His uncle stood meanwhile to one side, looking at the picture and the youth. He had shown no special concern, and when Victor made the first move away from the picture, he immediately went on ahead so as to lead him out of the room, saying nothing more either about the picture or Victor’s father other than the words: “The likeness is amazing.”
Once back in the dining-room, he carefully closed the concealed door and began to walk about the room in his usual fashion, fiddling about with the objects lying and standing around—from which Victor deduced from experience that his uncle no longer wished to have anything more to do with him for the present.
He therefore decided to go outside again onto the island. The door to the outside steps was once again closed. Victor didn’t want to go to his uncle to get him to let him out, but thought instead of the cupboard into which the old woman had gone with the dishes the day before and assumed there was a way out of the house through there. He soon found the cupboard, opened it and did indeed see steps leading down, but, on going down these, instead of finding himself outside, they brought him into the kitchen, where he met none other than the old woman, who was busy with all the many and various things to do with the midday meal. She was being helped, however, by a girl who looked almost like a simpleton. Victor asked the woman if she could let him out into the garden.
“Of course,” she said, led him back up the steps he had come down and fetched his uncle, who immediately opened the door for him and let him out.
Victor now realised that the wooden steps constituted the only way out and that a deep distrust kept this sole exit locked, even though the whole place was girt about with an impenetrable wall.
The day passed like the day before. Victor came for lunch at two o’clock and then went off again. Towards evening something unusual took place. Victor saw a boat coming towards the island and heading directly for the wooden boathouse he had discovered the day before. Victor ran hurriedly down the steps to the mooring hall. The boat approached, the barred gate was opened from outside with a key, and old Christoph, quite on his own, rowed in. He had fetched provisions and other necesssities and for this reason had been in Hul and Attmaning. Seeing the cargo, Victor couldn’t grasp how the old man could have put together such a load of things and rowed it all across the lake. He was also upset he hadn’t been told about the old servant’s trip, as he would have given him a letter that was to go to his mother. Christoph began to unload everything and, with the help of the simple girl, to carry the various sorts of meat on a litter up to the ice cellar. Victor saw them open a small and very low iron door at the rear of the house. When he went down the steps on the other side of this door, there, by the light of the lantern they had lit, he saw a huge pile of ice, on which all manner of provisions were lying, and which spread a dreadful chill throughout the room. The business of unloading was completed in the late dusk.
The third day passed in a similar way to the first two—and so, too, the fourth and the fifth, while in the distance the Grisel was a constant presence, with the bluish rock faces to the right and the left, while below lay the glimmering lake and, in the midst, the bright green of the island’s mass of trees; and like a small grey stone in this green sat the monastery with the house. In the branches of the trees many a patch of blue from Mount Orla shone through.
Victor had now been in every place along the perimeter wall, had sat on all the benches in the sandy forecourt or garden, and stood on all the promontories along the shore’s edge of that enclosed place.
On the sixth day he could not bear the way things were any longer and so decided to bring the matter to an end.
Early in the morning he dressed more carefully than usual and so appeared at breakfast. When this was over and he was standing in the room beside his uncle, he said: “Uncle, I wished to speak with you, if, that is, you have the time to listen.”
“Speak,” said his uncle.
“I would like to request that you kindly reveal to me the reason why I was obliged to come to this island, if, that is, you had a particular reason, for tomorrow I am going to resume my journey.”
“It’s more than six weeks still before you are to take up your post,” his uncle replied.
“Not as long now, Uncle,” said Victor. “Only thirty-five days. But I’d like to spend some time in my future place of residence before I take up my post and would therefore like to leave tomorrow.”
“But I’m not letting you go.”
“But if I ask you, and request that you have me taken over to Hul tomorrow, or, if you prefer, the next day, then you will let me go,” said Victor firmly.
“I’ll let you go only on the day you have to leave in order for you to arrive at your post in good time,” his uncle rejoined.
“But you can’t do that,” said Victor.
“Indeed I can,” his uncle replied, “for the whole property is surrounded by a strong wall dating back to the monks, the way out being the iron grille gate that no one besides me knows how to open, while the rocky shore of the lake, which forms the next border, is so steep that no one can get down to the water.”
From childhood Victor had never been able to bear the least injustice and had clearly used the word ‘can’ in its moral sense, while his uncle had used it in its material sense; so on these last words his whole face became suffused with the dark red of indignation, and he said: “So I am a prisoner, then?”
“If you want to call it that, and if the way I have disposed things here makes it such, then you are,” his uncle retorted.
Victor’s lips now trembled and he was so agitated he couldn’t say a word—but then he cried out: “No, Uncle! You cannot dispose things just as you would like, for I shall go down to the rocky lake shore, throw myself off and so be smashed to pieces.”
“Do so, if you are that weak,” said his uncle.
Now Victor really couldn’t bring himself to utter another syllable—he was silent for a while and thoughts of revenge against the harshness of this odious man rose up in him. On the other hand he also felt ashamed of his childish threats and realised that by hurting himself he wouldn’t be putting up a very effective resistance. He therefore decided to defy him with patience. And so it was he said finally: “And when the day you named comes, you’ll then have me taken across to Hul?”
“I’ll then have you taken across to Hul,” his uncle replied.
“Good—well, I’ll stay until then,” Victor answered, “but I tell you, Uncle, that from now on all ties between us are severed and that we can no longer be on the same footing as relatives.”
“Very well,” replied his uncle.
Still in the room, Victor put his hat on his head, and, pulling the dog he had with him by his lead behind him, left the room.
The young man now regarded himself free of every obligation he had otherwise believed he was under as regards his uncle, and decided to give himself free rein to behave from now on in any way not forbidden by his sense of morality or made impossible by the limitations that blatant force now imposed on him.
Leaving his uncle, he went to his room and wrote there for over two hours. He then went outside. On either side of the door that opened out to the outer steps was a ring that served as a knocker. Whenever Victor from now on wanted to go out or come in, he no longer, as before, went to his uncle to get him to open the door for him, but instead stood there by the door and banged on it with the knocker. At this sign his uncle always came, if he was in his room, and opened up. If he was himself outside, then the door stood open anyway. During lunch this first day Victor said nothing, neither did his uncle ask him anything, and when the meal was over both of them got up and Victor left immediately. Dinner was the same.
Victor now set about investigating every part of the enclosure. He plunged into the shrubbery behind the house, went from one tree to the next, looking at and examining the features and form of each and every one. On one occasion he beat a path through all the bushes and creepers growing on the inside of the who
le length of the property’s perimeter wall. As musty and dilapidated as it was in many places because of the innumerable plants growing on it, the wall was everywhere nevertheless sound and solid enough. He also explored everything in the house in which he lived with his uncle, upstairs and downstairs and along every passage, but little came to light as a result of such investigations. At every point where a door or gate appeared, the padlocks were firmly in place, and large, heavy cupboards, which may once have contained cereals or suchlike, were standing in front of them, permanently preventing access, just as most of the windows in the passages, as Victor had immediately noticed the first day, were boarded up apart from a thin strip through which the light came. Except for the passages running between the dining-room and his two rooms, and the stairs which took him down to the kitchen—these two being areas he had been familiar with for some time—he discovered nothing in his uncle’s house, apart perhaps from the stairs that had once led down to what had been the front door, but which now came to an end at a low gate, locked and covered in rust.
What gave Victor most pleasure was the old monastery. He walked round all the sides of the grey, desolate square building, and one day, when he was in the tumbledown cloister garden, from which the church towers were visible, he managed to climb over a low transverse wall, from which he was able to break off several tiles, and so into an outer courtyard, and from there into unlocked rooms inside. He walked through a passage where the old abbots had gone in and out, and where their portraits looked down from blackened pictures, with their names and dates in blood-red at the foot of each. He came into the church and stood in front of the altars, stripped of their gold and silver—then, crossing many flagstones worn smooth by countless footsteps, he had reached some cells, whose doors happened to be open, and which now echoed in the musty air. Finally he had climbed up the towers and seen the silent, dust-laden bells hanging there. After climbing back over the diagonal wall into the orchard, he released his dog, which he had tied up to a trunk, and left.
Several days after the strange scene with his uncle, he went down to the boathouse in order to wash himself partially in the refreshing water, as he had often done now. As he was sitting on the bottom step in order to cool off, and looking in front of him, he noticed in the depths of the water, either because it was a particularly fine day or because he had become more observant, that one of the pointed stakes of the barred outer gate reaching down into the water was shorter than the others, and so made a gap through which it might be possible to dive down through and so reach the lake outside. He decided to attempt it immediately. To this end he went to his room and fetched his swimming costume. On returning with this and having cooled off and changed, he headed for the deeper part of the water; there he laid himself along the surface, dived under carefully, swam forwards, lifted his head up and found himself outside the barricade. After taking off his lead, he was even able to take the dog out with him through the struts, being as thin as he was. The boy now swam around happily in the deep lake in large circles away from and back to the barricade, with his dog paddling alongside him. When he had exercised himself enough, he approached the gap again, dived, went under the stakes and so back into the boathouse. After this swim he dressed and left. He now did this every day. When the heat of the day started to ease off, he went to the boathouse, got himself ready and then swam as long as he pleased outside and around the barricade.
At this time the idea struck him that he could get his clothes out through the barricade stakes along with a store of bread and pull these along behind him floating on a rope, until he had swum round the nearest end of the wall that curved inland. He could climb out there, dry his clothes off in a hidden place and then put them on. It would surely be possible, if only the bread held out, to wait there until he could get one of the little boats fishing on the lake to come over and pick him up. Indeed, in moments when his imagination was most fired, he even had the idea that, drawing hard on his physical strength and summoning all his spirits, he could perhaps swim over as far as Mount Orla—from there he would have to find his way, by climbing and hiking, over to Hul. The enormity of this piece of daring didn’t seem so daunting to him, because after all the monks had once climbed over Mount Orla, too, and that was in winter as well. But he didn’t stop to think that the monks were men who knew the mountains, while he was but a youth who had no experience of these things. But as enticing as all these delusions may have been, he couldn’t carry any of them through, since he had promised his uncle to stay there until the requisite day—and he wanted to keep this promise. For this reason he always came back under the barricade after his swim.
Apart from swimming he spent the rest of his time doing other things. He had already visited and familiarised himself with each and every corner of the enclosure area. He now began to pay attention to the coming and going of the lights on the mountains and little by little became aware of the quivering colours that passed over them as the times of day slowly changed or when the clouds raced faster over the bright overarching sky. Or, while sitting with the sun at its zenith or when it had just dipped behind the mountain ridge, he would listen to see if he could hear the bell from Hul ringing for prayers—for on the island you could hear neither the striking of the hour from a clocktower nor the tolling of a bell: but he never heard anything, for the green and thick wall of trees that covered the best part of the island lay between his ears and the beautiful sound he had heard on that first evening on the lake, coming from the rocky shore. After a long period of starry nights—for Victor had arrived when the moon was waning—very beautiful moonlight nights had finally made their appearance. Victor then liked to open his windows and, being cut off from his fellow man, watch the magical light shimmering, glittering and fading on the lake and rock faces, and then see the black, unlit rock masses in the midst of this sparkling world, hovering like strangers.
He spoke not a word to Christoph and the old woman servant whenever they met him, since he didn’t think it proper to exchange words with his uncle’s servants when he was not speaking to their master.
And so the time slowly passed.
One day towards five o’clock, as he was crossing the flower garden on his way to the boathouse for a swim, with his poor dog as usual on a lead behind him, his uncle, who was sitting as was his wont on a bench in the sun, addressed him and said: “You don’t have to have the dog on a lead like that. You can let him run free with you if you want.”
Astonished, Victor looked in the man’s direction and saw no dishonesty at least in his face, though nothing else besides.
The next afternoon he tried letting his dog go. Nothing happened to him and from now on he let him off the lead every day.
And so again more time passed.
On another occasion, when Victor was in the middle of a swim and happened to raise his eyes, he saw his uncle standing and looking down at him from a door that opened from the roof of the boathouse. The expression on the old man’s face seemed to suggest an appreciation of the skill with which the youth cut through the water and of how he often looked fondly at the dog swimming alongside him. The great beauty of the youth, too, spoke gently in his favour, how the water played about his young limbs and flowed round his innocent body, abiding the ravaging might of time and what fate had in store in the unfathomable future. Whether in the old man there were also some feelings of kinship stirring towards the young person, the only one who stood closer to him in blood than any other in the world—who can tell? Whether today was the first time he had watched him or whether he had done so often already, was also not certain, for Victor had never before looked up towards this door in the boathouse roof. But the next day, at five in the afternoon when Victor was crossing the garden and saw his uncle tending the flowers, the only loving activity he had ever seen him engaged in, and had walked by without saying anything to him, he found to his great astonishment, when he had reached the boathouse, one of the barricade doors standing open. He was inclined to attribut
e this event to some circumstance unknown to him; but at five o’clock the next day and on every day that followed the boathouse stood open, while for the rest of the entire day it was always locked.
These things put Victor on the alert and he quickly realised he was being watched by his uncle.
The time passed so deathly slow that one day he found himself standing yearningly at the iron grille gate of the perimeter wall once more—something which out of pride he had never done since his imprisonment. He had put his face between two of the bars in order to look out, when he suddenly heard a rattling noise in the ironwork: a chain that he had often noticed running up from the bars and disappearing into the wall was moving and at that moment, he could feel, from the slow outward give of the bars, that the grille was open and letting him out. He went out and walked about in several parts of the island. He could now have used the opportunity to escape, but because his uncle had freely let him out he didn’t use it and so returned voluntarily to his prison. As he approached the grille, it was shut but it opened as he came up and let him in, closing behind him again.
The Bachelors Page 9