Frau Stacher's ring brought a scurry of young feet to the door, she heard welcoming shouts, "Tante Ilde's come! Tante Ilde's come!" even before it was opened with a rush. She was smiling a breathless smile, after the stairs and the blessedly heavy bag, as she went in. It was known that she was coming with the dinner, but what had she brought? They surrounded her, they embraced her, they overwhelmed her. They were all there save Maxy whose turn it was to eat his midday meal at the Bellevue Palace, and Lilli not yet back from fetching a few briquets.
Kaethe was nursing that youngest, rosiest of her children who knew, as yet, only the sweet fullness of her mother's breast. Carli was sitting at her feet, his head hanging listlessly against her knee. He hadn't run with the others to meet Tante Ilde because he couldn't even stand. He would laugh, a sweet, somewhat surprised little laugh when he tried to pull himself up by a chair and would fall down; but his mother always wanted to weep when she heard the soft little thud as he slipped to the floor. Carli was an angel. Carli, quite evidently to any but a mother's eye, was not to pass another winter on earth. Even in the week since Tante Ilde had seen him he had become more and more like something made of crystal, so smooth, so shining, so transparent was his little face. But she concealed the sudden fear that came over her as she looked from him to his mother.
"I'm nursing the baby earlier so I can be ready to help with the dinner," Kaethe said as her aunt bent over to kiss her and Anny,—one fat little hand spread out over her mother's breast, and making soft, contented noises,—little Anny, the last, she must be the last of Kaethe's children, Tante Ilde was thinking....
Kaethe wore a frayed but evidently once expensive, wadded, blue silk wrapper. It struck an unexpected note in that denuded room, whose immediate air of indigence was inescapable. Not only was the piano gone, and long since Eberhardt's 'cello, but gone one after the other the pleasant, superfluous tables and the little objects once set out upon them. Even the bookcases.... What remained of the books was piled in a corner and received many a careless kick from romping children.
Whenever Frau Stacher entered that room she was confronted by a quite flashy portrait of her mother in the Winterhalter style. It had been sent to Kaethe's for safe-keeping and now hung frameless on the wall. A dealer at the time she sold her furniture had offered her a surprising and unrefusable price for the frame. The young face that looked out at the aging daughter, though like her in many ways, had a point of competent malice in the wide, blue eyes, that was neither in her daughter's eyes nor in her heart. Sometimes, too, from under that broad, floppy, rose-trimmed hat with the long, pink streamers she seemed to look reproachfully, severely at her daughter,—leaving her elegant prettiness thus unset in so cold a world. Frau Stacher had never felt easy about selling that frame, and she sometimes had useless little night thoughts, or equally useless morning thoughts of getting another. But it had been hanging just like that since she gave up the house in Baden, near an enlarged photograph, (whose pressed wood frame picked out with gilt no one had wanted) of the departed Commercial Advisor. She would gladly have been unfaithful to the memory of her husband, now become exceedingly hazy anyway, and replaced his image by that of her mother. But her mother's portrait was square, and his photograph unprophetically had been taken in oblong form. Things were like that now. Nothing fitted....
Kaethe got up a moment after her aunt had greeted her and laid the sleeping baby in a battered crib in the next room, filled with beds of all sizes and sorts. That child was nourished. She would have felt quite exhausted herself, but for the thought of the dinner Tante Ilde had brought. She was still a handsome woman, in the early thirties,—even treading up that Calvary to which every road she knew now lead her, those seven roads of anguish for her seven children and for Leo whom she adored. Once, not indeed so long before, she had been softly, sweetly alight with a kindly inner warmth, that flamed easily, attractively in her face, in those sparkling eyes, in those bright cheeks, hanging about that wide, red-lipped mouth with its irregular white teeth. And then those quick, generous, outward gestures! Now that soft fire was banked and her movements were often listless. But as she stood by the kitchen table, she became animated even gay, because of that natural gift which neither time, nor wars, nor miseries could quite destroy, and clapped her hands, as her aunt had known she would, and talked about the great feast they were going to have. The water was boiling and bubbling forecasting near, delicious moments and Tante Ilde had begun to grate the cheese which was sending up its sharp, appetizing odor.
Carli had been put on the table in the very beginning, that he might be nearer than anybody else to the goodies, as Tante Ilde took one package after the other out of the string bag and made them guess what was in it. Kaethe opened the can of milk to prepare a drink for him.
"Hungry," he said turning his blue eyes somewhat languidly towards her and shaking his shining curls about his crystal face. They all cried lovingly in one or another way:
"Yes, gold child, yes, angel, yes, little lamb, you'll have some soon!"
"I bought a whole half kilo of rice," said Tante Ilde grandly, "suppose," she went on dashingly, "we cook it all at once? We're seven to eat it and we'll put the cheese on thick!"