IX
The student of philosophy, Kurt Brenckenberg, strolled between the borders of the parsonage garden at Wengern and enjoyed the early freshness of the sunny sabbath morning. He had slept late, shaved, curled his moustache, and felt his mind full of sublime idealism and his heart full of longing for a fair mistress. He also congratulated himself on the heroic fortitude with which he had thrown off the effects of the last night's carousal.
He smoked his cigar in a self-satisfied humour, waiting till his sister should have finished ironing his shirt-collar, which she seemed to have taken an endless time over.
"I shall be obliged to make a row about it," he said to himself. Service in the parental establishment left much to be desired. When the things came from the wash they were not fit to be seen. There was not a trace in them of the stiffness and glaze which are the artistic triumphs of the professional laundress. He who knew what was due to himself as a corps-student felt it his duty not to neglect his personal appearance, but to keep up the dignity of his "badges" daily and hourly in face of the country bumpkins.
The eldest of nine olive branches, which had sprung from the nuptials of old Pastor Brenckenberg, he had gone to the University in his nineteenth year, it was vaguely reported, to study the dead and Oriental tongues. Nothing more definite was ever gleaned about the calling he had chosen, for he did not consider it seemly to discuss such trivialities. He left that sort of thing to the "swats," as he himself put it. It was quite undeniably certain, however, that he had fought fourteen duels, and had been "gashed" nine times; that he had been concerned in two scandals and a praemisses praemittendis intrigue; and that he had cultivated the drinking of beer to a fine art. Neither could it be disputed that he had been captain of two élite student clubs, i.e., the Westphalians and the Normans. He boasted, therefore, the title after his name, Guestphaliæ (XX), Normanneaque (X), and thus he figured on the bills of exchange and promissory notes which his father received periodically, accompanied by a polite request for payment, till that worthy declared it must now stop, and that the young lardy-da would not get a brass farthing more out of him. He had remained firm, and his mother's tears and intercession for her darling had been in vain.
One fine day at the beginning of February, in consequence of the paternal hardness of heart, the son and heir arrived at the parsonage and announced his intention of staying there for the present. In the admiring eyes of his mother he blazed out as the possessor of a light, braided suit, the coat of which was very narrow, and the trousers very wide; of ribbons and badges denoting the colours of his corps; an ivory scarf pin in the shape of the corps monogram; a gold bangle with a sham thaler representing St. George and the dragon--also bearing the corps monogram attached to it; a swagger walking-stick, on the knob of which the monogram was engraved; a note-book full of the eternal monogram, and a purse which contained no silver except the monogram on the clasp.
For the rest, his trunk had little else in it save a book of students' drinking-songs, bound in calf, a few bills of exchange, a broken meerschaum cigar-holder, and a whole pile of dirty, ragged linen, marked above his name with the monogram in shot floss silk.
His mother, a worthy, hard-working and uneducated woman, was not a little perplexed at the constantly recurring hieroglyphic, but she was far too infatuated with her darling to think anything that he did ridiculous.
While he was thus displaying his splendours to the open-mouthed brothers and sisters, his father came in.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"It is impossible to go on studying without money," was the prompt reply.
"Come to my study."
The doting mother foresaw a scene. She hung on her husband's arm and stroked it coaxingly; but he shook her off with a rough exclamation.
A few minutes later two resounding boxes on the ear were heard coming from the study, and the outraged remonstrance of a virtuous youth. "Father, I am a corps-student!"
Almost at the same moment he flew back into the family sitting-room and declared that he must go away again instantly. He had no home now, and his mother must pack his things.
The packing was quickly accomplished; but when evening came, Kurt Brenckenberg had not gone. The next morning, too, he appeared at the breakfast table. He did not vouchsafe his father a glance, and once more announced his determination to leave by the first train, as he had no home. So it went on for several days, and his father, who might be repenting his violence, let him alone.
When a week had passed, he caught his son by the button-hole, and said--
"As you intend to go away to-morrow we will have a farewell drink together to-day. Put on your cap and come along."
Kurt acquiesced, and two hours after midnight he played the part of the good Samaritan by bringing home his father, whose drunken state, within a circuit of six miles, no creature would have taken pity on. He made up a bed for him on the sofa, so that his spouse should not be disturbed in her slumbers. After this no more was said about his going away.
The relations between father and son became day by day more intimate. Since his own offspring had beaten him at beer drinking, he had made no further attempt to assert his paternal authority, and allowed his son to come and go about the house at any hours he pleased. Only he could not give him money, for the noble youth's escapades had cleared him out of a year's income in advance. As he himself put it, there was scarcely a halfpenny left for the communion collection.
Through the winter Kurt Brenckenberg had lorded it, partly on the neighbouring estates, partly in his father's house, where he was dissatisfied with everything, and perpetually bullied and grumbled at his brothers and sisters. He drank, composed songs, made himself agreeable or arrogant according to the sex of his associates, borrowed where it was possible to borrow, and cut as elegant an appearance as was permitted by the increasing shabbiness of the last check suit supplied by Kessel and Munchmann of Unter-den-Linden, on credit to corps students. He got up private theatricals, contrived new figures for the cotillion, gave fencing lessons, and had understood on the whole how to make himself indispensable. Ladies gushed about him, but men rather avoided him, because if they so much as looked at him sideways, they were apt to be confronted with the disconcerting question, snapped out in tone of intimidation: "Will you give satisfaction?" Not that the sturdy young squires of the Hinterwald district were by any means cowards. On the contrary, they had proved often enough that they were ready where their honour was concerned to engage in any daring combat. It was only in the case of this little bristling fighting-cock, whom they regarded scarcely as their equal by half, that they felt stiff and embarrassed. Often as he boasted of his little adventures with pistols, he never gave a practical demonstration of anything of the sort. He it was who for the most part at the conclusion of the challenge formalities proved himself a model of wise moderation. But even this fact resulted in the increase of his reputation in the country-round, and made his pose as an irreconcilable combatant the more effective.
For his part he felt it incumbent on him to continue the rôle of the celebrated Dr. Oswald Stein, who two generations earlier had turned the heads of all the rustic young Pomeranian rustics, and he made no secret that the ideal on which he modelled himself was the hero of "Problematical Natures." Accordingly he had entered on a sentimental love episode with the pretty daughter of Halewitz, and by the spring hoped at last to have found his Melitta. For it was at about this time that Ulrich von Kletzingk summoned him to Uhlenfelde to act as private tutor to his little stepson. The boy was delicate, and not to be overworked. So he had all the more leisure at his disposal in which to pay court to the beautiful fair-haired mistress of the castle. It was patent that she was a flirt. How otherwise would she have kept dangling about her all the cavaliers, young and old, of the neighbourhood? She also had some sense. For she did what she pleased, quite unconcerned by the gossip of friendly neighbours. And the famous duel had proved that she was in possession of an interesting past.
Nevertheless she had turned a deaf ear to his addresses. He had hardly dared hope for anything but indifference. He languished at her feet, despairing, full of worship and a desire to die for her; as the pages of olden times had loved their queens, so he revelled in this hopeless passion.
It seemed sometimes almost as if his homage rather pleased her, as if she saw the necessity, as he did, for a little harmless romance with the tutor. No check was put on his poetical effusions; his sighs and half-intelligible speeches. He might, if he liked, break his neck in knightly service, or, above all, attempt great things in verse. He scattered his leaflets about the house and garden; sometimes he placed them under her knitting or in an uncut book. Yes, he had even had the temerity to put them under her pillow.
And in smiling silence she had ignored everything. Yet his unrequited passion had not in the least altered his manner of life. He ate enough for three, and drank enough for a dozen. He consorted with the bailiffs, in the hopes that they might lend him money, and, after dark, he flirted with the dairymaids and farm-wenches in the stables, or under the elder-bushes by the water.
But this brilliant career, so rich in every sort of experience and sentiment, was doomed and drawing to its close. His first hint that it was so had been three days ago, when Baron von Kletzingk had informed him, that for the present his services must be dispensed with, his wife having emphatically expressed a wish to teach the boy herself for the next few weeks. This decision alone might not have counted for much, for Frau Felicitas changed her mind as often as a new idea came into her curly head; but what upset him most was an unpleasant change in her manner towards him which he had remarked several days previously.
She had become cold, almost severe, and when he had resorted to the usual method of letting her know his feelings, she had, after morning coffee, put a question to him, with a languid smile and yawn.
"How did these atrocious verses get into my basket of keys, Herr Kandidat?"
This was rough on him, and really looked as if he were out of favour. Nevertheless he was not the man to let a woman's foibles break his heart, and in the Prussian Crown at Münsterberg, only the night before, he had again thoroughly enjoyed a booze in his father's company. This morning the sun laughed down on a world in which there was plenty and to spare of women's love. If only he could have had his clean collar, his satisfaction would have been complete.
He resolved to agitate for this end, and went into the half-dark front kitchen where Lotty, his eldest sister, a lean, unattractive, blonde, sulky and faithful as a beast of burden, was ironing the Sunday clean linen on a large board.
"Am I at last to get a decent rag to put round my neck?" he shouted at her.
Dumbly she handed him a collar.
"Do you call that a collar?" he cried, twirling the limp strip round his fingers. "Do you call that piece of dish-clout a collar, I say?"
"If your linen isn't starched to your liking, get it up yourself," the sister answered snappishly, and put the bellows in the fire under the iron-rest till smoke and cinders flew about the room.
"It's a disgrace," Kurt said, "that a man should be compelled to interfere in such sordid household matters."
"Why don't you earn money enough to keep a laundress of your own?" asked his sister.
Instead of an answer, he threw the collar at her head, and she screamed out for help to her mother.
She appeared on the scene in a white dressing-jacket, and her grizzled hair caught up with a celluloid comb. Three of the small fry trotted after her. She was already worried and irritable.
"Can't you be quiet?" she stormed. "Father is busy with his sermon, and you are behaving like heathens."
"Heathens," replied Kurt, "are at least in the happy position of not requiring clean linen, as they prefer to go naked."
"Yes, you ungodly lout," cried his mother, whose admiration for him had long ago ebbed. "You are a precious, good-for-nothing----"
"You are a lout. A lout you are," he trolled forth, mimicking her. "A lout. Ha, ha!"
The harassed mother began to cry for vexation, and the little ones following her example, the Sunday morning concert of praise was in full swing.
Meanwhile, Pastor Brenckenberg, suffering from severe headache, sat brooding over a bulky book of sermons at the half-cleared breakfast-table in the parlour.
He was a corpulent man of over sixty, tall, with massive shoulders and a red, coarse neck. He wore his thin, much-greased hair parted in the middle and combed smoothly behind his ears, so that it framed his big, bloated face with locks like those with which Christ is depicted in sacred art. In spite of the hanging cheeks and moist, protruding, sensual lips, there was an expression of power and strength about his countenance which inspired a certain reverence and respect. Twenty-two years before, the old Squire Sellenthin had appointed him tutor and bear-leader to his wild, unmanageable son Leo, though he might be thought hardly suitable for the post, his drinking-bouts as a student having been the talk of the country-side. But the keen insight into character of the old man of the world had not been at fault in this instance. The new private tutor ruled with a rod of iron, and at the same time made himself invaluable as a perpetrator of dry jokes and an indefatigable boon companion.
And when Leo was ready for the gymnasium, a bright-eyed, plucky boy in his teens, thoroughly well trained and prepared, Herr von Sellenthin bestowed on the convivial clergyman the living of Wengern, of which he was the patron. On the strength of this the pastor at once made haste to renew an old attachment, the existence of which no one had had any suspicion, and with the love of his youth as his bride, and a bonus which his squire had given him, began to populate the empty old parsonage as speedily as possible.
Hypocrisy and unctuous piety were not in this man's line, and no one could deny that he was possessed of a certain vein of cynical good humour; but woe to the erring sheep who fell a victim to his righteous anger.
One of the stories told of him, as a warning to others, was that of the overgrown hobbledehoy, who had been in the act of taking himself off to America, and leaving the girl he had brought to shame behind him. When it had come to the pastor's ears, he had seized him by the throat and had so nearly throttled him, that the seducer, black in the face, had sunk on to his knees and implored him to let him go, promising to marry the girl on the spot, and to stay in the country and work honestly to support her and the child.
Yet, in spite of his iron rule amongst his flock, he himself had no scruples in indulging in his own weaknesses. The Sunday after, he would kneel in front of the whole congregation, wringing his hands, his face streaming with tears, and send up fervent supplications for Divine forgiveness, for his own and his brother's sins. Sometimes, when it chanced that an up-to-date town clergyman, who was in the habit of entertaining his parishioners at home with sermons of a liberal tendency, interlarded with quotations from Goethe and Lessing, occupied the pulpit at Wengern in his stead, he would say that sort of thing was priestly clowning, and reminded him of "Abraham a Sancta Clara." The natives were not cultivated enough to appreciate it.
The old man had long been a thorn in the flesh of the church-wardens. Several times, at Church council meetings, the subject of his resignation had been broached, but owing to an official report to the effect that the standard of morality was higher in the parish of Wengern than anywhere else in the province, it was decided to leave him alone. The flock loved their shepherd because he reflected their own vices and weaknesses, and their own rough, though cute, mental fibre.
This morning Pastor Brenckenberg found it difficult to attune his thoughts to the Holy Scriptures. He had chosen the unexciting theme of harvest, taking for his text the verse from the second of Corinthians: "He that had gathered much had nothing over, and he that had gathered little had no lack."
A propos he had tried to hang together a few consolatory reflections on the consequences of the wet summer--the diseased potato crop, the rotten fruit, and to give voice to joyous thanksgiving that at last God had let the glorious sun shine on the harvest-fields. But this "drivel," as he expressed it, nauseated him. He was in a mood to thunder and bruise. He would like to have something to curse.
"Shall I give them 'Hell' again, freshly furbished up?" he asked himself. But he had dealt with this subject only a fortnight ago. "I must let their burns heal first, and then I can go for them once more." Also, the Last Judgment; the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, in its modern application to Berlin and the Social Democrats; the baby-farming murder case; the diphtheria outbreak; one and all had been used in previous sermons.
He meditated and meditated; but the more he did so the worse his headache became, and the more irritably wiry his well-oiled hair.
"Next time the lad shall not tempt me," he said, and savagely pushed back the cup of coffee and milk which had grown cold.
The door opened, and Kurt, who had won his point and got a starched collar, came into the parlour, smiling amiably.
"Have you slept well, papa?" he asked carelessly. The old man threatened him with his open hand. "I'll never do it any more on a Saturday night, you young dog," he roared at him. "How am I to compose my sermon on Sunday with a splitting head?"
Kurt perceived that his father was not in a humour to be trifled with, and poured himself out some coffee from the big brown family jug in silence. The old man shut up the folio before him with a furious bang.
At that same moment a sombre female figure passed by the vine-embowered casement, a cloud of black gauze flapping behind her.
The Countess Prachwitz's low muffled alto sounded in the outer hall. The pastor pricked up his ears.
"Get out with you," he commanded his son, and stood all expectation awaiting the entrance of the visitor, with his brows drawn together in straight lines and wearing his most scowling bull-dog expression.
Kurt, subdued, with his coffee-cup in one hand and a buttered roll in the other, slipped out by a side door. He would have given something to catch a few crumbs of the conversation, for since his flirtation with little Elly his conscience with regard to Halewitz was anything but easy.
The pastor and Countess Johanna were closeted together for more than an hour. The organ strains began to come from the church, and already the stream of worshippers was thinning, but the two still continued to converse in low eager tones. The pastor's wife had knocked twice warningly, and had twice been sent away. At last, when the clock chimed half-past nine, they came out into the hall, the countess with compressed lips and traces of tears about her eyes, the pastor with the dark frown of the avenger upon his brows.
"You may depend on me, my lady," he said, as he stood looming within the doorway. "I will do what lies in my poor power to bring him to penitence."
She gave the Frau Pastorin her hand and patted the watered curls of the little ones, who stood round gaping up at her, then glided out without bestowing a look on Kurt.
"My gown; my bands!" cried the old man in a voice of thunder, when the door had closed behind her; and while his wife, who had been eagerly awaiting this command, rushed to invest him with the robes of his spiritual office, he murmured to himself with grim satisfaction, "Now I have got a subject. Aye, and what a subject! Old boy, congratulate yourself."