The house appeared desolate, abandoned, dead.
“Yes,” repeated Herbst, “it was here; here we used to live. Through that door there she entered in her bridal dress one evening, when the stars were burning in the treetops. And through the same door they carried her out one winter day. They carried her out in a black chest and drove off with her in a grotesque wagon ridiculously gotten up, carried her off somewhere, God knows where. I doubt if I know where the grave is. I have never been there since.”
We sat down on a green bench which ran around one of the old tree trunks. We sat there a long while in silence. Paul Herbst was tracing flourishes in the sand and now and then spearing a withered leaf with his stick.
“You see that left gable window up there,” he went on. “There she sat when I came home and when I went away. There we both sat together as evening drew on. When the sunlight fell in aslant, it painted the shadow pattern of the chestnut’s leaves on the bright wallpaper and brought out a warm glow from her red mahogany sewing board. There we would sit in the bright May evenings with the window open. And in the dusk of December afternoons I used to unfasten her hair and let it run between my fingers … while the city down below there was sunk in wintry darkness … in silence and dream.
“She was a good child, Margot. I remember a New Year’s Eve, our last. We had gone to church together, she had wanted to. It was packed and fearfully warm. Margot went to sleep with her head on my shoulder. Suddenly the preacher broke out with a thunder; she awoke and was frightened at having been asleep. He was her spiritual adviser, and we had our pew right under the pulpit; she was positive that he had seen her. She thought he looked at her so sternly and coldly. She was depressed all the evening afterwards. She was afraid she had been too happy, she whispered to me; what if God had grown angry and would do her some harm?
“She was a guileless, conscientious little being. She knew little of the world’s evil, and my own knowledge was much the same—at that time. … Toward spring she got brain fever and died. In three days it was over.”
There was a rustling in the trees. Herbst sat in silence and traced in the sand.
I sat and stared at the moon’s reflection in the left gable window. There one might have had some notion of happiness once. A peaceful nook, protected, remote.
“Who lives here now?” I asked so as to say something.
“Some artisans’ families, I believe. The house has run down.”
And he continued with a smile, “That must be their wash hanging out there. It reminds me of a story from the time when we lived here. Before us the house had belonged to an apothecary who had come to grief, I don’t know how, and gone bankrupt. More than once I saw him out on the street looking in through the palings. One night—it was bright moonlight as now, and I was standing at the window with Margot—one night I saw him steal into the yard. The tears came into Margot’s eyes when she recognized him. Our laundry was hanging out. He looked cautiously round; it was dark in our window, and he didn’t see us. When he thought he was unobserved, he hurriedly tore down all the clothes from the line and threw them higgledy piggledy on the ground. He acted as if he was on the rampage. The man obviously had a screw loose; he couldn’t stand seeing strangers’ clothes hanging to dry in the same yard where in the old days his own shirts and drawers had dangled in the moonlight.”
A cloud slipped over the moon. Herbst rose. “Well, let’s go! I’m freezing.”
He had won back his calm. When he was out on the street he lighted a cigarette and after a while resumed:
“So happiness passes from one to another. It’s no good shutting your hands on it with a convulsive grip; no matter what you do, some day you’ll be standing with your hands full of empty air. The only thing to do is to take everything with the same imperturbable equanimity as a well-conducted gambler when he loses the last thing he owns. … What if existence afterwards should be like a worn and faded coat which one would gladly give away to a beggar; it’s all one has anyhow. So one can only refrain from exposing his poverty too openly, one must keep close to the houses on the shady side of the street; and when one sees the stream of humanity billow forward on the opposite sidewalk, one may console himself with the knowledge that in time they will all come over to the shadow side—one by one, sooner or later.”
“That’s a fine consolation, ‘A solace for a tiger heart.’ ”
“Yes, it leaves much to be desired, I grant … but there is no other. Furthermore there is a certain interest in seeing one after another of one’s friends and acquaintances slip into the freemasonry of the shadow side. One sees it on them when they have passed the line—in their walk, their carriage, the lines around the mouth, and the corners of the eyes. After that nothing matters. The end will be the same, whatever happens: one will be carried out of his house by six fellows dressed in black, who smell of brandy and have white cotton gloves, and one will be buried in the ground amid reading and mumbling of incantations.”
We went along the street in silence; only our steps echoed between the rows of houses. A company of night revellers took a clamorous farewell at a street corner. A door with a rattling chain was pushed open and shut with a bang. Herbst turned up
