“My letter!” she wanted to scream out; she wanted to bang on the window and ask for it back. What restrained her was not the fear of arousing the house, nor the dislike of a silly dispute with the crazy lying fellow. Oh, hang the letter! she thought suddenly, very calm. I don’t need it, I’ll find Fritz without it.… He’s probably kept it, not in order to take it to my parents, but to demand a reward again! And she felt his hand on her heart, his cold, inhuman hand. If I tell Fritz, he’ll kill him; Fritz wanted to kill little Meier for much less.… But she felt that she would not tell Fritz. This must always be kept a secret from him, whatever happened. Actually she should be horrified at having a secret in common with Räder, but she was not. There was a dismal seduction about this evil servant’s hand. She did not understand it, but she felt it.…
While all this was going through her head—and such thoughts and fears don’t take a second—Hubert Räder had knelt down at the foot of his bed. There he crouched in his long nightshirt, with clasped hands, saying his prayers like a child. But there was nothing childish about that evil head. When she saw him, scarcely three yards away, kneel down on the little stage visible only to herself, and pray, he who just before had put his hand round her throat—when she reflected that perhaps he was thanking God for being allowed to do that to her—then Violet could contain herself no longer but jumped up and ran into the night, not giving a thought to the people who ought not to see her, nor to Fritz, whom she had to see.…
She ran through the garden, on and on, and up a grass ridge between the fields. Her breast heaved. She felt as if she must run away from it all, from herself and everybody, and she threw herself down and gazed at the sky, whose impalpably deep background made the stars twinkle all the more brightly. At last she dozed off.…
But she could only have slept a very short time, the stars hadn’t shifted. It was as if she had dreamed of something very light and happy, but knew nothing more about it. A feeling of approaching danger had awakened her. Yet around her was nothing but silence and rural night. The village, too, had gone to bed, there was not a sound.…
“No, there is no danger,” she said, calming her throbbing heart. But suddenly she realized that she was alone in the fields and too far away for a cry to awake anyone in the village.… And she, who had been out in the fields and forest hundreds of times at night without even a thought of fear, was seized with a cowardly trembling that he might come in his white shirt, along the ridge, and want to lay his hand on her heart again. I would not be able to resist, she thought.
And she started to run again. Away from the Villa, whence he might follow her, she ran toward the dark mass of trees in the park. She clambered over the fence, her dress tearing on a nail, and tumbled into the grass on the other side, but jumped to her feet immediately and ran towards the swans’ pond, to the hollow tree.… She thrust her hand into the hollow, but there was no letter there; so he had already taken it and was on his way to her.…
Then she started running again, but already while she ran she realized that he’d never received the letter, that it was still with Räder, and she was gripped by a furious anger against that crook.… But the anger passed and, while she ran, she began to wonder why she was still running. There was surely no point anymore. Of course he’s no longer in the village. After such a burying of weapons you’re more likely to go home and report back than look for romantic adventures in the surrounding villages. However, although she knew she no longer needed to run, she continued to do so, as if something were chasing her, and she only stopped in her tracks when she saw a bright yellow rectangle shining through the trees. She changed her step to a cautious creeping and approached the lighted window as quietly as a cat. It stood wide open, but the curtains were drawn. She crossed the path, stepped onto the narrow grass border under the window and pushed the curtains apart. She’d been so confused that night that she didn’t for a moment think she was doing anything improper, just unusual. After casting an initial look into the room, she pushed her whole head through the curtains, and remained looking, standing, her body outside in the night, but her head in the brightly lit room.
At the table sat young Wolfgang Pagel, writing a letter. It had been a rather sad and gloomy day for him—in the morning the row with the Rittmeister, who’d thrown him out. Then the chaos with the prisoners, and the bricked-up door with the white cross, which had to be painted over. Then there was the crazy farm servant Räder with his cartload of dead geese, and Studmann with his mysterious consultations in the manor—it was all frantic and confused, as little like rural life as could be. As he eventually, angrily, swallowed down his lonely evening meal—the servant Elias had replaced Studmann—he confronted the evening, unable to sleep, unwilling to do any further work. He had thought of going to the inn or of wandering into the village and keeping an eye open for Sophie Kowalewski. All things considered, she was quite a nice girl and probably, since she had experience of Berlin, without too many airs and graces. Violet von Prackwitz, with her morning kisses, would have been more dangerous. But then he remembered that he couldn’t leave the house. He had accepted a commission, he was expecting a visitor whom he had to thrash: the stupid servant with the fishlike head, Hubert Räder. For some time, Wolfgang Pagel paced up and down his two rooms in the dusk—now in his office, now in his living room. And a bad mood certainly doesn’t improve when one paces up and down for a quarter of an hour, thinking how one is to threaten, intimidate and thrash a scoundrel. That sort of thing is best done off-hand, without any undue deliberation.
It was rather strange: whenever he occupied himself with any girl, be her name Violet, Amanda or Sophie, his thoughts always drifted in the end to Peter. Well, Peter was finally gone and forgotten, peace on her ashes; a good, pleasant girl but, as already said, peace on her ashes! Well, he could at least write to his mother, tell her something of his new life and announce for her greater comfort the liquidation of the affair with Petra Ledig. That would be much better, anyway, than merely waiting idly for a wretched fellow. Now determined, Pagel switched on the light in his living room, drew the curtains, and took his writing things from his office. He only had to remove his jacket and he was sitting comfortably and airily in casual shirt and trousers, beginning to write.
He wrote of his life in Neulohe, a little insolently, a little coarsely, as one writes when one is twenty-three years old and will not admit that anything amuses him. In five sentences he drew a picture of his employer, then of the old father-in-law who oozed craft and cunning from every buttonhole. Of past things he wrote nothing. Nothing of the picture he had taken, nothing of the disappearance of a considerable sum of money, nothing of a marriage that had vanished into air. Neither shame nor reticence prevented him from writing of these unpleasant things. But, so long as a man is young, he still believes that the past is really past, is completely finished with. He believes he can begin a new life every day and assumes fellow human beings think the same, including his mother. He does not yet know of that chain which he drags behind him his whole life long; every day, every experience, adding its new link. He doesn’t yet hear its clanking; he has not yet understood the hopeless significance of the precept: because you do this thing, you must be that.
No, at twenty-three years what is done is done, what is past is past—Wolfgang’s pen flew over the paper. Now it was busy on a picture of Studmann, the nursemaid and mentor par excellence. His mood became stimulated, his father’s spirit entered into him. He caricatured Studmann in the margin, he drew him as a rabbit gloomily sitting outside its burrow. The rabbit looked at the world wisely, and at the same time foolishly. But above all, gloomily.