An Old Heart Goes A-Journeying (20 page)

But these were the least of her grievances: what distressed her most was the state of her father’s little farm.

Farmer Gau had closed the house and stables, he hardly worked the land at all—he had enough of his own already. The place was a wilderness of weeds, the fruit trees were decaying, the fences were falling down and the plaster was moldering off the walls of the unaired rooms.

Rosemarie’s appeals and grievances never ceased—Frau von Wanzka was a widow, and owned eight thousand acres—but the thirty-eight acres of the Thürke farm gave her far more trouble.

The Schliekers heard all this, and they laid their plan accordingly; one of them met the girl by accident, and talked to her kindly—as she thought, poor thing. She was a mere child of thirteen or fourteen in those days, a very helpless and a very trusting child—and she trusted the Schliekers.

Rosemarie herself suggested to Frau von Wanzka that Schlieker should be put in charge of her father’s farm and appointed to look after her. Frau von Wanzka sent for her gardener and asked him what he thought.

He did not entirely agree. At Tischendorf there were
eight or ten hours’ work a day depending on the season, but at Unsadel he would have to work twelve or fourteen hours a day, including Sundays. Moreover, here his wife had only the housework to do—if she worked in the garden she was paid extra. In Unsadel, on the other hand, she would have to work in the fields as well. If he undertook a job of that kind, he expected to be better off, not worse. No, it couldn’t be done under a hundred marks a month; in fact he really ought to get a hundred and fifty. But he wouldn’t insist.

Frau von Wanzka listened and then consulted the magistrate and her fellow guardian. Perhaps she was not sorry to see the last of her gardener. Not that he was inefficient, far from it, she never had a better gardener, but people generally detested him. They said his vegetables filled them with wind, and that his fruit was always maggoty. His flowers made their heads ache and he was a little too keen on the main chance.

In the end Frau von Wanzka let Rosemarie have her way, but expressed the hope that there would be no more complaints.

Here was the Schliekers’ chance to strike roots and acquire possessions of their own.

Their plans were ready: they never meant to let that farm out of their hands, and they could, of course, contrive that until Marie came of age the farm should be theirs and not hers.

And so they toiled and plotted, mismanaging the farm in a fashion that really went to Schlieker’s heart, while they slowly worked their will. The end was inevitable—what could Rosemarie do? She had no friend, no one
to speak for her, no relations who might for very shame have given the child some help.

At which point that confounded old fool had walked into the Schlieker kitchen and threatened to wreck all their precious schemes.

The morning after the Professor first appeared in Unsadel Schlieker thought that he could still salvage everything; even in the evening, when he set out to make his bargain with the Gaus, he thought he would win out.

But in that decisive hour, his fellow schemer, Mali, the only human being he trusted, had ruined everything by letting the boy escape.

Dark night covered him, dimly lit by the fires of hatred and of fury. Could those two young creatures, who crept behind the stumbling figure, have seen into his heart, they would never have dared to look upon his face again.

But they followed him, and as he disappeared into the dark farmyard they sat down by the roadside and wondered what to do next.

The man looked up at the house, and across the stables—everything was plunged in darkness. Muttering a curse, he leaned his bicycle against the fence and went into the pitch-dark entrance hall. “Mali!” he called, first softly and then louder. Then he shouted into the yard. No answer.

Suddenly his anger vanished and he almost forgot his aches and pains—he knew that something was wrong. Not only had the boy escaped, something else had happened.

He stepped back into the house, groped his way to the
fireplace, felt for the matches, struck one, found the lamp, lit it, and again called “Mali!”

Not a sound.

He picked up the lamp, and headed toward Marie’s room, but hesitated. He seemed to be evading some decision, for he went into his and Mali’s bedroom first.

He lifted the lamp—the room looked precisely as it had when he left the house an hour before. This seemed to him somehow ominous. Suddenly feeling faint, he sat down on the edge of the bed and stared into space, still grasping the guttering oil lamp. All the foxiness had vanished from his face, it merely looked dark and terrible. The sly smiling eyes were dull and dead. Then he pulled himself together, got up, went to the cupboard, and took out a bottle of schnapps. He took a heavy swig, shook himself, and put the bottle back.

For a moment he pondered, then the alcohol began to work, warming him and stiffening his will. He picked up the lamp and went into Marie’s room.

The trapdoor lay open, a square of yawning blackness; he knelt beside it, and picked up the cord with which he had tied the hasp. It had been cut!

Then he began to understand: Mali would never have cut the cord—she was far more economical than he—she would have untied it, if it had taken her an hour. It was not she who had let the Gau boy out, she had not been outwitted. Perhaps she had been overpowered? Where could the woman be?

As he crouched by the open trapdoor, with the lamp beside him on the floor, he eyed the severed cord as though it were something more significant than the remains of a calf’s halter. And it was. It was the symbol
of a misplayed card and with it his schemes and hopes were severed.

And Mali?—

In a sudden impulse, he bent over the trapdoor and flashed his lamp into the cellar. No, no Mali, only swedes and beet roots.

He stood up and wavered. He was seldom at a loss, but the savage throbbing in his temples, since his encounter with Wilhelm Gau, seemed to drain all power of thought. The alcohol had numbed his aches and pains for the moment, but he was now in agony once more. He must lie down—but he must try to find the wretched Mali first.

Racked with uncertainty, he stood in the doorway, not knowing where to go. He looked helplessly about him—then caught sight of the open door of the cupboard. He hurried toward it—the cupboard was empty. So her clothes had gone too.

Then, tormented as he was, his anger blazed up again, and he cursed the brute who had robbed him of Marie and her possessions, and then had flung him into the street.

He had begun to doubt whether Gau had really been behind all this, but now his doubt fled. He was furious, he forgot his injuries, he forgot his wife. He would mount his bicycle at once and dash off to Kriwitz.

He hurried into the kitchen, and then stopped. The smell he had already noticed he recognized now: the pigs’ potatoes on the stove had been left to burn.

He pushed the saucepan to one side and turned to go, when suddenly it occurred to him that burnt potatoes meant unfed pigs. And had the cows been milked? There
was no skim milk to be seen, but the pails were missing.

He stumbled across the yard, swung open the stable door, and called into the pitch-darkness: “Mali!”

Not a sound.

Then a cow chain rattled, a cow mooed hungrily. It must be Star.

Returning to the house, he found the stable lantern, lit it, hurried back, and stepped into the stable.

The two cows turned toward him, lowing softly, the two ponies whinnied. On one of the cow stalls, beside an upturned milking stool, a milk pail lay on its side.

The cow was half out of the stall, as far back as the chain could reach. He called to her, but she would not move. She was afraid, and as he held the lantern above her head, he saw the figure of his wife under the window, lying across the manger. He stood motionless, with quivering lips; he knew the meaning of those slavering lips, congested cheeks and rasping breath. He had seen these symptoms two or three times before they were married. She had had a fit.

When she married, the plague had left her, but now it had returned.

Inch by inch, step by step, rung by rung, down, down, back into the mire. His schemes wrecked by a girl of sixteen and an old half-witted Professor. Inch by inch, step by step, rung by rung, down, down, down.

There comes a moment in the life of every man when he feels that the stone beneath his foot, his native earth, his very world, is giving way.

That was how Paul Schlieker felt that moment—darkness encompassed him, there was no help anywhere, all his toil had been in vain.

After a while, he tethered Star to the back wall and lifted his wife out of the manger into the straw. The effort was almost beyond him; he gasped for breath—the stabs of pain in his side were agonizing. She must be got into the house and to bed—but where could he find help? In that whole village of three hundred souls there was not one whom he could ask. He must leave her where she was until the fit passed.

The cows were mooing, the pigs were grunting—he must see to the animals. He could barely walk, but he had to do his best. He crouched under a cow and began to milk, but did it so unskillfully that he hurt the cow who kicked the milk pail and upset it. The milk trickled away into the straw. The tip of her tail struck him sharply in the face. He leapt up in a fury, and dashed the pail against the cow, who stamped and tugged at her chain.

Pale and stricken with pain, he stopped, aghast at what he still had to face that evening.

Suddenly Mali appeared before him, an altered woman, wild and malignant, surveying his outburst with mocking eyes: “You’re a fine sight, I must say. Gau seems to have fixed you properly. That’s what comes of being too clever—I suppose you left him for dead. Why don’t you go to the police, as I told you. Pah!—I’ll milk that cow!”

She sat down and set to work.

He did not answer. He knew from the days before their marriage that she was always irritable after an attack and that it was best to say nothing.

He sat down on the fodder bin, and tried to rest, but as she milked she went on scornfully: “The boy arrived
just in the nick of time, eh? I wish I’d been there to see your face. You always thought yourself so clever, and you always put your foot in it.”

That she, of all people, should taunt him! “How did he get away?” he asked, mastering himself with an effort.

“Yes—you’d like to know, wouldn’t you? Hurry up, harness the horses, we’ll have to clear out at once—I suppose they’ll take us in at the Biestow workhouse, won’t they?”

He leapt up with a curse, flung back the lid of the fodder bin, mixed some oats and chaff, and fed the horses.

But the devil was in her, she would not let him be—never had she spoken to him so: “Where’s the money for the cow? You might give me a share. You did well on that, didn’t you?”

He controlled himself and held his tongue, silently going to fetch the potatoes for the pigs. The yard lay still and dark, but he thought he saw a shadow moving by the dog kennel. He crept toward it, and whatever it was cowered to the ground. He put out a hand and found himself holding Bello by the collar!

The dog whined and struggled, but Schlieker made him fast to the chain. This was something to the good, the faintest indication of a change of wind. Something might be done. He made sure that the dog was secure and then hurried into the house after two steel traps. These he carefully set in such a way that anyone who approached the dog would be caught.

That was a deed well done.

Then he carried the pig food into the stable.

“Bello’s come back,” he announced. “I’ve put him on the chain.”

“Oh,” she growled from beneath the second cow, “another mouth to feed.”

“Don’t go near him,” he warned. “I’ve set the traps by his kennel.”

She stopped milking, looked at her husband sharply with malignant, birdlike eyes, nodded with an air of returning satisfaction: “Yes, they might be fools enough.” Soon the pair had put the milk through the separator, fed the animals and locked the stable.

Schlieker sat stripped to the waist, feeling his chest. It was swollen and bruised. “There, Mali, right there.” He guided her finger. “Can’t you feel anything?”

She looked at him. “Do you think the bone’s broken?”

“And there,” he pointed, “on this side—can’t you feel? Two ribs smashed on the right side, and one on the left.”

“The brute,” she burst out savagely, “we’ll make him pay!”

“Yes,” said Paul, “we will—and in cash. Damages and doctor’s fees.”

“Yes,” she said. “But we’ll have to get a doctor’s certificate.”

“And we must have his house searched this very night. Marie’s there.”

“I don’t believe so,” she answered. “She’s gone off with the old fellow to Berlin.”

“But the clothes? The cupboard’s empty.”

“What!” she cried, snatched up the lamp, and ran into Marie’s room.

He remained seated in the darkness. This was the woman for him, and he had got her back again. She returned in a fury: “Yes, she must still be somewhere around. But she didn’t come herself. There were two dresses of mine, she wouldn’t have taken those.”