Lieutenant said.
They did not have long to wait. Hardly three or four minutes. Then the door opened again and out stepped Meier, a suitcase in his right hand, a suitcase in his left hand. He did not even waste time in closing the door again, but strode on, a little hampered, it is true, yet at a steady pace—toward the farmyard, out into the world— away.
“He’s clearing out,” whispered the Lieutenant.
“Thank God!”
“You won’t see him again,” he muttered, and fell silent, as if he was annoyed at what he had said.
“Let’s hope so.”
“Violet!” he said after a while.
“Yes, Fritz?”
“Wait here a minute, will you? I just want to find out something in the office.”
“What do you want to find out there?”
“Oh, nothing much.… Just to see what it looks like.”
“What do you mean? It doesn’t matter to us.”
“Still, let me. Excuse me—now, you wait here!”
Hurriedly the Lieutenant went over to the staff-house. He felt his way through the dark passage, switched the light on in the office and went straight to the drawer containing the weapons. It was half open, but this was not sufficient for him. He pulled it right out and regarded its contents very attentively.
No, the nine-millimeter Mauser was not there. He closed the drawer again, switched off the light and went out.
“Well, what does it look like in there?” Violet asked a little maliciously. “I suppose he tidied it up quickly?”
“What should it look like? Oh—I see—yes, of course. Pigsty, that’s what it looks like, my little lamb.” The Lieutenant was strangely cheerful.
She took advantage of this at once. “I say, Fritz.”
“Yes, Violet?”
“Do you still remember what you wanted today?”
“Well, what did I want? To give you a kiss? All right, come along then!”
He seized her by the head, and for a while she lay completely breathless in his arms.
“There!” he said. “And now I must dash off to Ostade.”
“To Ostade? Oh, Fritz—you wanted to look round my room to see whether I kept a diary.”
“But, my lamb, not today. I really must dash off. I’ve got to be at Ostade at six!”
“Fritz!”
“What?”
“Isn’t it possible at all?”
“No—completely impossible today. But I shall come, quite definitely. The day after tomorrow; perhaps tomorrow even.”
“Oh, you’re always saying that. You didn’t say anything this evening about having to go at once to Ostade!”
“I must, I really must.… Come, Violet, walk along with me as far as my bicycle. Now, please don’t start making a fuss, my lamb.”
“Oh, Fritz, you … the way you treat me …”
V
For a long time Petra had sat as if benumbed. Her sick enemy also lay still for a long time, exhausted. She had hurled all the abuse of which she was capable into Petra’s face; spitting at her, she had reminded Petra in an ecstasy of malicious exultation of how she had once dragged her out of a taxi. “Away from that fine rich bloke. And your umbrella also went flying!”
Mechanically Petra had done what was to be done: had given her a little water, laid a compress on her forehead and a towel over her mouth, which she kept pushing away. However much the other abused and reviled her, jeered and tried to hurt her, it no longer affected Petra, just as the noises of the city, growing ever quieter after midnight, no longer affected her. The city outside, her enemy here inside—neither meant anything.
A feeling of extreme loneliness had numbed everything in her. In the end everyone was completely alone with himself. What others did, asked, performed, was nothing. With a single solitary person on it the earth whirled along its path through the infinities of time and space, always with one mere solitary person on it.
Thus Petra sat, thinking and dreaming—Petra Ledig, spinster. She tried to convince her heart that she would never see Wolf again, that things had to be this way, that this was precisely her fate, and that she must resign herself to it. In the days and weeks to come she was often to dream and try to convince herself. Even if love, filled with longing, would not let itself be convinced, there was yet something like consolation, like a faint memory of happiness, in the mere fact that she could thus sit and dream.
Therefore she was almost annoyed when a hand placed itself on her shoulder and a voice roused her from her brooding with the words: “I say, jail-birdie, talk to me. I can’t sleep. My head aches. Your girl-friend pulled my hair so hard, and I can’t help thinking of my business, too. What are you thinking about?” It was the fat elderly woman from the lower bed, whom the Hawk had previously attacked. She pushed a stool next to Petra, scrutinized her with dark mouse-like eyes and, tired of sitting alone and brooding, whispered, with a nod of her head toward the sick woman: “She can sting like a wasp! Is it true, what she said about you, jail-birdie?” Of a sudden Petra was glad that the other had spoken, that there was some diversion in the long night; she found the woman not too bad, if only because she looked without animosity at the girl who had caused her no little pain.
“Some things are true and some things are not true,” she answered readily.
“But that you go on the streets—that’s not true, is it?”
“A few times,” began Petra hesitatingly.
But the old woman understood at once. “Yes, yes, I know, my pet!” she said kindly. “I’ve also grown up in Berlin. I live in Fruchtstrasse. I’ve also lived through these times—such times as we’ve never had before! I know the world, and I know Berlin, too. You smiled at someone when you were hungry, eh?”
Petra nodded.
“And that’s what a cow like that calls going on the streets. And she squeals on you for a thing like that. She did squeal on you, didn’t she?”
Petra nodded again.
