“I don’t want to bring back any memories at all,” replied Doralice, who was close to tears.
Hans turned this over in his mind: “Yes, yes,” he murmured, “it was fusty and grey for you here and you wanted to be around something beautiful, of course I understand. Very good.”
Both of them fell silent for a while and Doralice perceived that the little bit of joy that the dress had brought her was now gone. Hans got up and paced nervously about the room, then he stopped and asked: “Are you going to keep that dress on?”
“I can take it off again,” replied Doralice meekly.
“Yes,” continued Hans, “you see, it looks somewhat out of place here in this room. I feel as if I am with a model.”
“A model,” repeated Doralice in a hurt voice.
“No, no, not a model,” Hans reassured her, “it was stupid of me to say that. Listen, I will explain it to you. It was in Munich, I was living on the fourth floor, in a very ugly room of course. At the shop of an art dealer I fell in love with a French glass bowl, a pretty thing, as if made of pink and green ice, much too expensive for me. Very well. But I had fallen in love, and when I received some money for a picture, I bought the bowl and carried it back home. I set in on my table. The table had a hideous yellow table cloth with blue flowers. No, that didn’t work. I set it on the chest, a crudely stained yellow chest. But that was even worse. I set it on the washstand, in the window… well, what can I say, wherever I put this bowl, in every single place, it produced a false note, it tormented me like a toothache. I was only happy when the thing had been returned to the art dealer. Do you see?”
“Am I that bowl?” asked Doralice. “Not you, your dress, your dress.” Hans stood in front of Doralice and waited anxiously for her response. But she said nothing and stood up and went into the bedroom to change. Hans, however, began to pace rapidly around the room again – he was furious. So he had upset her once again, but these days that seemed unavoidable. Did it not seem as if love were an arrangement that bound two people together so that they could torment each other? It truly appeared to be so. But it was not supposed to be like that, and when Doralice came back in her dark dress and sat down quietly in her chair again, he burst out: “You’re upset, I know, I know. But you will see, I will create a setting for you in which you can dress like a queen.”
“Ah, the little house,” interjected Doralice.
“Actually, something much more splendid,” continued Hans impatiently. “There is a lot that can be done in Munich right now. I will establish a painting school and then I will work, I’m full of ideas, I have so many stored up in me that I am loaded like a bomb, and when I explode in that world of decadent city dwellers, it will open some eyes. I am already looking forward to it. Come, let’s light the lamp and then together we will write some letters to Munich right away.” He rubbed his hands and laughed, he was quite eager, thirsting for action. But Doralice said wearily: “Oh no, please don’t light the lamp.”
Hans stood there for a moment and reflected, then he slowly sat down on a chair, lit himself a cigarette and smoked. Both of them remained silent, it got darker and darker, the dusk appeared to stream down onto the land with the rain, the wind was trapped somewhere in the house and there was a sound like mournful laughter. Doralice sensed that Hans, sitting next to her in the darkness, was fighting with himself, and her awareness of his agitation, the anticipation that there would perhaps be a passionate scene, comforted her during this melancholy hour. Then Hans began to speak again in a calm, kindly manner: “You see, this is what happens.”
“What do you mean?” asked Doralice.
“The fact that we are sitting here and not talking to each other, as if we were enemies,” explained Hans. “We are not enemies and we have much to say to each other, but we are behaving like this because something in our love has come to an end and something new must begin. Now the most delicate, most sensitive parts of our souls must come to an understanding, now an extremely complex reckoning must begin, a sort of deriving of square roots. It has always been this way, it must always be this way. I can’t always be the unexpected event that I was back then.”
“I never demanded that you always be an event,” replied Doralice.
“I know, I know, and I also know what we need to do now to bring an end to this wretched moment. We must walk down to the sea. It’s dark and it’s raining, but that doesn’t matter, the sea will cure us, the sea can always be an event, and down there we will be drawn to each other, and you will find that we will feel like friends again, and then you will also be able to tolerate the lamp again.”
He fetched Doralice’s cloak, wrapped it tightly around her, took her arm and led her out into the open air.
Outside they had to struggle against a strong wind, the roar of the sea was deafening, a babble of great voices that shouted down and interrupted each other. And in the twilight the waves heaved up like great white shapes, drawing themselves up, bending over, falling down. At times Hans and Doralice suddenly found themselves standing as if on a cold, white cloth – an incoming wave had surged all the way up to them. They both laughed, pressed themselves close together and Hans asked over the roar of the surf: “Do you feel it, do you feel how we are already becoming better friends once again?”
“Yes, yes,” replied Doralice, breathless from all of the strongly gusting air that she was forced to breathe.
*** *** ***
At the Bull’s Inn, too, the rainy afternoon was weighing upon the spirits of the household. There was tension in the air in any case, which was driving the residents to wander among the cramped rooms in a state of irritated and joyless agitation. “My troop,” said the Generalin to Fräulein Bork, “is prowling about like polar bears in a cage. Let’s have all of the lamps lit, absolutely no gloom, it’s dangerous. And then plenty of good food. That is how we will most easily forget our troubles.” The house grew quite bright, the Generalin sat down on the sofa with Fräulein Bork and laid out a game of patience. She spoke with her strong, soothing voice, laughing at her card game. She compelled the betrothed couple to play piquet with each other. “There is nothing better for restless lovers than cards,” she maintained. Wedig and Nini played draughts and argued, and Herr von Buttlär paced about the room with small, nervous steps and looked again and again at the barometer. Then his wife appeared in the dining room door and said: “Buttlär, a word, please.”
“Certainly, certainly, my dear,” he replied, pulling himself more upright with a jerk. “What is it then?” He followed his wife into the dining room and the door closed behind him. The Generalin shook her head discontentedly and remarked: “Bella has always overestimated the effectiveness of such confrontations.” The conversation of the married couple lasted for a good long while. They could hear the voice of the Baron, which was growing emotional, and Wedig whispered to Nini, “Did you hear that? Papa just said ‘poetic desire.’”
Hilmar and Lolo were increasingly distracted from their game. Finally the dining room door opened again, Frau von Buttlär came into the sitting room, sat down silently at the table and took up her needle work. She was pale, they could see that she had been crying. But the Baron, who had remained in the doorway, said solemnly, “Hilmar, a word, if you please.”
“At your service,” Hilmar replied and jumped up. But as he did so he drew his eyebrows together and for a moment his face assumed such an angry expression that Lolo looked at him with alarm. Then both of the gentlemen disappeared behind the door of the dining room. The Generalin raised her eyebrows and said: “What these conferences are good for, I don’t know, they don’t contribute to a cosy atmosphere.” “No, dear mother,” replied the Baroness as she continued to crochet studiously, “I am cheerless and prosaic, I was just told that. Others can be cheerful and poetic, but not me. I am like the policeman whom everyone needs and nobody likes.”
“Come now, Bella,” objected the Generalin. Fräulein Bork, on the other hand, approved of the sentiment. A mother’s love
serving as a police force for the happiness of others was, she said, a beautiful idea.
“You have spoken well, dear Bork,” replied the Baroness, and the Generalin grew irritated: “I never said that a decisive intervention can’t be useful now and then, but it is always better if it is short and sharp rather than long and ill-tempered.”
“And who is ill-tempered?” asked the Baroness, to which the Generalin had no response. Meanwhile Lolo was pacing restlessly about the room. She paused by the French doors and looked out into the darkness, then opened the doors and went out onto the veranda. The wind, as if it had been lying in wait for her, immediately assailed her, tearing at her dress, burrowing into her hair. Resounding blasts, like the rush of great, hurried wings, were flying through the night – breakneck, exuberant life was cavorting out here in the night and Lolo stood there and breathed it in deeply and purposefully. She was suffering, but indoors in the glow of the lamp her pain had been unbearably sharp, whereas here outside she could feel it as something grand, almost beautiful. When she then heard the dining room door opening and the men returning to the sitting room, she opened the French doors a crack and called to Hilmar. He stepped out to join her on the veranda. For a moment they stood next to each other silently in the darkness, Lolo had taken Hilmar’s arm and was leaning firmly on it. Finally she said softly: “Did he reproach you on my account?”
“Oh, he was right to do so,” replied Hilmar, his voice choked and despondent. “They are all right – if you are suffering on my account, then that makes me a filthy swine. I shouldn’t have been allowed near you, you must be kept happy and safe.”
Lolo began to speak again quite softly and consolingly: “No, you can’t do anything about it, neither of us can do anything about it. There are some things in this world that are stronger than the both of us. I understand that now. Oh, I understand a great deal now. I used to think that being in love meant sitting together and holding hands and writing each other long letters. But now I know that being in love is a terribly serious business, and thus one also has to be ready to perform very great deeds and… why shouldn’t I also suffer? You are suffering too, and many, many others are suffering. No, my poor Hilmar, I may not have a tragic mouth, but there is nothing of the blue Sunday smock about me either. But rest easy, we will find the right way.” And she patted his sleeve gently with her hand.
“Lolo! Lolo!” cried the Baroness and the Baron knocked on the window pane. “They are calling for me, we must go inside,” said Lolo.
“I can’t go in there now,” moaned Hilmar, “but you, you must be safe and happy and I… I am a filthy swine. Then he stooped over her and pressed his hot, dry lips firmly against her eyes, then pushed her away and ran out into the darkness. Lolo stood there for a moment, raising both hands to her breast and looking out into the night with hot, fanatical eyes, intoxicated by her own great pain.
From the kitchen door on the narrow side of the house three figures wrapped in cloaks crept down to the beach. It was Nini and Wedig, who had stolen away from the sitting room and were now, under Ernestine’s guidance, pursuing their favourite pastime of spying on the Countess. To accomplish this, they had to climb a dune so that they could approach the right-hand window at the back of the Wardein house. It was a pleasure to escape from the stuffy air of the sitting room, which was in any case heavy tonight with ill feeling and boredom, and to grapple with the wind, to clamber up the steep walls of sand, to push through damp juniper bushes, and above all to be fearful of what they might meet in the darkness. Now they could already see the small, bright square of the window, they needed only to climb carefully down the sandy slope in order to creep closer when Ernestine hissed a warning. Instantly all three of them ducked down behind a juniper bush. Someone was already standing there in front of the small, bright square: a short, crooked figure and a long, regular-featured profile stood out sharply against the yellow-illuminated window pane.
“His Excellency,” whispered Ernestine. They did not dare to move. The small man standing there in the darkness before the window seemed terribly sinister to them. Then suddenly he was no longer there, he had disappeared into the night. But the three young people still did not dare to move forward, cowering silently instead behind their juniper bush. Once again a figure emerged out of the night and stood before the window, a slender figure, a dark head, a fine-featured profile that stood out against the bright pane like a silhouette.
“It’s Hilmar,” said Wedig. This time it seemed to them that they had a long wait before this figure also disappeared into the darkness. Only then did they dare to stir from their hiding place, approaching the window, peering at Hans sitting at the table writing a letter, looking at Doralice in her chair, her head leaning back, gazing dreamily before her with eyes wide open.
Later when Nini, tucked into bed in their chamber under the eaves, related her adventures to Lolo, she said: “You know, she looked as if it is terribly exhausting to be so beautiful.”
“Yes, because it’s a terrible responsibility to be so beautiful,” came the solemn, wise response from Lolo’s bed.
Note
36“Where the scorpions creep and the satyrs gather,”: Isaiah 34:14. The Privy Counsellor is quoting, or paraphrasing, Luther’s German Bible. It reads somewhat differently in the English of the King James Version:
“The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.”
Chapter Eleven
Around midnight a thunderstorm had broken and the wind had arisen suddenly, spinning about erratically, as if it were coming from all directions at once, so that the waves drew themselves up and then staggered drunkenly. But it did not last long. The storm subsided as suddenly as it had arisen; from the west came a gentle breeze that caressed and calmed the waves. A cloudless day dawned, the sun shone down on a marvellously green sea, the shore was covered with washed-up seaweed as if by black silk, and the air was completely filled by the sharp, salty smell of the sea.
Hans and Doralice had already climbed early in the morning up to their usual place on the dune. Doralice was lying there on her blanket in the sand and looking out at the sea. Hans was painting, to be precise he was painting Grandmother Wardein, who was sitting there motionless on a chair, her hands folded in her lap. The tough, wrinkled skin of her face gleamed in the sun, as if a trace of ancient gilding were still clinging to her, and the cloudy yellow eyes looked out at the wide world with a gaze that stared fixedly into the distance with complete indifference. As he painted Hans talked about his art. Since yesterday he had been talking endlessly and enthusiastically about his art and his prospects for success: “It’s coming along brilliantly. You are a splendid model, Mother Wardein. Human destiny cannot be revealed more clearly than it is in the lines of your face. A portrait,” he said, turning to his wife, “should of course give us a sense of its subject’s life. And for that reason one should only paint people that one doesn’t know, otherwise one adds too much. Thus, it is quite difficult for me to paint you, for example, because I know too much about you.”
You know all about me?” asked Doralice.
“Of course.”
“Then you know more than I do,” replied Doralice.
Hans put down his paintbrush and looked at Doralice with surprise: “You know, for some time now you have taken to uttering the occasional unpleasant aphorism, just like the Privy Counsellor.”
Doralice sighed: “Ah, yes, it’s not exactly pleasant to perceive within oneself a growing similarity to the Privy Counsellor.”
Hans shrugged his shoulders and reached for his paintbrush. They both fell silent. Doralice peered attentively at the beach down below, as if something might occur down there that would directly concern her. There were carts and shaggy ponies down there as well as fishermen, who were loading the seaweed that they would later drive out to their fields. And a small grey figure with
a fluttering headscarf was pacing restlessly by the shore, stopping now and then to look out to sea. “Our Steege isn’t back yet?” asked Hans. “I see his wife is still running to and fro down there.”
“Whether he comes back with his boat,” answered the old woman in a voice that sounded as deep as a man’s, “or whether he comes back without his boat, no one can know. Mathis, my husband, came back on the second day over there, not far from the graveyard, without his boat. Ernst, my son, did not come back at all. Well now, that is just like Steege. When no one else will go out, he goes out – he thinks he will have all of the fish for himself. It was still blowing something fierce when I went to have a look at midnight. I always go and take a look at midnight, ever since the days when I waited for my own menfolk.” The deep, hoarse voice went on softly, not as if she were addressing the others, but rather as if once she got started talking she could not easily fall silent again.
Doralice raised herself slightly to get a better look at the fisherman’s wife on the beach, who was restlessly roaming along the edge of the breaking waves, waiting, waiting for something terrible, and what was that Mother Wardein had just been telling them, had she too not had a long, interminable life in which she had always been waiting for something terrible to happen? Doralice screwed up her face, she could have wept, not out of compassion, but because all of this darkness was suddenly drawing so near to her. The morning with its light, its fragrance, its breeze had seemed so full of promise to her. It had perhaps all been meaningless, but it had done her good. Now all of that was over. She shrank back despondently, she no longer wanted to see and hear. And yet she soon felt compelled to open her eyes again to see if the grey figure down below was still there. She was there. But now something else was advancing through the sunshine, Hilmar, in a blue flannel suit, his red necktie flashing from afar; he was walking swiftly with a rocking gait, his shoulders were swaying slightly, and every line of the blue figure, which stood out gaily against the backdrop of the green sea, was so full of eager recklessness that Doralice had to smile. Hilmar went down to the boats, where he found young Stibbe. He ordered him to make the sailboat ready, he had to go sailing today, such weather would not come again. Hilmar did in fact want to go sailing, but he rose from bed this morning possessed by another desire as well, one of those desires that burned inside of him like a fever: he wanted to go sailing with Doralice. It did not matter whether this was probable, whether it was possible, he knew only that he had to go sailing with Doralice. And so he marched straight up the dune to Herr and Frau Grill.
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