Chapter VIII.
A bunch of crysanthemums stood on the table, asters in vases on dresser and chiffonier—colourful and scentless.
Antonie wore a dress of black lace that had been made by the best dressmaker in the city for this occasion. In festive array she desired to meet her beloved and yet not utterly discard the garb of filial grief. But she had dressed the child in white, with white silk stockings and sky-blue ribands. It was to meet its father like the incarnate spirit of approaching happiness.
From the kitchen came the odours of the choicest autumn dishes—roast duck with apples and a grape-cake, such as she alone knew how to prepare. Two bottles of precious Rhine wine stood in the cool without the window. She did not want to welcome him with champagne. The memories of its subtle prickling, and of much else connected therewith, nauseated her.
If he left his village at six in the morning he must arrive at noon.
And she waited even as she had waited seven years. This morning seven hours had been left, there were scarcely seven minutes now. And then—the door-bell rang.
"That is the new uncle," she said to Amanda who was handling her finery, flattered and astonished, and she wondered to note her brain grow suddenly so cool and clear.
A gentleman entered. A strange gentleman. Wholly strange. Had she met him on the street she would not have known him.
He had grown old—forty, fifty, an hundred years. Yet his real age could not be over twenty-eight! …
He had grown fat. He carried a little paunch about with him, round and comfortable. And the honourable scars gleamed in round red cheeks. His eyes seemed small and receding….
And when he said: "Here I am at last," it was no longer the old voice, clear and a little resonant, which had echoed and re-echoed in her spiritual ear. He gurgled as though he had swallowed dumplings.
But when he took her hand and smiled, something slipt into his face—something affectionate and quiet, empty and without guile or suspicion.
Where was she accustomed to this smile? To be sure; in Amanda. An indubitable inheritance.
And for the sake of this empty smile an affectionate feeling for this stranger came into her heart. She helped him take off his overcoat. He wore a pair of great, red-lined rubber goloshes, typical of the country doctor. He took these off carefully and placed them with their toes toward the wall.
"He has grown too pedantic," she thought.
Then all three entered the room. When Toni saw him in the light of day she missed the blue white golden scarf at once. But it would have looked comical over his rounded paunch. And yet its absence disillusioned her. It seemed to her as if her friend had doffed the halo for whose sake she had served him and looked up to him so long.
As for him, he regarded her with unconcealed admiration.
"Well, well, one can be proud of you!" he said, sighing deeply, and it almost seemed as if with this sigh a long and heavy burden lifted itself from his soul.
"He was afraid he might have to be ashamed of me," she thought rebelliously. As if to protect herself she pushed the little girl between them.
"Here is Amanda," she said, and added with a bitter smile: "Perhaps you remember."
But he didn't even suspect the nature of that which she wanted to make him feel.
"Oh, I've brought something for you, little one!" he cried with the delight of one who recalls an important matter in time. With measured step he trotted back into the hall and brought out a flat paste-board box tied with pink ribands. He opened it very carefully and revealed a layer of chocolate-creams wrapped in tin-foil and offered one to Amanda.
And this action seemed to him, obviously, to satisfy all requirements in regard to his preliminary relations to the child.
Antonie felt the approach of a head-ache such as she had now and then ever since the arsenic poisoning.
"You are probably hungry, dear Robert," she said.
He wouldn't deny that. "If one is on one's legs from four o'clock in the morning on, you know, and has nothing in one's stomach but a couple of little sausages, you know!"
He said all that with the same cheerfulness that seemed to come to him as a matter of course and yet did not succeed in wholly hiding an inner diffidence.
They sat down at the table and Antonie, taking pleasure in seeing to his comfort, forgot for a moment the foolish ache that tugged at her body and at her soul.
The wine made him talkative. He related everything that interested him—his professional trips across country, the confinements that sometimes came so close together that he had to spend twenty-four hours in his buggy. Then he told of the tricks by which people whose lives he had just saved sought to cheat him out of his modest fees. And he told also of the comfortable card-parties with the judge and the village priest. And how funny it was when the inn-keeper's tame starling promenaded on the cards….
Every word told of cheerful well-being and unambitious contentment.
"He doesn't think of our common future," a torturing suspicion whispered to her.
But he did.
"I should like to have you try, first of all, Toni, to live there. It isn't easy. But we can both stand a good deal, thank God, and if we don't like it in the end, why, we can move away."
And he said that so simply and sincerely that her suspicion vanished.
And with this returning certitude there returned, too, the ambition which she had always nurtured for him.
"How would it be if we moved to Berlin, or somewhere where there is a university?"
"And maybe aim at a professorship?" he cried with cheerful irony. "No, Tonichen, all your money can't persuade me to that. I crammed enough in that damned medical school, I've got my income and that's good enough for me."
A feeling of disgust came over her. She seemed to perceive the stuffy odour of unventilated rooms and of decaying water in which flowers had stood.
"That is what I suffered for," involuntarily the thought came, "that!"
After dinner when Amanda was sleeping off the effects of the little sip of wine which she had taken when they let her clink glasses with them, they sat opposite each other beside the geraniums of the window-box and fell silent. He blew clouds of smoke from his cigar into the air and seemed not disinclined to indulge in a nap, too.
Leaning back in her wicker chair she observed him uninterruptedly. At one moment it seemed to her as though she caught an intoxicating remnant of the slim, pallid lad to whom she had given her love. And then again came the corroding doubt: "Was it for him, for him…." And then a great fear oppressed her heart, because this man seemed to live in a world which she could not reach in a whole life's pilgrimage. Walls had arisen between them, doors had been bolted—doors that rose from the depths of the earth to the heights of heaven…. As he sat there, surrounded by the blue smoke of his cigar, he seemed more and more to recede into immeasurable distances….
Then, suddenly, as if an inspiration had come to him, he pulled himself together, and his face became serious, almost solemn. He laid the cigar down on the window-box and pulled out of his inner pocket a bundle of yellow sheets of paper and blue note-books.
"I should have done this a long time ago," he said, "because we've been free to correspond with each other. But I put it off to our first meeting."
"Done what?" she asked, seized by an uncomfortable curiosity.
"Why, render an accounting."
"An accounting?"
"But dear Toni, surely you don't think me either ungrateful or dishonourable. For seven years I have accepted one benefaction after another from you…. That was a very painful situation for me, dear child, and I scarcely believe that the circumstances, had they been known, would ever have been countenanced by a court of honour."
"Ah, yes," she said slowly. "I confess I never thought of that consideration…."
"But I did all the more, for that very reason. And only the consciousness that I would some day be able to pay you the last penny of my debt sustained me in my consciousness as a decent fellow."
"Ah, well, if that's the case, go ahead!" she said, suppressing the bitter sarcasm that she felt.
First came the receipts: The proceeds of the stolen jewels began the long series. Then followed the savings in fares, food and drink and the furniture rebates. Next came the presents of the county-counsellor, the profits of the champagne debauches during which she had flung shame and honour under the feet of the drinking men. She was spared nothing, but heard again of sums gained by petty thefts from the till, small profits made in the buying of milk and eggs. It was a long story of suspense and longing, an inextricable web of falsification and trickery, of terror and lying without end. The memory of no guilt and no torture was spared her.
Then he took up the account of his expenditures. He sat there, eagerly handling the papers, now frowning heavily when he could not at once balance some small sum, now stiffening his double chin in satisfied self-righteousness as he explained some new way of saving that had occurred to him…. Again and again, to the point of weariness, he reiterated solemnly: "You see, I'm an honest man."
And always when he said that, a weary irony prompted her to reply:
"Ah, what that honesty has cost me." … But she held her peace.
And again she wanted to cry out: "Let be! A woman like myself doesn't care for these two-penny decencies." But she saw how deep an inner necessity it was to him to stand before her in this conventional spotlessness. And so she didn't rob him of his childlike joy.
At last he made an end and spread out the little blue books before her—there was one for each year. "Here," he said proudly, "you can go over it yourself. It's exact."
"It had better be!" she cried with a jesting threat and put the little books under a flower-pot.
A prankish mood came upon her now which she couldn't resist.
"Now that this important business is at an end," she said, "there is still another matter about which I must have some certainty."
"What is that?" he said, listening intensely.
"Have you been faithful to me in all this time?"
He became greatly confused. The scars on his left cheek glowed like thick, red cords.
"Perhaps he's got a betrothed somewhere," she thought with a kind of woeful anger, "whom he's going to throw over now."
But it wasn't that. Not at all. "Well," he said, "there's no help for it. I'll confess. And anyhow, you've even been married in the meantime."
"I would find it difficult to deny that," she said.
And then everything came to light. During the early days in Berlin he had been very intimate with a waitress. Then, when he was an assistant in the surgical clinic, there had been a sister who even wanted to be married. "But I made short work of that proposition," he explained with quiet decision. And as for the Lithuanian servant girl whom he had in the house now, why, of course he would dismiss her next morning, so that the house could be thoroughly aired before she moved in.
This was the moment in which a desire came upon her—half-ironic, half-compassionate—to throw her arms about him and say: "You silly boy!"
But she did not yield and in the next moment the impulse was gone. Only an annoyed envy remained. He dared to confess everything to her—everything. What if she did the same? If he were to leave her in horrified silence, what would it matter? She would have freed her soul. Or perhaps he would flare up in grateful love? It was madness to expect it. No power of heaven or earth could burst open the doors or demolish the walls that towered between them for all eternity.
A vast irony engulfed her. She could not rest her soul upon this pigmy. She felt revengeful rather toward him—revengeful, because he could sit there opposite her so capable and faithful, so truthful and decent, so utterly unlike the companion whom she needed.
Toward twilight he grew restless. He wanted to slip over to his mother for a moment and then, for another moment, he wanted to drop in at the fraternity inn. He had to leave at eight.
"It would be better if you remained until to-morrow," she said with an emphasis that gave him pause.
"Why?"
"If you don't feel that…."
She shrugged her shoulders.
It wasn't to be done, he assured her, with the best will in the world. There was an investigation in which he had to help the county-physician. A small farmer had died suddenly of what did not seem an entirely natural death. "I suppose," he continued, "one of those love philtres was used with which superfluous people are put under ground there. It's horrible that a decent person has to live among such creatures. If you don't care to do it, I can hardly blame you." She had grown pale and smiled weakly. She restrained him no longer.
"I'll be back in a week," he said, slipping on his goloshes, "and then we can announce the engagement."
She nodded several times but made no reply.
The door was opened and he leaned toward her. Calmly she touched his lips with hers.
"You might have the announcement cards printed," he called cheerfully from the stairs.
Then he disappeared….
"Is the new uncle gone?" Amanda asked. She was sitting in her little room, busy with her lessons. He had forgotten her.
The mother nodded.
"Will he come back soon?"
Antonie shook her head.
"I scarcely think so," she answered.
That night she broke the purpose of her life, the purpose that had become interwoven with a thousand others, and when the morning came she wrote a letter of farewell to the beloved of her youth.