good was a duck if he could not live to see it? Would a father not be more useful for him than a wind-up toy? In my passion I forgot my situation. I pushed away my milky coffee. In my room, I packed what would fit into my walking sac. I “borrowed” one of the stout ash sticks kept in a box by the door. I did not say goodbye, but goodbye was what I meant. I must go home.
Soon thereafter I was greeted by the mistress of the inn. It had been my first impression that she was a comic figure but by now I knew this was in no way true. Never mind, it was for one night, then back to England. The old procuress thought me rich and I did not disabuse her. She gave me her best room and said she would dry my clothes by the kitchen fire.
Rage did not make me reasonable. I thought, I will go home tomorrow. I did not yet consider that I had neither funds nor home to return to. I thought, to hell with everything. I will do what I wish.
I rejected the asparagus and ordered veal stew and dumplings. The first glass of yellow wine arrived wrapped in a pearl-white cloud of condensation. I felt a quite ridiculous confidence. It was really not until the fourth glass that the dark cloud settled on me. Cloud? It was a rock to crush my chest. I had no home to go to. I had had my childish outburst and tomorrow I would have to go crawling back inside my cage.
I was in this miserable condition when the door swung open and a damp wind blew across the room. It was the relentless Sumper, of course, his great wet head shining like a river rock. When he sat at my table I thought, thank heavens, he is sucking up.
He sat sideways, his great legs splayed out, surveying the room.
“There are beings superior to this,” he announced (as the landlady, bending and bobbing deferentially, served his stein). “If there were not superior forms of life to this,” he said, “I would hang myself.”
I thought, is this an apology? He would not look at me. The stein returned to the table and was replaced immediately while the procuress, again, performed her servile dance. I noticed how studiously the habitues avoided looking at us. They understood Sumper had the power to harm. Of my true nature no one had the least idea, particularly not me.
“Don’t be concerned,” he said, still avoiding my eyes, “not one of them speaks English.” He called, “Who speaks English?” and none dared answer.
“There,” he said triumphantly. But he had only proved himself a boor.
“Are these truly human?” he cried in that great booming voice. “Look at them. Tell me your opinion,” he demanded. And finally he turned his chair and I realized there was something shifty in his gaze. Is he frightened he will lose me?
“Come Brandling, what do you think?”
I thought I had put myself in thrall to a most eccentric bully, but I gave him the courtesy of a civil answer, saying that our fellow drinkers looked very human to me, all gathered together in their differences and similarities, the marks of toil on their common people’s hands, the sad erosion of life upon their features. I thought to relate to him certain parts of “The Stigmata of Occupation” wherein the author studies corpses and remarks on the swollen fingers of washerwomen, the particular calluses of metal-workers and coachmen and the similarity of the thumb’s expansion in shoemakers and glass-blowers. He also gives instructions for boiling the skin and nail clippings of suspected copper-workers. A “beautiful blue colour” is a positive sign.
He followed me closely, to an unusual degree.
“So,” said he when I had finished. “That is your opinion?”
“A little more than opinion.”
“Yes, of course, they have stigmata, as you say.” (Was this the first time he agreed with anything I said?) “But do they have souls?” he demanded.
“Yes, like all men.”
There, finally, I saw his mind move elsewhere and of course his interest could never be in “all men,” only in himself.
“This is my birthplace, can you imagine? When I understood my mother had carelessly delivered me into such company, can you understand my rage? But you can fathom none of this,” he said. “You are English.”
I groaned before I knew what I had done.
“You were not born locked up in this dung heap,” he said angrily. “You do not believe in ghosts and hobgoblins and the sacred heart of Jesus. You have travelled. It does not help to be able to identify the stigmata of their occupations. Even when alive, these creatures you see do not travel. They stay here with their hairless thighs, their depressed chests, their fairy stories. They have Puss in Boots but they have no idea the entire universe is changing. They cannot imagine a magic beyond a bean. They have never seen a simple threshing machine. They have not known the Englishmen I knew, the machines I helped make. You have no idea how insulting it is that you should ask me to make this toy. Of course,” he said quickly, “you meant no offence, I understand.”
“All men,” I said, “need money to live.”
“I am not making it for profit,” he said, “but because you love your son.”
“You also have a son,” I blurted. What made me say it, I have no idea. To stop him? To cancel him? In any case, I knew Carl was not his son.
“Are you blind?” he cried. “This boy is no one’s son. He is what these idiots would call an angel. If they knew the truth they would crucify him. Of course the ignorant father dragged him off in the middle of a riot. He might as well have offered up a Dresden bowl, he had no idea of the treasure. The universe is blessed that the child was not really cracked and broken. Beer,” he called, or words to that effect. “You do not want a duck,” he declared.
“You accepted my plan.”
“I am instructed to make something far superior.”
“It is I who instructs you.”
Then suddenly his manner was very soft and gentle. He laid his big hand on top of my arm and grasped it. “Henry,” he said. “We need each other.”
I have met men like this before, fierce, hard, rude, but capable of this swift seductive kindness. When he said our need was mutual I believed it was the truth. His eyes turned soft as silk inside their bony case. He leaned closer and, with that great hand still holding me, spoke softly. “What are you doing with your life? To what use is it put? What higher purpose do you serve?”
He would dominate and use me, so he thought. Alas, I must use him. “Dear Sumper,” I said, “you must make me the duck or I will make you very sorry.”
He stood suddenly. I thought, what now?
He would leave the inn. I with him.
“You are a sad man,” he said as we came out onto the muddy track. “You have suffered a loss.”
I thought, be calm, he cannot know that.
I followed him down off the saddle of the road, down into the clear under-forest. I thought, he is a fraud but I was, quite suddenly, hot all over.
As he walked, he belittled the fairytale collector, saying he was a simpleton who bought whatever stories the peasants invented for him in the winter. They were not real fairy stories at all. He however, he told me, had a twenty-four-carat fairy story. He was thinking he might trade it with the fairytale collector for something useful.
I thought, none of this is true. Also, I have not seen a single piece of clockwork, not an axle or a wheel.
He said, a mother had a little boy of seven years who was so attractive and good that no one could look at him without liking him, and he was dearer to her than anything else in the world. He suddenly died, and she could find no consolation …
I needed him. I let him talk.
“She wept and wept,” he told me. However, not long after he had been buried, the child began to appear every night at the very places he had sat and played while still alive. When the mother cried, he cried as well, but when morning came he had disappeared. The mother could not stop her weeping, and one night he appeared in the white shirt in which he had been put to rest.
To listen was a torture. Had I not been desperate for his services, I would have stopped his ugly mouth.
“He had the little laurel wreath still on his head. He sat down on the bed at her feet and said, ‘Oh, mother, please stop crying, or I will not be able to fall asleep in my coffin, because my burial shirt will not dry out from your tears that keep falling on it.’ This startled the mother, and she stopped crying. The next night the child came once again. He had a small lantern in his hand and said, ‘See, my shirt is almost dry, and I will be able to rest in my
