The Road Back (31 page)

She swings round and stares at him as if he were a ghost.
She tries desperately to smile, but as she sees Albert's gaze
fixed on her naked breasts, the twitching dies in her
face. It is no use lying now. Frightened she pushes in be
hind the settle. "Albert—it wasn't my fault—" she stam
mers—"he, it was he—" then all at once she gabbles
quickly: "He made me drunk, Albert—and I wouldn't—
and he kept on giving me more, and then I didn't know
what I was doing any more; Albert, I swear——"

Albert does not answer.

"What's the meaning of this?" demands someone behind him.

Bartscher has come back from the yard and now stands there swaying slightly to and fro. He blows the smoke of his cigar into Albert's face. "Pimping, eh? Be off with you! Clear out!"

For a moment Albert stands there dumbly before him. Then suddenly, with awful vividness the protruding belly, the brown check suit, the gold watch-chain and the wide, red face of the other man stamps itself into his brain.

At that moment Willy looks over casually from our table. He leaps up, knocks over a couple of people and tears down the café. But too late. Before he can arrive Albert has drawn his field revolver and fired. We dash across.

Bartscher tried to shield himself with a chair; but he had only time to raise it to the level of his eyes. Albert has planted his shot one inch above it, square in the forehead. He hardly even took aim—he was always the best shot in the company and with his service revolver he had no equal. Bartscher fell crashing to the floor. His feet twitched. The shot was fatal. The girl screams. "Out!" bawls Willy, holding back the onrushing guests. We run Albert, who is standing motionless staring at the girl, out through the courtyard, across the street, round the first corner to a dark square, where there are two furniture vans standing. Willy follows us. "You must clear out at once! tonight I right now!" he says panting.

Albert looks at him as if he had only just waked up. Then he shakes himself free. "No, Willy, let me alone," he answers dully, "I know what I have to do."

"Are you mad?" snorts Kosole.

Albert sways a little. We hold him. Again he wards us off. "No, Ferdinand," he says quietly, as if he were very tired, "who does the one thing must do the other also."

He goes slowly back to the street.

Willy runs after him and argues with him. But Albert only shakes his head and turns the corner into Mill Street. Willy follows him.

"Well have to take him by force!" cries Kosole. "Hell give himself up to the police!"

"I don't think it's any good, Ferdinand," says Karl hopelessly, "I know Albert."

"Giving himself up won't bring the man back to lifel" cries Kosole. "What good will that do? Albert must get away!"

We sit round in silence waiting for Willy.

"But whatever can have made him do it?" Kosole asks after a while.

"He banked so much on the girl," I answer.

Willy comes back alone. Kosole jumps up. "Is he away?"

Willy shakes his head. "Gone to the police! I couldn't do anything with him. He almost fired on me too, when I tried to drag him off."

"Oh, Christ!" Kosole rests his head on the shaft of the cart. Willy sinks down on the grass. Karl and I lean against the side of the furniture van.

Kosole, Ferdinand Kosole, is sobbing like a little child.

A shot has been fired, a stone has been loosed, a dark hand has reached in among us. We fled before a shadow; but we have run in a circle and the shadow has overtaken us.

We have clamoured and searched; we steeled ourselves and yet have surrendered; we tried to elude it, yet it has sprung upon us; we lost our way, yet we still ran on further —but ever we felt the shadow at our heels and tried to escape it—We thought it was pursuing us—We did not know we were dragging it with us; that there where we were, it was also, silently standing—not behind us, but within us—in us ourselves.

We have thought to build us houses, we desired gardens with terraces, for we wanted to look out upon the sea and to feel the wind—but we did not think that a house needs foundations. We are like those abandoned fields full of shell-holes in France, no less peaceful than the other ploughed lands about them, but in them are lying still the buried explosives—and until these shall have been dug out and cleared away, to plough will be a danger both to plougher and ploughed.

We are soldiers still without having been aware of it.—Had Albert's youth been peaceful and without interruption, then he would have had many things familiar and dear to him, that would have grown up with him, and that now would have sustained and kept him. But all that was broken in pieces, and when he returned he had nothing—his repressed youth, his gagged desires, his hunger for home and affection then cast him blindly upon this one human being whom he supposed that he loved. And when that was all shattered, he knew of nothing but to shoot—he had been taught nothing else. Had he never been a soldier he would have known many another way. As it was, his hand did not falter—for years he has been accustomed to shoot and not to miss.

In Albert, the dream-ridden adolescent, in Albert, the shy lover, there still sat Albert, the soldier.

The wrinkled old woman cannot realise it—"But how
could he have done it? He was always such a quiet child!" 
The ribbons of her old-lady's cap are trembling, the hand
kerchief is trembling, the black mantilla is trembling—the
whole woman is one quivering piece of anguish. "Perhaps 
it is because he has had no father. He was only four when 
his father died—But then, he was always such a quiet, good
child——"

"And so he is still, Frau Trosske," I say. She grasps
at the straw and begins to talk of Albert's childhood. She
must talk, she says, she can't bear it any more—the neigh
bours have been in, and acquaintances, two teachers, too—
none of them could understand it——

"What they should do is to hold their tongues," I say. "They're to blame for it, partly."

She looks at me uncomprehendingly. But then she runs on again and tells me how Albert first learned to walk, how he never cried like other children, indeed, how he was almost too quiet for a young boy—and now, to have done a thing like this! But how could he have done it?

I look at her in wonder. She doesn't know anything about Albert! It would probably be the same with my mother— Mothers know only to love, that is their one understanding.

"But, Frau Trosske," I say warily, "Albert has been at the war, you must remember."

"Yes, yes," she replies. But she does not see the connection—"This Bartscher, was he a bad man?" she then asks quietly.

"He was a blackguard," I affirm roundly, for I don't mind betting he was.

She nods in her tears. "I couldn't understand it otherwise. He never hurt a fly in his life. Hans now, he did pull their wings off. But Albert never—What do you think they will do to him now?"

"They can't do much," I say to comfort her; "he was very excited, you see, and that is almost the same as doing it in self-defence."

"Thank God," she sighs. "The tailor upstairs said he would be hanged for it."

"Then the tailor's mad," I retort.

"Yes, and he said, Albert was a murderer, too! And he isn't t never, never, never!" she bursts out.

"You leave that tailor to me, I'll fix him," I say savagely.

"I hardly dare to go outside the door, now," she sobs. "He is always standing there."

"I'll come along with you, Frau Trosske," I say.

We reach the outer door of the house. "There he is again," whispers the old woman fearfully, and points to the door. I brace myself—If he says one word I will pound him to pulp, though it should cost me ten years in the clink—But he gives us a wide berth, as do the two women also who are loafing there with him.

Once inside the flat Albert's mother shows me a picture of Hans and Albert as boys, and then begins to weep anew. But she stops again almost at once, as if she were ashamed.—Old women are like children in that—tears come to them quickly; but they dry up quickly also—In the passage, as I am about to go, she asks me: "Do you think he gets enough to eat?"

"Yes, I'm sure he does," I reply. "Karl Bröger will see to that. He can get plenty."

"I have still a few pancakes left; he likes them so much. Do you think they would let me take him some?"

"There's no harm in trying," I answer; "And if they do let you, you just say this to him: I know you're not guilty, Albert.—Only that."

She nods. "Perhaps I did not think of him enough. But
Hans, you see Hans hasn't got any feet——"

I reassure her. "The poor boy!" she says, "and now he is
sitting there all alone "

I give her my hand. "Now I'll just have a word with that tailor—He won't trouble you next time, I promise."

The tailor is still standing at the door. A commonplace, stupid, little bourgeoise face. He leers at me maliciously, his mouth ready to start blabbing as soon as I am gone. I take hold of him by the coat lapels. "You bloody snip! if ever you say another word to the old lady up there, I'll knock bloody hell out of you, hear me? you pack-thread athlete, you washerwoman!" I shake him like a sackful of old rags and bump his backside against the knob of the door. "You lousy, stinking skunk! if I have to come again I'll break every bone in your body, you miserable, bloody scissor-grinder!" Then I land him one on each cheek.

I am already a long way off when he shrieks after me: "I'll take you to court! It will cost you a hundred marks at the least." I turn round and walk back. He disappears.

Dirty and travel-worn Georg Rahe is sitting in Ludwig's room. He read the report about Albert in the newspaper and has come back at once—"We must get him out," says he.

Ludwig looks up.

"With half a dozen bright fellows and a motor car," Rahe continues, "it couldn't possibly miss. The best time would be when he is being taken across to the courthouse.

All we do is to jump in among them, make a bit of a shindy while two run with Albert to the car."

Ludwig listens a moment, then he shakes his head. "It's no good, Georg. We would only make things worse for Albert, if it miscarried. As it is, he does at least stand a chance of getting off fairly lightly—Not that that's any argument—I'd be with you at once—But Albert—we wouldn't get Albert to come. He doesn't want to."

"In that case we'll just have to make him," explains 
Rahe after a while—"He's got to get out—and if I once 
start——"

Ludwig says nothing.

"I don't think it's any use either, Georg," I say—"even if we did get him away, he would only come straight back again. He almost shot Willy, when he tried to lug him off."

Rahe puts his head in his hands. Ludwig looks grey and wasted. "It's my idea we are all lost," says he hopelessly.

No one answers. Silence and trouble weigh like death in the room.

I continue to sit alone with Ludwig a long time. He
props his head in his hands. "It is all in vain, Ernst. We
are finished, but the world goes on as if the war had never
been. It won't be long now before our successors on the
school benches will be listening, eager-eyed, to stories of the
war, and wishing they had been there too, rid of all the 
tedium of school—Even now they are trooping to join the 
Free Corps—at seventeen years guilty of political murder!
—I'm so tired, Ernst——"

"Ludwig" I sit down beside him and put my arm about his slight shoulders.

He smiles cheerlessly. Then he says quietly: "I had a schoolboy love affair once, Ernst, before the war. I met the girl again a few weeks ago. She seemed to me to have grown even more beautiful; it felt as if those days had come to life again in one human being. We used to see one another fairly often afterwards—And then all at once I realised—" He rests his head on the table. When he looks up again his eyes are dead from anguish—"such things are not for me, Ernst—I am terribly sick."

He gets up and opens the window. Outside the night is warm, and many stars. I continue to stare before me gloomily. For a long time Ludwig stands there looking out. Then he turns to me: "Do you remember how as youngsters we used to go off at night with a volume of Eichendorff into the woods?"

"Yes, Ludwig," I answer quickly, glad that he is now thinking of something else, "it was in late summer. One time we caught a hedgehog!"

His faces relaxes. "And we imagined it might turn into a real adventure, with stage-coaches, and winding-horns and stare—remember that?—how we wanted to go off to Italy?"