For there is also to be discovered in Grotius II.ix.80:
All men of sober judgment and enlarged information deem the public interest of higher moment than their own.
So Axel—it was the last time he ever thought of himself as Axel—righted himself and went downstairs prepared to do his best, a bluff, straightforward, elusive figure, already indistinct, with a high narrow forehead, arched eyebrows, a saturnine expression, and, as all spectators agree, extraordinary eyes.
*
Though he complained of the sport the world had had with him and of his hard lot no less, like many people who take to their heels, Epiphanius Stöss had the art of falling on his feet. He thought terrible things happened to him. The worst of these was that nothing happened to him. He would not let it. Once, in his youth, he had with a bare white bony foot disturbed the green algae which covers over the depths of experience. He had then been so revolted by the living slime clinging to his flesh that he had determined never again to endure it. This had kept him a clean prig, but after thirty years no one can go on being a prig; either you must become a prick or change. He had not changed.
It is the drawback to the faith that anyone in search of mothering can be a Christlike figure, despised, rejected, and for that reason, chosen and among the truly loved. No other religion offers quite this fatal opportunity to dispense with weaning. Stöss had therefore made himself a little nest of crushed cabbage leaves and sucked his toes.
Since it is human nature when you see an animal that begs to be kicked, to kick it, his spectacles had the glint behind them of a soul singularly satisfied to be abused in these small daily ways. They constituted proof. Sometimes alone in his room he whipped himself, but only lightly, and never with anything heavy. On the other hand, since to harm anything caused him deep pain, he was severe with his switches when minding geese or swine. In this way he did whip away the Old Adam. Though a great deal of his time was spent down on his knees, except in public, he used a hassock. For vicarious sinning he had the Confessions of St. Augustine, and it did not occur to him that that somewhat luxurious saint had used Santa Monica in any way ill. Buried in the middle of him somewhere was the wreckage of a quite decent young boy, only without any guts. He was as bedraggled as a water rat, otherwise mousy. He liked others to think ill of him. He had lost himself somewhere along the way.
This pathetic ring-tailed possum of a man fetched up at Blicksburg, where, by a combination of chance, availability, and recommendation (he was scrupulous about his duties), he was made pastor of St. Anne’s, and felt lonelier than ever. But possums, when cornered, can be dangerous. Where is there a churchman on whom God relies?
He was a true German: he had never disobeyed his superiors on his own initiative, even when they were plainly wrong. But if they were wrong, and of course they often were—did he not know better?—he never forgave them. So he was one of the many who spoke an eulogy for the late commander, and, like the rest of his fellows, turned to Joshua.
I.1.: “I will deliver to you every place that the sole or foot shall tread upon, as I have done to Moses.” I.5.: “No man shall be able to resist you all the days of thy life.” II.13: “That you will save my father and mother, my brethren and sisters, and all things that are theirs, and deliver our souls from death.” XXIV.7: “And he put darkness between you and the Egyptians, and brought the sea upon them, and covered them.” It was a long and elaborate sermon, most effective, ending with a parting injunction (XXIV. 16) not to follow strange gods.
But Stöss had been young once, so though he spoke of Joshua, what he thought of privily was the death of Baldr, who has the whole flowered summer earth for gorgeous tomb, after whose death the earth turns sere. He was struck down with a wooden wand because, of all the hosts of heaven, there was one god who did not love him. Baldr is the most embarrassing of all the northern gods. So he is not mentioned much.
Yet Herr Stöss, though he did not think so, might congratulate himself upon good choice of profession for these troublous times. Grotius has a word for that, too:
III.xi.10: Thus age and sex are equally spared [in time of war]. The same rule may be laid down too with respect to males, whose modes of life are entirely remote from the use of arms. And in the first class of this description may be placed the ministers of religion, who, among all nations, from times of the most remote antiquity have been exempted from bearing arms—Thus, as may be seen in sacred history, the Philistines, being enemies of the Jews, forebore doing any harm to the company of prophets, that was at Gaba: and David fled with Samuel to another place, which the presence of a prophetic company protected from all molestation and injury.
Blicksburg was such a place, though when he spoke of Golgotha and Galilee, it was Greece and Rome he saw. Baldr was embarrassing. Baldr was youth the way it should have been, which would have been worth dying for, instead of this way, in early middle age, of slow strangulation, for no better reason than that one had no courage.
Across his mind as he spoke marched not Joshua, but the Seven against Thebes, followed by suppliant women. Stöss blinked.
His congregation had already come to recognize that blink. It meant a passage of denunciatory exaltation, glistening with tears.
23
In the same winter that the Great King died, Frau Larsen died, too.
The children were brought in, but she did not wish to see them. She lay in a high cupboard bed, set in a niche in a room on the second floor. It was a large virginal room, a room not entered in her lifetime by any man but one.
She had made herself old. There was no trace anywhere of Captain Larsen’s widow. Instead, this was a town house of the olden time, of forty years ago. And already the servants were stealing the linens. It had not been a sudden decline. The house had been restored. She was not needed any more. The doctor came. The pastor came. The Jews stayed discreetly away. The master of the inn sent over an encouraging broth, under a napkin, but did not come himself.
She was acting out a role, of course. She had always acted out a role. You had merely to offer her one, and she turned to that instead of life.
Her dying was a long, monotonous, and dreary business. She did not find it so. She felt drowsy, cozy, and clogged, as though she had fur in her veins. You were aware of the blood trickling and wriggling through, on its long trip back to the heart. The circulation is continuous, but slower, slower, slower. The outlying parts of one’s body are shut off like disused rooms.
It is necessary to cast over the grayness of well-loved things the protective mantle of a certain glamour, a tarnhelm by whose glitter we may remain invisible, invulnerable, eavesdrop, and move naturally among our natural enemies, until death snatches the cap off. The Milky Way is the trod of faerie, a scintillating procession of stars moving off into nothingness, the fore edge of the Nebula, seen from inside. Among them the Coal Sack is carried off safely, unidentified, unknown, unknowable. The old gods, made known to us on one night of the year, smaller, shrunken, but with none of their diamond panoply impaired, move away through taller and taller trees, with rejoicing, with voices, worthless, lovable, and brave. We may join them if we will. They would like us to. Among them passes the Coal Sack, borne on rods, hung black as the Kaaba, and jostling about as importantly as the Ark of the Covenant. It disappears. We catch the echo of a winding horn. We shall never hear such music again.
Rather sadly, as they left Iceland in 1000 A.D. when the Thing ratified Christianity, asking only, here and there, at a shepherd’s hut, that perhaps a child might be baptized in the new faith with their name for old time’s sake, cap in hand, the old gods are leaving. They join the end of the procession, the endless, sparkling, diminishing, cool company of our gods endlessly leaving, filing through the black boles of the trees, down toward the lake, deeper and deeper into blackness, into nothingness, into space, into eternity, past the nebulae, beyond the universe, a pinpoint of dwindling life which, because it shrinks, will never meet its end. It is a triumph. It goes farther and far
ther from us, but it is always where it is, jostling its covenant, playing its silver horns, bearing along its Coal Sack: somewhere. It carries away with it the hot diamond odors of mignonette. All flowers that are white and have no scent have that smell.
Once a year you can see that shimmer in the woods; or every night, lie out on the wet grass on your back, and staring up at the heavens, watch them coming down the trod. But Frau Larsen had never esteemed stars. So of all this consolation there was in this room nothing.
The Pastor had dispatched a no-nonsense woman to keep her clean, a woman who had given good service in the monastic hospitals in Catholic times, and did the same in the poorhouse now. She was dropsical. When something touched her arm, the flesh did not come back at once. The touch left a white mark. She gave her patient a bed bath with a coarse rag, and changed the sheets frequently (Frau Larsen’s hoarded linen now had its first use). She supervised broth, feeding her patient from a bent metal tube. She took her pay out of a blue China bowl with a European silver cover, which stood on a gate-leg table beside the bed and contained loose silver. She was a terrible woman, remorseless, professional, full of good cheer. She turned her patient as a fishwife would turn smelts on a drying rack to make sure they were evenly desiccated.
Just before she entered her final coma, Frau Larsen who had been dying as she did everything else, by protective mimicry, gave a lizard start. Apparently now it was too late, she did not wish to be this Frau Larsen; she wished to be some other one. She sat up in bed and yelled “No.”
The nurse gauged her with clinical affection.
“You mustn’t fuss. You mustn’t make it more difficult for yourself,” she said, and held her down. After that Frau Larsen did not fuss. Her last entirely human expression was a white indignant glare from under fallen lids, with a lot of red showing. Her last words were, “Very well.” She would wait. Instead, the undertow of coma dragged her down.
The room now had that sick, sweet smell of the dying. Why does no one mention the aural horrors of death? Her respiration fell to 8, to 4. There were patches of sunlight crosshatched on the wall, from the window casement. They had not warmth in them. You can talk to Socrates, but what can you say to a beached dolphin, gasping and changing color?
Hannale buried her fingers in Lars’ fist. Frau Larsen had shut them out, as usual. Every once in a while there seemed to be a shuddering subsidence in the body, after which it was somehow smaller. And the sweat on the faces of the dying is like mucus on a trout: in an hour or two the spots fade.
“There we are,” said the nurse. “All tidy.” No matter how obstreperous the patient, she prided herself on keeping a tidy bed. The sheets had to be folded under just so. In her eye might be caught the righteous gleam of the sanctioned sadist.
Hannale shut her eyes. She could not stop her ears. Out of Frau Larsen’s dropped jaw came a clammy rush of air.
“It is a sign,” said the nurse, so intent she had forgotten the children. She laid people out, too. There was quite a lot of silver left in that blue housekeeping bowl.
Frau Larsen died.
“Is that all?” asked Hannale. “Oh, Lars.”
The nurse gave a contented sigh. “Come and kiss your mummy good-bye, child,” she said. And crooked her finger like a Norn, full of power.
Hannale refused to budge.
“Do as you’re told,” snapped the nurse. She moved toward Hannale, pursy with contentment.
“I won’t. I won’t.”
“You ungrateful, un-Christian child,” said the nurse, grabbing Hannale and shaking her, and trying to push her toward the bed. “You did love your mummy, didn’t you?”
Lars blinked. “Take your hands off my sister at once,” he said, in such a voice that she dropped them. It was an order, his first one. It had been wrung out of him.
The nurse’s loose mouth sagged. He did not notice. He got Hannale out of there.
II.xx.l: Among the dictates laid down by nature, as lawful and just, and which the ancient Philosophers called the law of Rhadamanthus, the following maxim may be placed: THAT IT IS RIGHT FOR EVERY ONE TO SUFFER EVIL PROPORTIONED TO THAT WHICH HE HAS DONE…. What has been said of the inseparable connection of a penalty with every offense is similar to the remark of Augustin, “that to make a punishment JUST it must be inflicted for some crime.”
But nobody knew what Frau Larsen had done.
24
“So you see,” said the Lutheran pastor of that place unhappily (he had taken hold, somebody had to), “it is a sad and peculiar business. And I do not know what rightly we are to do.” And he looked bleakly at the crucifix on the wall, as though for advice.
Frau Larsen was in his churchyard. There had been, as she had accurately computed, exactly enough cash in the blue bowl to take care of that. On Sunday, to an apathetic congregation, he had spoken of “the stranger in our midst.” The little girl was neatly turned out, the boy sturdy, but they were not, it appeared, to be rich children after all.
Frau Larsen had died not only intestate, but paperless. There wasn’t a scrap anywhere. Well yes, there was just one evasive note of account. She was described on her tombstone, not as the widow of Captain Larsen but as a native of this city. Nor did the Pastor find out the truth of it. He was a kindly man, well intentioned, but he had the sort of mind that makes no voyages. So Lars had not told him.
The problem was what to do with the children. Orphans, if of good estate, fell under the provenance of the Town Council. A lawyer was told off to deal with it. It was a matter of conferring, so it seemed, with the heirs of Erasmus Salterbaum.
Erasmus had been quaint. This had saved him from the fury of townsmen who had seen their trade milked dry at the hands of an accomplished, if invited, auslander. The Frankfurters were sufficiently astute at profit to be less upset by the spirituality than were most of the Germanies. But Salomon was another matter; Salomon presumed.
He was presuming now, but turned out to be bashful. It was hard to understand why; he was always well treated, unless feeling happened to be running strong. There was nothing for him to be afraid of.
Seen from the other side, this was not quite true; there was pity. Pity is not a virtue, but a wound which will not heal. We hide it as best we may, and if it suppurates, change the dressings daily.
Frau Larsen, having sold her Wollin properties and bought her Frankfort house, took her monies off to fraternize with that person she called “my Jew.” Against his advice, she invested her remaining capital in one cargo for and from the Russia trade, by way of Riga. To his relief, nothing went wrong. The profits were large. She plowed back not only the profits, but the capital as well. Perhaps gambling was the only spontaneity left to her, and now, the cost had been as high as the risk, but she could indulge herself. To her Jew’s relief, however, she consented to spread her investment, and at the time Frankfort was sacked and her house ruined, she had three ships upon those waters in which she had never taken an interest. Come and go, these voyages took ten weeks.
She borrowed against her cargoes, and took a mortgage on the house in order to restore it exactly as it had been before.
Salomon placed his stubby fingers on the oak table. They were fatty, yellowish hands, with webs. “All three ships were lost. Think of it. All three. They were not bound for the same ports. It was not even the same storm.” He sighed, took out a handkerchief, and did his best to hide his face.
“Erasmus was our most respected man,” he said, staring at the opposite wall. “She did try to save him. That house was important to her. So we gave her a second mortgage; but what is a second mortgage? It is a matter of form. I tear it up. It has been a burden. Please, I must sit down.” He sat down.
“We gave her money to go on living that way. But when a woman like that loses her security, she begins to die. So it was not for long. Also the charity.”
“What charity?”
“A few pennies every month, to some priest at Magdeburg. ‘For the relief of a poor priest.’ Always
the same one.”
“A relative?”
Salomon shook his head. “She was not a woman you ask anything. She said he was a man who had once saved her from herself. And she smiled. We discontinued it some weeks ago.”
He stared at the pieces of the second mortgage, which he had placed, like a pair of gauntlets, on the table.
“But why did she call him ‘My Jew’? He was not hers. He was ours.” And with his customary gingerly dignity, as though he were afraid of being knocked down, Salomon returned to the ghetto. The matter no longer concerned him.
The house and its contents were sold. Stöss was written to, but did not answer. Even the portraits went, to a painter who was delighted to get them; painted panels make the best of grounds. He would cover up one face with another, and since he was not short of commissions, Frau Larsen’s two faces quietly and methodically disappeared under a thin spread of gesso, supplanted in the one case by the daughter of Herr Krüger, in the other by a pleasant blue-eyed, hard-faced girl in plaits. She would never be seen again, and Lars and Hannale no longer had any house, either of their father’s, at Wollin, or here.
It was Herr Krüger who held the first mortgage. He was a man generous to his own relatives, but after his mortgage had been settled (he bought Frau Larsen’s house himself), there remained only 80 pounds out of which Hannale’s expenses were to be paid to those Sisters of Charity who were to bring her up, the remaining capital to form her dowry when she came of age (at fifteen).
“You need not worry. It will be prudently invested,” Lars was told with the mechanical benevolence of any man ordering the affairs of this world from behind a table. He had been called up before the Syndics, a beggar outside the door.
This quiet shining boy, with something odd about him, found himself confronted by two gentlemen in black gowns and velvet bonnets (one of them Herr Krüger) who had never heard the sea in their ears. Therefore he must keep away from the docks and low company. Unexpectedly, the baker had offered to take him as an apprentice, and had not asked for the fee proper to such occasions. So that was that. It was most fortunate, since the child would have to make his own way, that it had been so easy to persuade someone to teach him.
People of the Book Page 18