Flood

Prologue

THE HOUSE

CHILDREN

TORN out of the abyss of night, dragged along the deso¬ late highway of dead years, they crowd about me — death-masks and the faces of children.

The little iron crib standing against the wall was enam¬ eled white, with the figures of angels at head and foot — guardians of sleep, sentinels of repose. When the railing was put up, the crib was a room which one had all to one¬ self ; cozy, shut off from everything, with only the ceiling, with the long crack in its plaster, to look down from above, like a far-off sky. Beneath it was a narrow border, blue as the summer air, and under that the calculated prodigality of marvelous painted flowers in a pattern that assumed an eternal swaying and struggling. There wTas a gash in this immensity, a deep hole left in the wall by a huge iron hook that used to be there. The little hand straying out between the bars could go feeling around in the jagged mysterious¬ ness of this whitish cavity in the blue paint, and small bits of plaster broke off in the clumsy fingers and were conveyed to the little mouth. And so one feasted of the immense, cool wall, until Agnes came and patched up the hole.

Father was often away. When he returned, a white cloth was spread on the table, and we ate. Sister was also gone every forenoon. She was unattainably big and grown-up — she went to school already, while I still lay in my carefully guarded crib. In the morning, during breakfast, she would go to the window — she was allowed to do that! — and look down upon the street. Presently, she would cry: “There go the children already !” Then, hastily, she would snatch her black school-bag, which rattled mysteriously, and run away. And Mother would say: “She doesn’t finish her milk. She is very nervous.”

Then, again, the fogs of years shroud the isle of memory. When they at length dissolve, I am already a little boy, who can reach the door-knob and go alone into the kitchen, where Agnes dips her bare, red arms into the dishwater, out of which protrude sharp reefs of knives and forks and banks of bowls and plates. When the gray twilight falls, Agnes sings endless songs in a language I do not understand — songs so sad that sometimes I creep into the parlor, amid the plush furniture, and weep, without knowing why.

Then, once, I have a slight illness and lie all the day in Father’s bed. And I ask: “How long am I going to live?” “I don’t know,” Sister answers. “Fifty years?” “Yes.” “And twenty more?” “Yes.” “And twenty more?” “Yes.” “And ten more?” “Yes,” she says, impatiently. “And then?” I feel the fear clutching at my throat, so that I can hardly speak. “Then,” she cries, and jumps up, flushed with anger and im¬ patience, “then, you will die!” And so I weep again, for hours, until Mother comes, and under her gentle words and touch I fall asleep.

The fogs keep drifting, now and again broken by little incidents. Summertime. The smell of hay. For lunch, we eat stewed pears. But the mosquitoes are ravenous. Once, I am in a row-boat. Again, I sleep on a train and overeat until I vomit. Then, Grandfather, with his long, white beard, lean¬ ing on his cane, brings nuts and a little glass of wine. And once I am allowed to cross the street alone and buy needles for Mother. A package of Number Twos. Mother sewed an entire year with these needles, and I wrould ask time and again if they were truly the right ones. Once, I became really ill, and doctors were called ; and then I lay a long time in the hospital. At that time, I had a target to shoot at — a lion’s head that opened its mouth. If you threw a ball into the mouth, it would snap shut. It exuded a breath of the wilderness and an odor of paste and varnish.

The suburban street in which our house stood was at that time but sparsely developed, especially to the left, toward the double row of young, dusty trees, near the river quay, where there was still an immense storage yard for lumber and hewn stone. The gate was locked, and placards were pasted on the board fence. One could climb over this fence, if one were as venturesome as Gutjahr. But I only peered long¬ ingly through the cracks into the forbidden land. This Gut¬ jahr (I went to school with him) was short, sturdy, freckled, and wore a gray suit of mannish sackcloth. He was half a year older than I, and knew much of the world. Sometimes, in the evenings, he went with his mother to the saloon. She was the janitress of the front-house. Upon certain occasions, he was even allowed to go with her into Herr Abel’s apart¬ ment, which was the only one overlooking the street. But once, when he stood in the vestibule with Ulrich Abel — pale Ulrich Abel — Ulrich’s father, who happened to pass by, dragged his son after him, and the front door crashed shut behind them. Then Gutjahr’s mother, a large, big-boned woman with black braids, came and silently led the be¬ wildered boy into the rear-house, where they lived.

I likewise was not allowed to be friends with Ulrich Abel at that time, which was perhaps, as I thought, because my father did not like Herr Abel and was the only one in the house who did not greet him. (Our apartment was in a sort of side-house, connecting the front- and rear-houses on one side of the courtyard, and facing the side street.) And so little Ulrich Abel, who was a year younger than I and did not yet go to school, was alone for hours. From the window of our kitchen, I often saw him standing in the courtyard.

He had a hobby-horse with a silver-gray mane and red wheels, but he did not put it between his legs as he ought to have done ; he just held it by the bridle and dragged it, dole¬ fully, upside down, along the ground behind him. Once, I saw him standing at the half-open door of the basement, which was used as a warehouse. I went up to him. He was staring into the corner. But when he saw me, he slunk away. In the corner lay a dead mouse.

It was probably about this time that Mir jam moved into the house. Like myself, she would soon be seven years old, and she wore her hair in tight braids. Her father, whose name was Feuerbach, had rented the empty rooms above ours. Incidentally, the rumor was that he had been recom¬ mended as a tenant by old man Abel, who had taken elab¬ orate pains to remove any possible difficulties to his accom¬ modation. According to him, he had known the man and his wife for quite some time, and was their friend. The be¬ longings of the Feuerbachs arrived in two carts. The first one carried a scant few pieces of household goods. The second one was heaped high with boxes, large and small, and Feuer¬ bach himself — this was the first time I saw him — walked along beside it. When one of the boxes slid out of the hands of the truckman and fell to the ground, innumerable books were scattered over the flagging of the courtyard — manycolored books, with old-fashioned covers, large and small, thick and thin. Feuerbach stooped and silently placed them, one by one, back into the box, while the workmen were busy unloading the rest. Only later, when nearly everything had been moved into the house, did a one-horse carriage arrive, bringing, amid a mountain of baskets, bundles and hatboxes, a voluptuous young woman with auburn hair and very wide-open, pale-blue eyes. Beside her sat Mir jam. Her hair also was of a reddish blond, and her eyes resembled those of her mother. They passed me quickly, as I stood curiously in the hallway, and disappeared into the house.

After that encounter, I did not see them again for a long time, although I spent many a free hour after that first day walking up and down before their door and windows. The reason for this obscurity, as I afterwards discovered, was that Feuerbach had leased the little fruit garden adjacent to the rear house, which, being strictly secluded, was visible only from the back windows. There the new tenant spent his days with his wife and daughter, but I only learned of this, as I have said, some time later, and in a most singular and disturbing manner.

Because these new neighbors, on account of their — to me — mysterious invisibility, occupied my mind more and more, I spoke of them to my playmates and school-companions. It was thus I discovered that Gutjahr, the son of the janitress, was informed of everything in connection with Mir jam and her parents. I devoured his information with perplexed and trembling interest. He knew that, in his garden, Feuerbach cultivated fruit-trees, raised fruit on trellises, grafted, raked, tied, and sprinkled. He said that the wife, who was apparently ill, rested all day in a reclining chair, which, so that she might escape the wandering shadow of the house, was slowly moved from one end to the other of the zealously guarded enclosure. Of Mir jam herself, he told, strictly speaking, nothing at all. In response to my innumerable questions, he found vague, evasive answers that told me nothing. He even invented, just to torment me the more, monstrous tales, only to deny them the next moment.

I no longer remember how the transaction came about, but I gave him a racing-game, with only one dice missing. After he had carefully examined it, he took my hand without a word and led me across the courtyard into the rear-house, which I had never before entered. The stairs were filthy, and smelled of cabbage and mustiness. Upstairs, Gutjahr pushed open a door. I found myself in a small, wretched kitchen. Gutjahr’s mother sat on a wooden box beside the stove, and slept. Her angular body had fallen backward and was par¬ tially leaning against the wall. Her head hung sideways. Grayish-black strings of hair fell over her face. Her mouth was open. She snored. An overturned, empty beer-glass lay on the table near her. With a gesture, Gutjahr cautioned me to be careful. We crept across the narrow kitchen into a small room. Gutjahr shut the door behind us. “She’s been boozing again,” he said. The ceiling of this little side-room sloped ; in spots, where the gray plaster had fallen, the bare bricks showed. An arm-chair, a table, and a high bed breathed the stale, stuffy air. The bed was shoved in front of the window. Gutjahr jumped up on it, trampling with his dusty boots on the dirty gray covers and colored pillows, and invited me, with a motion of his hand, to follow him. Thus we stood, side by side, pressed against the window-pane, and looked down.

There lay Feuerbach’s garden. The man himself was not to be seen. But in the extreme corner, far to the right, where the sun still shone — for it was already late afternoon — his wife rested in her steamer-chair. She seemed to be asleep. A white cloth lay over her eyes and forehead — a shield against the light or a compress, I do not know which. She was alone. Mildly disappointed, I was about to turn away; but Gutjahr, giggling, grasped me by the arm and pointed to a gooseberry bush. It was moving, as though some one were playfully pulling down its branches, just to see them snap back. Then, suddenly, something naked, something alive crawled out from under the leaves. It was Miriam. Crouch¬ ing on the ground like a cat or some prowling animal, she thrust her brown, agile body, kittenish yet purposeful, cau¬ tiously through the grass. It seemed as if she were gliding toward a certain object — perhaps a butterfly — that I could not see. She shot forward abruptly, reached far out, and snatched something white from the ground. It was a stone. Disappointed, she tossed it aside and threw her brown nakedness backward into the grass. Gutjahr snickered.

At that moment, the door was jerked open and the janitress, with a coarse ejaculation of rage, yanked her son off the bed and, under a torrent of ugly words, started to beat him with a stick. He stumbled and fell ; but even as I slid in shame and terror from the bed and slunk out of the door, I saw that Gutjahr had seized a footstool and was defending himself viciously. Shouts and the crash of over¬ turned furniture followed me down the stairs and into the courtyard. I ran home in great confusion, said I was ill, and was put to bed. I fancy I must have been in bed with a temperature for about two weeks. The doctor came, ex¬ amined me, and could not diagnose my ailment. He pre¬ scribed some harmless home remedies, especially rest and quiet. Thus, I could give free rein to my agitated thoughts and distorted dreams, in which the images of Mir jam, Gut¬ jahr and the drunken woman were linked together in in¬ terminable, paralyzing repetition. It was some time before I recovered from that experience.

Yet, I remember this period of my life as a peaceful and happy one. My sickliness once more brought me close to my father and mother, whom I had neglected for school companions and new-found friends. I saw myself, nearly eight years of age, placed anew and exclusively in the se¬ cluded world of our home, and I learned to look at many things with different eyes. It was midsummer. School was closed. My sister, graduated from the elementary school, had been sent to Father’s relatives in the country, ostensibly to study domestic science; and our servant Agnes also left us, shedding many tears. When I asked for the cause of such measures, I was given either a vague answer or none at all.

Once, awakening at night and hearing my good father walk¬ ing restlessly up and down in the room with the plush furni¬ ture — light shone from under the door into the dining-room, where I slept — I slid from beneath the covers and listened. For a long time, I heard nothing but the monotonous tramp! tramp! of my father’s footsteps and an occasional deepdrawn breath. Then, the bedroom door must have opened, for the voice of my mother became audible. “Come !” she said. “Go to sleep, Edward !” — and there was a deeper hope¬ lessness in her tone than I could comprehend at that time. The light was extinguished ; my poor father sighed, and all was silent.

Only much later I learned that he, who until now had been a bookkeeper in a large factory, had at this time lost his position, for some paltry reason. Meals became scanty. Father wrote many letters, went away every morning, dressed in his best suit, and returned at noon or in the eve¬ ning, quiet, pale, and tired. We would sit together in silence, and I know that at that time my mother secretly took in sewing to help buy food. In spite of everything, she re¬ mained serene and seemed quite cheerful and, as I have said, I attached myself very closely to her during this period. She was tall, slender, industrious and gentle, but lacking in imagination ; and the story of “the little tree that longed for different leaves” — which always brought tears to my eyes, I do not know why — she repeated at least a hundred times. Notwithstanding our poverty during that year, my grandmother moved in with us, for reasons unknown to me. She was my mother’s mother, and she never wearied of enter¬ taining me with fairy-tales and anecdotes of her life. Al¬ though uneducated, she was a woman of great experience and sympathetic understanding. She had lived an eventful and troubled life, with a capable husband who had been cursed by continuous adversity in business. She had borne a great number of children, raised them, and had seen them go out into the world. She had buried her husband As an old woman, she had gone to her son in America, and had re¬ turned, undejected, still full of life and laughter, and had now joined her own indigence with that of my parents. When she was in good spirits — and that was nearly always — she would mingle English gibberish with her talk, and this seemed to open up a world of adventurousness for me.

And thus, this quiet summer was filled with small events. When I was released from the confinement of my room and once more took possession in my own way of house, court¬ yard and street, school had commenced again. The boy Gutjahr I deliberately shunned, but as the authorities had just then begun to try out the coeducational system, I one day discovered Mir jam Feuerbach sitting in front of me, and my heart beat faster. Taking the same road morning and noon was bound to bring us closer together and, since I remained bashful, it was Mir jam who first spoke to me — quite uncon¬ cernedly, for I, after all, was merely a neighbor and casual acquaintance, and she could not know what a deep impres¬ sion she had already made in my life. If I was somewhat silent, she was all the more talkative ; and thus I learned that her father was “one who makes books,” an author, or per¬ haps a scientist, and I also learned that she had lived for some years in the country, that her mother had been ailing now for months, and many other things. I never mentioned Gutjahr, whom she did not seem to know. On the other hand, her parents were evidently on friendly terms with Herr Abel of the front-house — and in this connection, I must mention here one little occurrence which I never forgot.

It was early winter — drab, gloomy days, ending in sudden darkness. That afternoon, Mir jam and I had left school together. We had stood for a moment in the half-darkness of the house entrance, when Ulrich Abel, who was always lurking in corners, stepped out of the shadows of the stair¬ case and joined us. Mir jam greeted him in a friendly man¬ ner, but at the same time warily. He was delicate and pale, wore his brown hair long, and had dull brown eyes. We began to talk in hushed voices, oppressed by the gloominess of the place. Then, suddenly, I saw Herr Abel appear in the door on the opposite side of the archway. I started and, re¬ membering the time when he had taken Ulrich away from Gutjahr in such a rough manner, I stepped back into the shadows. Meanwhile, Abel had come closer ; but, to my great astonishment, there was nothing of anger or severity in his face. He stepped up to Mir jam, and it seemed to me as though his features were frozen in a false smile. He spoke to her; he laid his slender, yet heavy hand upon her head; he stroked her caressingly, with oppressive gentleness, on her cheek and chin, while she looked at him fixedly, in evi¬ dent embarrassment. He talked continuously about many things, spoke casually, in rambling sentences and with great verbosity, about knowing some nice games, about inviting her into his house, about some possible gifts, and he smiled down at her with his artificial smile.

Something made me turn away from Mir jam and look at Ulrich. He also had retreated into the shadow of the stair¬ case, and only the gleam of his terrified eyes was visible. Abel had now taken the girl by the arm and, chattering inces¬ santly, was pulling her toward the stairs. Mir jam, who until now had stood shy and guileless before him, became terri¬ fied at this sudden insistence and tried to liberate herself from his grasp. Red blotches appeared on his face. He stopped chattering, but he did not release her. Instead, he pulled her over the lower steps toward the door of his apartment. She uttered a little cry, in startled confusion. At this moment, the entrance to the archway darkened, and Mir jam’s mother appeared in the gateway from the courtyard. I had not seen her since the day I spied upon her from Gutjahr’s room. Her face seemed to have broadened; she wore a wide cloak, and moved heavily. When the man saw her, he released the child’s arm, bowed politely, and took off his hat. Frau Feuerbach remained silent, and though Abel began to talk and laugh about this thing and that, she neither answered nor moved. Presently, she nodded. “Come, Mir jam!” she said, in a low voice, and left, accompanied by the bewildered girl. Abel’s chatter cea&d abruptly. He turned, looked about him, his features now slack and spongy, and stormed up the stairs. Only Ulrich remained behind, pressed into the shadows of the staircase; his eyes were glistening. I stole away into the street.

Of this Abel — his first name was Johannes — there is still much to tell. He was about forty years old, a powerfully built man with a broad forehead, and at that time he wore a brown, well-cared-for beard. One might have called his face handsome, had not certain little creases and frowns marked on it the capability of sudden passions and capricious moods. His temper was not without a trace of timidity, his severity not without gentleness — this gentleness, however again, not without inflexibility. His eyes, red-veined and slightly protruding, were apt to wander, and held hidden lights and shadows. He had, as I afterwards learned, mar¬ ried a very young girl, a niece of his first wife, and the rumor was that nothing but the extraordinary resemblance of this girl to the deceased woman had prompted him to the marriage. But this union — not a happy one, by the way — likewise proved of short duration. Abel’s second wife died at Ulrich’s birth. The man remained alone with the cliild in the large, well-furnished, but gloomy apartment that was only visited — with the exception of the gruff old cook — by the janitress of the rear-house. Cook and janitress, as I heard, had been with Abel for many years ; and Ulrich, although his father sometimes exhibited a sudden interest in his upbringing, was mostly dependent on these two women for companionship and knowledge. For Abel himself, his mode of living and his character, this period of inner empti¬ ness after the death of Ulrich’s mother may well have been — in the readjustment and reorientation — a decisive and dangerous factor.

These unfortunate domestic matters were counterbal¬ anced, as far as this may have been possible, by the ex¬ traordinary success of Abel’s business ventures, beginning shortly after the death of his first wife. By inheritance, he had come into possession of a small marmalade factory, old-fashioned and of bad repute. Abel took over the property at a time when an exceptionally late crop of preservable autumn fruit had destroyed all possibilities of profitable commercial canning. Without ceremony, he decided to dis¬ continue the manufacture of marmalade. As he was able to use his mixers and vats, there was very little other equip¬ ment needed to turn the place into a chocolate factory. A device for breaking and roasting the cocoa-beans and a granite rolling-mill for pulling and grinding the semi-pulpy paste were easily secured. The enterprise flourished. Abel added an extra workroom for the manufacture of plain chocolate-creams and light pastries, and out of the first profits bought rotating copper kettles for the purpose of producing cheap sweets, in the English fashion. Within a year, he had brought to life, in a small way, a factory of totally different character, which, as he was then without serious competition, made it possible for him to put aside substantial sums of money in a very short time. He bought houses and lots in this suburb, again profited by their oppor¬ tune sale, and slowly accumulated a fortune sufficient to enable him to indulge even his most expensive whims. Realiz¬ ing this, and having, through the misfortunes of his earlier life, become a stranger to any serious impulses, he now pro¬ ceeded to interrupt his industrious life with intervals and digressions of carefully planned dissipation. He played the instrument of Life cold-bloodedly, and ruthlessly manipu¬ lated its strings.

IT WAS shortly after the episode between Abel and Mirjam, on a Saturday. I remember this quite distinctly, be¬ cause my parents had left early that morning on one of their visits to my sister — a fussy procedure, which was repeated regularly every fortnight. I had remained at home with Grandmother. She busied herself in her room and, when she came out, I saw to my astonishment — since this happened only at rare intervals — that she was dressed to go out. With a somewhat forced cheerfulness, entirely lacking her usual bantering coarseness of expression, she told me that she was going to the doctor, “to have him examine her thoroughly.” She imparted this information with a laugh that startled me, but apparently she was not willing to say more about it. With a friendly tap on my shoulder, she suggested that I spend two hours as best I could, and pushed me out of the dour. In the courtyard, I met Mir jam. We went up to her room and worked out our arithmetic examples together ; then we played, and I so completely lost track of the time that the two hours must have stretched into three and a half before I went downstairs again.

It was early evening. I was abstracted and somewhat tired, so it meant nothing to me that the door to the apartment opened as I turned the knob. I walked into the anteroom, into the dark dining-room, and put on the light.

On the sofa, stiffly erect, sat my poor grandmother. She started as the light flamed up, but she remained seated and only nodded at me with a difficult smile. She still wore her gay, close-fitting, somewhat ostentatious street dress, but the tight jacket was slightly open at the throat, and I noticed that her small hat was ridiculously askew on top of her gray hair. From beneath it, out of a face of alarming pallor, stared two distended, deeply troubled eyes. She had prob¬ ably been sitting like this for a long time in the slowly gath¬ ering darkness. She smiled at me and called me to her with a feeble motion of her hand. “You mustn’t say anything,” she whispered. “You mustn’t say where I — ” She stopped abruptly, rose, kissed me on the hair, and went slowly, with unsteady, yet controlled, steps, out of the room.

Curiously enough, this occurrence revived an old weakness of mine which had not troubled me for several years : I was afraid. It was not an immediate return of the terror that formerly had used to clutch me, and that was afterwards to clutch me so penetratingly, tenaciously and decisively, but a fear of faces, of grimaces, of anything distorted. Perhaps because of the expression in Grandmother’s face that eve- ^jiing — naturally, I had kept silent, as she asked — perhaps also because of a famous picture-book which I happened to possess at this time and which portrayed in a terrifying manner the punishment of childish disobediences, my nightly dreams, and soon my day-dreams as well, were haunted by weird personages. But these specters never lost their relation to reality. Now, it was Mir jam whose hair changed to worms; now, Grandmother, who stared at me with the red, blind eyes of a hen; then, it was the milkman whom I saw suddenly coming up the long, spiral staircase, a grinning skull in the place of his head and rapping at the door — eight times, so softly that only I, sleeping on the couch in the dining-room, could hear him. I said not a word about these apparitions that tortured me, but I tried by a hundred pre¬ texts to keep the door to the parlor and the one to my parents’ bedroom open at night. Because I failed in this and because my good father chided me severely for my cowardice, I fell into a fever and was allowed to sleep for three or four blissful nights between Mother and Father in their double bed, safe and in glorious security. Then, I was put back again into the dining-room with the creaking furni¬ ture. Thereupon, I determined secretly to take the officer’s saber — a memento of my uncle, who had disappeared — out of the clothes closet in the anteroom and to bed with me. For many years I lay, night after night, pressed against this ornamental, nickel-plated weapon, torn between fear and a hazy fantasy of heroic defense.

Only one human being — Mir jam — shared this secret with me, and that came about by accident. One night in early spring, some one knocked at our door. I awoke out of my sleep with a start. My father got out of bed and opened the door. I heard Feuerbach’s voice, and then the voices trailed off into the parlor. I could hear them talking about doctors, and the word “cab-stand” came clearly to my ears; my father hurried back into the bedroom, no doubt to dress, and I could hear how Feuerbach meanwhile drummed with his knuckles against the windows and muttered to himself, in great excitement. After a while, Father returned to Feuer¬ bach. “Calm yourself !” he said. Evidently, my mother must also have gotten up. She said : “God will help !” I heard some one sobbing. Then, all three disappeared in great haste. Their steps died away on the stairs. Hardly fifteen minutes could have passed before the outer door was again opened and my mother entered, followed by Mirjam, who was cry¬ ing softly and seemed greatly confused. She was wrapped in a huge, knitted shawl, and beneath it showed the long nightgown which covered her throat and naked limbs. The untied laces of her shoes flopped round her bare feet. She trembled. Mother told her to sit down at the head of my long couch, fetched a pillow and a cover out of her room for the freezing girl, stroked her tear-wet cheeks, spoke a few soothing words, and hurried out again, leaving me alone with Mir jam.