The Sleepwalkers (92 page)

“I haven’t joined the Union,” muttered Lindner.

“How do you know the Union rate, then?”

“One soon gets to hear of it.”

Huguenau had meanwhile considered the matter. Of course Liebel was at the bottom of this with his workshop propaganda. So he was an enemy too. But Liebel was a man to keep in with for the present. He said therefore:

“Well, we’ll manage some arrangement … let’s say, from November the new rate, and until then we’ll see what can be done.”

Both men professed themselves content.

In the evening Huguenau went to the Palatine Tavern to look for Liebel. The Lindner affair was really only a pretext. Huguenau was not at all ill-natured; he looked with clear eyes at the world; only a man has to know who are his enemies so that he can make a change of front
when necessary. Oh, he knew well enough who his enemy was. They had managed to shut down the brothel and two outlying pubs … but when he offered to help them in their fight with the real subversive elements the Major had turned tail. Well, to-morrow he would butter the old man up again in the newspaper, this time for having closed the brothel. And Huguenau hummed to himself: “Lord God of Sabaoth.”

In the Palatine he found Liebel, Doctor Pelzer, who had volunteered as a private, and a few more. Pelzer asked at once:

“And where have you left Esch? we never see him at all nowadays.”

Huguenau grinned:

“Bible class for the Holy Sabbath … he’ll be getting himself circumcised next.”

They all roared with laughter, and Huguenau swelled with pride. But Pelzer said:

“All the same, Esch is a fine chap.”

Liebel shook his head:

“It’s almost incredible, the stuff that people swallow.…”

Pelzer said:

“It’s just in times like these that everyone has his own ideas.… I’m a Socialist, and so are you, Liebel … but that’s just why, all the same, Esch is a fine chap.… I like him very much.”

Liebel’s forehead, which rose up not unlike a tower, reddened, and the vein running over it stood out:

“In my opinion that kind of thing just makes people besotted and should be stopped.”

“Quite right,” said Huguenau, “destructive ideas.”

Someone at the table laughed:

“O Lord, how even the big capitalists are changing their tune!”

Huguenau’s eyeglasses flashed at the speaker:

“If I were a big capitalist I wouldn’t be sitting here, but in Cologne, if not in Berlin.”

“Um, you’re not exactly a communist either, Herr Huguenau,” said Pelzer.

“Nor that either, my dear Herr Doctor … but I know what’s just and what’s unjust … who was the first to expose the state of things in the prison? eh?”

“Nobody denies the services you’ve rendered,” conceded Pelzer, “where would we have got such a fine Iron Bismarck but for you?”

Huguenau became genial; he clapped Pelzer on the shoulder:

“Pull your grandmother’s leg, my dear fellow!”

But then he proceeded to let himself go:

The services he had rendered were neither here nor there. Of course he had always been a good patriot, of course he had acclaimed the victories of his Fatherland, and would anybody venture to blame him for that? but he had always known very well that that was the only way of rousing the bourgeoisie, who kept a tight hand on their ill-gotten gains, to do something for the children of the poor proletarian victims of the war; as far as he remembered it was he who had managed that! but what thanks had he got? it wouldn’t surprise him to find that secret police orders were already out against him! but he wasn’t afraid, let them do their worst, he had friends who would get him out of prison if necessary. This secret service work must in any case be put a stop to. “A man disappears, nobody knows how, and the next thing you hear is that he’s been buried in the prison yard; God only knows how many are still languishing in prison! No, we don’t get justice, we get only police justice! and the worst of it all is the sham piety of these police butchers; they have their Bibles always in their hands, but only to hit people over the head with. And they say grace before and after meat, but other people can starve to death, grace or no grace.…”

Pelzer had listened approvingly, but now he interrupted:

“Seems to me, Huguenau, you’re an
agent provocateur.
”

Huguenau scratched his head:

“And do you imagine that I haven’t had offers of that kind made to me? if I could only tell you … well, never mind.… I was always an honest man and I’ll remain an honest man if it should cost me my head … only I can’t stand that sham hypocrisy.”

Liebel said in agreement:

“This Bible stuff is only a stunt … the masters simply love to see the people fed on Bible texts.”

Huguenau nodded:

“Yes, first a text and then a bullet … there are plenty who had a hand in the shooting affair in the prison … well, I’d better say nothing. But I’d rather go to quod than to one of their Bible classes.”

So Huguenau aligned his position in the struggle then beginning between the upper and lower orders. And although Bolshevist propaganda was a matter of complete indifference to him, and he would
have been the first to call for help if his own possessions had been in danger, although indeed it was only with great uneasiness that he reported in the
Kur-Trier Herald
the increasing number of inroads on property, yet he said now with honest conviction:

“The Russians are great fellows.”

And Pelzer said:

“I believe you, my boy.”

As they left the inn Huguenau shook his finger at Liebel:

“You’re another of these sham-pious Johnnies … egging on my good old Lindner against me, and yet I’m only working for the people … and you know it, too. Well, I suppose we’ll come to an understanding yet.”

An eight-year-old child has resolved to wander alone out into the world.

She walks along the narrow strip of grass between the wheel-ruts and sees the pale purple of fading clover-heads that have strayed there, dried cakes of cow-dung, hoary with age, that have grass growing in their cracks, and the prickly burrs that cling to her stockings. She sees many other things too, the meadow-saffron growing in the fields and two dun cows grazing on the valley slopes, and since she cannot be always looking at the landscape she looks also at her frock and sees the little wild roses printed on its black cotton: over and over again a fully opened flower and a bud together on one bright green stalk between two small green leaves; in the middle of the opened rose there is a yellow point. She wishes that she had a black hat in which a rose with a bud and two leaves could be pinned—that would go well with the frock. But she has only a grey woollen cloak with a hood.

As she wanders along the river like this, one hand on her hip and the other clutching a mark to defray her expenses, she is in well-known country. She is not afraid. She walks through the landscape as a housewife might walk through her dwelling, and if the pleasant feeling in her big toe induces her to kick a stone off the strip of grass, that is only a kind of tidying up. All around her everything is clear. She can see the clumps of trees that stand clearly modelled in the transparent air of the early autumn afternoon, and the landscape has no mystery for her:
behind the transparent air is the bright blue sky, among the transparent green leafage there appears from time to time, as if it could not be otherwise, a tree with yellow leaves, and often, although there is not a breath of wind, a yellow leaf comes fluttering from somewhere and slowly circling settles on the path.

When she turns her eyes to the right, yonder where the willows and bushes fringe the shore of the river, she can see the white boulders in the river-bed, she can even see the water; for the foliage of the bushes has thinned out with the autumn and reveals the brown branches, it is no longer the impenetrable green wall of summer. But if she turns her eyes to the left she sees the marsh-meadow: uncanny and malicious it lies there, and if one sets a foot in its grass the water plashes up and seeps into one’s shoes; one dare not try to cross a marsh like that, for who knows? one might sink and be smothered in the bog.

Children have a more restricted and yet a more intense feeling for nature than grown-ups. They will never linger at a beautiful prospect to absorb the whole of a landscape, but a tree standing on a distant hill can attract them so strongly that they feel as if they could take it in their mouths and must run to touch it. And when a great valley spreads before their feet they do not want to gaze at it, but to fling themselves into it as if they could fling their own fears in too; that is why children are in such constant and often purposeless movement, rolling in the grass, climbing trees, trying to eat leaves, and finally concealing themselves in the top of a tree or deep in the dark security of a bush.

Much, therefore, of what is generally ascribed to the sheer inexhaustibility of a youth’s unfolding powers and to its purposeless yet purposeful exuberance is really nothing else than the naked fear of the creature that has begun to die in realizing its own loneliness; a child rushes to and fro because in so many senses it is wandering about at the beginning of its course; the laughter of a child, so often censured by adults as idle, is the laughter of one who sees himself surprised and mastered by loneliness: so it is not only comprehensible that an eight-year-old may decide to go out into the world in an extraordinary, one might almost say, an heroic and final attempt to concentrate her own loneliness and conquer within that the greater loneliness, to challenge infinity by unity and unity by infinity—not only is that comprehensible, but it is also comprehensible that in an enterprise of this kind the motives influencing her will be neither ordinary nor weighed by ordinary standards; a mere butterfly,
that is to say a thing of such little weight that it cannot come into consideration at all, may have a determining influence on the whole course of her adventure—for instance, let the butterfly that has fluttered for some time ahead of her suddenly leave the path to vanish across the marshes, and it is only in the eyes of an adult that that will seem irrelevant, for adults cannot see that it is the soul of the butterfly, not the butterfly itself, and yet itself, that has deserted the child. She comes to a stop; she takes her hand from her hip and with a wild swoop doomed beforehand to failure she tries to catch the creature that is already far away.

She does, indeed, continue on her original path for some time. She comes almost to the great iron bridge that carries across the river the main road from the east towards the town. The path by the shore which she has been following would here climb up the road embankment and cross it to descend on the other side. But the child does not get so far as that. For in face of the familiar bridge with its grey lattice-work that cuts the black pine-forest into multitudinous black rectangles when one looks through it, a sight that has always terrified her, and of the surprising and apparently unending familiarity of the country, she now quite suddenly decides to leave the valley. No sooner thought than done. And even although when she wandered off from home she may have hoped that what was familiar and homelike would vanish only gradually, merging almost painlessly, as it were, into what was strange, yet the painfulness of this sudden farewell to the valley is drowned in her strong desire to cross to the other side of the marsh, to where the butterfly vanished.

It is only a moderately high bluff that rises over there, but it is high enough for the child to see nothing of the house on its summit save the roof, and nothing of the trees that grow there save their tops. Perhaps her most sensible course would be simply to tackle the ascent from the main road. But her impatience is too great: under the bright blue sky, that cool-warm sky of the Indian summer, under the rays of the sun that burn her back, she begins to run; she runs along the edge of the marsh looking for a ford or a raised path, the narrowest of paths will do; but while she is searching she has run right round the marsh and is already at the foot of the hill, just as if the hill had run to meet her like a camel and was kneeling down for her to climb up on it. This twofold haste, her own and that of the hill, is a little uncanny, and she really hesitates now
that she is about to set foot on the imperceptible swell that marks the transition from the flat marshland to the steep hill. If she now lifts her head the farmhouse up there has quite vanished from sight and only a few tree-tops are visible. But the higher she clambers the more the little settlement up there grows to meet her eye, first the trees in their rich green as if spring were calling to her, then the roof from which the chimney rises like a candle, and finally the white walls of the house gleam through the trees: it is some kind of farmhouse set in a very green garden, and the last slope, so steep that she scrambles up on all-fours, is likewise so green that she advances her arms until she is stretched flat on her belly, her face in the grass, and only then slowly lets her knees follow.

Now that she is really at the top and the farmyard dog barks and tugs at his chain, the springtime she hoped to find is wanting. The landscape, indeed, is strange and unfamiliar, and even the valley, into which she now casts a glance, even that is no longer the valley out of which she came. A twofold transformation! a transformation that is certainly heightened by melancholy, but none the less is not decisive, for the transformation can be attributed to the change in the light: with that swiftness peculiar to autumn the clear purity of the light has become opaque and milky, and the whitening shield of the sky looks down on another sky, for the valley is beginning also to fill with cloud that is equally white. It is yet afternoon, ah, yet afternoon, but the evening of strangeness has already invaded it. Far into the infinite distance stretches the road on which the farm is set, and in the quickly mounting cold the butterflies droop and die. And that is decisive! She is suddenly aware that there is no fixed goal for her, that her casting about and seeking for a goal has been in vain, that only the infinite distance itself can be a goal. The child does not formulate this thought, but she answers with her actions the question she has not posed, she flings herself into the strangeness, she flees along the road, she flees along the road that stretches without end, she loses her wits and cannot even weep in her breathless race that is like a suspension of movement between the moveless masses of cloud. And when the evening really steals upon her through the clouds, when the moon becomes a bright patch in the cloudy roof, when the clouds are then washed away by some noiseless force and all the stars are vaulted above her, when the stillness of dusk is superseded by the immobility of night, she finds herself in an unknown village, stumbling
through silent alleys in which here and there a cart is standing without its horses.