Towards the west, opposite the door through which she had entered, the room had a second window. Against the wall next to it, so that the light fell on the hand of him who sat at it, stood a great writing desk with all the apparatus of a learned archaeologist: bronzes and terracottas from Rome and Greece, little models of ancient temples and houses, and other articles risen up out of the debris of the past, filled almost the entire top-piece. But above it, as if emerging from blue spring air, hung the life-size head of a young woman; like a youthful crown the gold-blonde braids lay about the clear brow. “Beauteous”, this antiquated word had been revived for her by her friends long ago, when she was still wont to greet with her smile those who crossed the threshold of this house. And so she looked down from the wall even now in this portrait, with her blue child-eyes; only about the mouth there played a slight trace of melancholy, which no one had seen on her in life. At the time the painter had no doubt been rebuked for it; later, after she had died, all seemed reconciled to it.
The little black-haired girl approached with soft steps; with passionate intensity her eyes clung to the lovely portrait.
“Mother, my mother!” she said in a whisper, but as if she were trying to reach her with the words.
The beautiful face looked down lifelessly from the wall, as before, but the child climbed, nimble as a cat, over the chair upon the desk, and now stood with defiantly curling lips before the picture, while her trembling hands tried to fasten the stolen rose behind the lower bar of the gold frame. When she had achieved this, she got down again quickly and with her handkerchief carefully wiped the marks of her feet from the desktop.
But now it seemed as if she could not find her way out of the room that she had previously entered so timidly; after she had already taken some steps towards the door, she turned about again; the west window beside the desk seemed to exert this attraction upon her.
Here too there was a garden down below, or, to be more exact, a garden wilderness. The space to be sure was small, for where the rampant shrubs did not cover the high surrounding wall, it was visible on every side. Against this wall, opposite the window, there was an open reed hut in evident dilapidation; in front of it, almost covered by the green fabric of a clematis, stood a garden chair. Facing the hut there must once have been a clump of standard roses, but now they hung like dry twigs on the faded stalks, while below them, covered with countless blooms, cabbage roses scattered their falling petals all about on grass and weeds.
The little girl had propped her arms on the window sill and her chin on her two hands, and looked down with eyes of longing.
Two swallows were flying in and out of the reed hut; they must have built their nest inside it. The other birds had already gone to rest; only a redbreast was still singing lustily from the topmost branch of the denuded laburnum, looking at the child with his black eyes.
“Aggie, where are you keeping yourself?” said an old voice gently, while a hand laid itself caressingly on the head of the child.
The old serving woman had come in unnoticed. The child turned her head and looked at her with a weary expression. “Annie,” she said, “I do wish I could go into grandmother’s garden again!”
The old woman did not answer; she merely pressed her lips together and nodded a couple of times as if agreeing. “Come, come!” she then said. “How you look! They’ll be here right away, your father and your new mother!” With that she drew the child into her arms and put hair and dress in order with stroking, twitching fingers. “No, no, Aggie! You mustn’t cry; they say she is a kind lady, and pretty, Aggie, and you like to look at handsome people!”
At this moment the rattle of a carriage came up to them from the street. The child started, but Anna took her by the hand and quickly pulled her out of the room. They were in time to see the carriage drive up; the two maids had already opened the front door.
The old servant’s statement seemed to be justified. A man of about forty years, in whose serious features one could easily recognize Aggie’s father, lifted a beautiful young woman out of the carriage. Her hair and eyes were almost as dark as those of the child whose stepmother she had become; indeed at a fleeting glance one might have taken her for the child’s own mother, had she not been too young for that. She bowed graciously, her eyes looking about as if seeking something, but her husband led her quickly into the house and into the downstairs room, where she was greeted by the fresh scent of roses.
“Here we shall live together,” he said, as he forced her down into a soft armchair, “do not leave this room without having found your first moment of rest in your new home!”
She looked up at him confidingly. “But you, will you not stay with me?”
“I will bring to you the best treasure of our house.”
“Yes, yes, Rudolf, your Agnes! Where was she just now?”
He had already left the room. It had not escaped the father’s eyes that at their arrival Aggie had kept hidden behind old Annie; now, finding her standing out in the hall as if lost, he lifted her up in his two arms and carried her thus into the room.
“And here you have Aggie!” he said, laying the child on the rug at the feet of her lovely stepmother; then, as if he had other things to attend to, he went out; he wanted to let these two find the way to each other.
Aggie slowly got herself up and stood in silence before the young wife; they looked each other in the eye, uncertain and guarded. The latter, who had undoubtedly assumed a friendly reception as a matter of course, finally grasped the hands of the little girl and said gravely, “You know I’m your mother now, so shan’t we love each other, Agnes?”
Aggie looked at the floor.
“But I may say Mama?” she asked timidly.
“Of course, Agnes; call me what you like, Mama or Mother, just as you prefer!”
The child looked up at her in embarrassment and replied anxiously, “I could say Mama easily!”
The young woman cast a quick glance at her, then fixed her dark eyes on the still darker ones of the child. “Mama, but not Mother?” she asked.
“My mother is dead,” said Aggie softly.
In an involuntary agitation the young woman’s hands pushed the child away, but immediately she drew it back passionately to her breast.
“Aggie,” she said, “Mother and Mama is the same thing!”
But Aggie made no reply; she had never called her own mother anything but Mother.
The conversation was at an end. The father had come in again, and finding his little daughter in the arms of his young wife, he smiled contentedly.
“But come now,” he said cheerily, as he held out his hand to the latter, “and as mistress take possession of all the rooms in the house!”
And they went out together; through the downstairs rooms, through kitchen and cellar, then up the broad stairs into a great hall and into the smaller rooms which opened into the corridor on both sides of the stairs.
The dark of evening had already fallen; the young wife hung more and more heavily on the arm of her husband; it almost seemed that with every door which opened before her a new load rested on her shoulders; ever briefer grew the replies to his happy and fluent speeches. At last, when they were standing before the door of his study, he too was silent and raised the lovely head, which rested mutely on his shoulder, up to his own.
“What is it, Inez?” he said. “You are not glad!”
“O yes, I am glad!”
“Then come!”
As he opened the door, a soft light shone upon them. Through the west window shone the gleam of the golden sunset, coming from beyond the shrubs of the little garden. In this light the lovely picture of the dead woman looked down from the wall; below it on the dull gold of the frame the fresh red rose lay like a flame.
Involuntarily the young wife laid her hand upon her heart and stared speechless at the sweet lifelike picture. But already the arms
of her husband had firmly embraced her.
“She was once my happiness,” he said. “Now it is to be you!”
She nodded, but without speaking, struggling for breath. Oh, this dead wife was still alive, and for both of them there could not be room in one house!
Just as before, when Aggie had been here, from the great north garden came the mighty baying of a dog.
With gentle hand the young wife was led by her husband to the north window. “Look down there a moment!” he said.
Down below on the path which encircled the wide lawn sat a black Newfoundland dog; before him stood Aggie, describing with one of her black braids an ever narrowing circle around his nose. Then the dog threw back his head and barked, and Aggie laughed and began the game all over again.
The father too, as he looked on at this childish play, had to smile, but the young woman at his side did not smile, and it was as if a dark cloud floated over him. “If it were her mother!” he thought, but aloud he said, “That is our Nero, you must get acquainted with him too, Inez; he and Aggie are good comrades, and the huge beast will even let himself be harnessed to her doll carriage.”
She looked up at him. “There is so much here, Rudolf,” she said half absently. “If I can only find my way through it all!”
“Inez, you are dreaming! Just ourselves and the child, it is the smallest family to be found.”
“To be found?” she repeated dully, and her eyes followed the child, who was now racing around the lawn with the dog; then suddenly, looking up at her husband as if in fear, she threw her arms about his neck and pleaded, “Hold me tight, help me! I feel so heavy-hearted.”
Weeks and months went by. The fears of the young wife seemed not to materialize; the household seemed to run itself under her management. The servants submitted readily to her rule, at once friendly and dignified, and all those who came in from outside felt that the master’s house was once more in the hands of a wife who was a proper match for him. The keener eyes of the husband, to be sure, saw things differently; he recognized only too clearly that she dealt with the things of his house as if she had no part in them, but must look after them all the more conscientiously, as a mere caretaker. It could not reassure this experienced man that at times she would nestle up to him with passionate intensity, as if she must assure herself that she belonged to him, and he to her.
Nor had a closer relationship to Aggie developed. An inner voice, both of love and of wisdom, urged the young woman to talk to the child about her mother, the memory of whom she had preserved so vividly, so obstinately, ever since her stepmother had entered the house. But that was just the trouble! The sweet picture which hung upstairs in her husband’s room, even the eyes of her mind refrained from looking at it. She had indeed plucked up courage more than once; she had drawn the child to her with both hands, but then had lapsed into silence; her lips had failed her, and Aggie, whose dark eyes had lit up joyously at such a heartfelt impulse, had sadly gone away again. For strange to say, she was longing for the love of this beautiful woman, in fact, as children will, she secretly worshipped her. But she lacked a form of address, which is the key to every cordial conversation; the one form, so she felt, she might use, the other she could not use.
This latter hindrance was felt by Inez too, and since it seemed the easiest to remove, her thoughts reverted to the point again and again.
So she was sitting one afternoon beside her husband in the living room, looking into the steam which arose with a soft hum from the tea kettle.
Rudolf, who had just finished looking through the newspaper, took her hand. “You are so still, Inez; today you didn’t interrupt me a single time!”
“There’s something I’d like to say,” she replied hesitantly, freeing her hand from his.
“Say it then!”
But still she was silent awhile.
“Rudolf,” she said at last, “tell your child to call me Mother!”
“Why, doesn’t she do that?”
She shook her head and told him what had happened on the day of her arrival.
He listened quietly. “It is an expedient,” he then said, “that the child’s soul unconsciously discovered all by itself. Shall we not be thankful for it?”
The young wife did not answer the question, she merely said, “Then the child will never come close to me.”
Again he tried to take her hand, but she withheld it.
“Inez,” he said, “you must not demand what nature denies; don’t require of Aggie that she be your child, nor of yourself that you be her mother!”
Tears burst from her eyes. “But – I am supposed to be her mother,” she said almost vehemently.
“Her mother? No, Inez, that’s not expected of you.”
“Then what is expected, Rudolf?”
Had she been able to understand the obvious reply to this question, she would have given it herself. He felt that and looked thoughtfully into her eyes, as if he must look there for the helping words.
“Admit it now!” she said, misinterpreting his silence, “you have no answer to that.”
“O Inez!” he cried. “Wait until a child of your own blood lies in your lap!”
She made a gesture of rejection, but he went on, “The time will come, and you will feel how the delight that radiates from your eyes will awaken the first smile of your child and draw its little soul to you. Over Aggie, too, two blissful eyes once shone like that; then she would throw her little arm about a neck that stooped down to her, and would say, ‘Mother.’ Don’t be angry at her for being unable to say that to any other woman in the world!”
Inez had scarcely heard his words; her thoughts were following only the one point. “If you can say: She is not your child, then why don’t you also say: You are not my wife!”
And there the matter rested. What did she care about his arguments!
He drew her to him; he tried to quiet her; she kissed him and smiled at him through her tears, but it did not solve her problem.
When Rudolf had left her, she went out into the great garden. Upon entering it she saw Aggie with a schoolbook in her hand walking around the wide lawn, but she avoided her and took a side-path that led between bushes and along the garden wall.
The expression of sadness in the lovely eyes of her stepmother had not escaped the child’s fleeting glimpse of her, and as if drawn by a magnet, still studying and murmuring her lesson out loud, she too had gradually got upon that path.
Inez was just standing before a gate in the high wall, which was almost covered up by a climbing plant with lavender blossoms. Her eyes rested absently upon it, and she was just about to resume her quiet stroll when she saw the child coming towards her.
Now she stood still and asked, “What gate is this, Aggie?”
“To grandmother’s garden!”
“To grandmother’s garden? Why, your grandparents have been dead for a long time!”
“Oh yes, a long, long time.”
“And whose is the garden now?”
“It’s ours!” said the child, as if that were a matter of course.
Inez bent her head under the branches and began to pull and shake the iron latch of the door; Aggie stood by in silence, as if waiting to see the result of these efforts.
“But it is locked!” said the young wife, as she desisted and wiped the rust from her fingers with her handkerchief. “Is it that neglected garden that one can see from father’s study window?”
The child nodded.
“Listen, hear how the birds are singing over there.”
Meanwhile old Anna had entered the garden. When she heard the two voices by the wall, she hastened to join them. “There are callers inside,” she reported.
Inez laid her hand kindly on Aggie’s cheek. “Father is a poor gardener,” she said as she moved away. “We two must get in there and set things to rights.”
In the house Rudolf came to meet her.
“You know that the Müller quartet is playing tonight,” he said. “The doctor and his wife are here to warn us against sins of omission.”
When they had joined the visitors in the parlour, a long and animated conversation about music ensued; then there were household affairs to be attended to. For this day the neglected garden was forgotten.
In the evening the concert was given. The great past masters, Haydn and Mozart, had swept by the listeners, and now the last chord of Beethoven’s C minor quartet was dying away, and in place of the solemn stillness in which only the musical notes gleamed up and down, the chatter of the crowding audience filled the spacious room.
Rudolf stood beside the chair of his young wife. “It is over, Inez,” he said, bending over her. “Or do you still keep on hearing something?”
She still sat as if listening, her eyes directed to the platform, on which nothing but the empty stands remained. Now she held out her hand to her husband. “Let us go home, Rudolf,” she said, getting up.
At the door they were stopped by their physician and his wife, the only persons with whom Inez had so far formed any close association.
“Well?” said the doctor, nodding to them with the expression of the deepest contentment. “But come along with us, our house is right on your way; after a concert like this one should stay together for a while.”
Rudolf was just about to express a cheerful acceptance when he felt his sleeve gently plucked and saw the eyes of his wife fixed upon him in the most urgent pleading. He understood her perfectly. “I refer the decision to a higher court,” he said humorously.
And Inez inflexibly managed to put off the doctor, not so easily overcome, to another evening.
When they had taken leave of these friends at their own house, she drew a deep breath of liberation.
Immensee and Other Stories Page 5