“Why shouldn’t I get the time off?” said Petra with bravado. “I take time off when I like! Everything you see here,” and she went with Minna to the hut door, “everything, the rags, the paper, the old iron and the bottles—it’s all under my management, and the men working here too, of course. Herr Randolph,” she said to an old man, “I’m going up to my room for a bit with my friend. If there’s anything special you’ve only got to call me.”
“What do you call special, Fräulein? Do you think they’ll be bringing in Kaiser Bill’s crown this afternoon? You go and have a lie down. If I was you I wouldn’t stick all afternoon among the rags!”
“Very well, Herr Randolph,” said Petra happily. “After all, it’s the first time I’m having a visitor here.”
And the two of them went up to Ma Krupass’s little flat, sat down, talked, and talked more.
When the time came for Minna to go home to make supper for her mistress, she did what she had not done since time immemorial; she went to the telephone and announced that she was not coming, that the key of the larder was in the right drawer of the kitchen sideboard behind the spoons, and that the key to the right drawer was in the pocket of her blue apron hanging up with the tea towels. And before Frau Pagel had quite grasped these clear instructions, Minna had already hung up. “Otherwise she’d start pumping me on the telephone, and she can wait for once. Now go on telling me about your Ma Krupass—pinches cuff links and yet has a good heart. Such things are neither in prayer book or bible. How long has she got, did you say?”
“Four months—and that’s just as if the court had known, for I’ll be confined at the beginning of December and she’ll be coming out at the end of November. She didn’t appeal—her lawyer said she ought to be glad. But still, it’s a pity when an old woman like that is up before the judge. I was there, and he told her off properly, and all the time she was crying like a child.”
It was half-past ten before Minna came home. She saw the light in her mistress’s room, but “You can wait!” she told herself, and crept quietly to her bed. But not quietly enough. For Frau Pagel called out: “Is that you, Minna? Well, thank God for that. I was beginning to think you were taking to night life in your old age.”
“Seems like it, madam,” said Minna staunchly. And then, with affected innocence: “Is there anything else madam would like?”
“Why, you deceitful cat!” cried Frau Pagel angrily. “Are you pretending you don’t know what’s itching me? What have you found out?”
“Oh, nothing special,” said Minna off-hand. “Just that madam will soon be a grandmother.” And with that she fled into her room with a speed that one would never have thought possible in such an old bag of bones, and slammed the door, as if to say: “Consulting hours are over for this evening.”
“Well, I never!” said old Frau Pagel, vigorously rubbing her nose and looking dreamily at the spot on the carpet where her vixen of a servant had been standing. “That’s a nice way to tell me! Grandmother! A moment ago a widow without any encumbrances, and now suddenly a grandmother.… Oh, no, we shan’t swallow that medicine, even if you do give it to me so craftily, you spiteful old devil!”
With that Frau Pagel shook her fist at the empty passage and withdrew into her room. But she could not have thought the news too bad, for she fell asleep so soundly that she did not hear Minna creeping out of the house with a letter. And it was now past midnight!
This letter was the beginning of that correspondence which, even though it did not contain a line from Petra Ledig, turned Wolfgang Pagel into a young man who, in Herr Studmann’s words, looked as if he wanted to embrace the world.
III
When Wolfgang Pagel bicycled to the prisoners on his own, and Violet von Prackwitz agreed to this without demur, although she would rather have spent the morning with the young man herself, it was because a higher will prevailed to which everyone had to agree: That of the Principal Warder Marofke. This ridiculous, conceited little man with a potbelly not only made the faces of his convicts sullen—whenever he entered the farm office with one of his never-ending requests, Frau von Prackwitz groaned: “Lord, here he is again!” and Studmann frowned. The workers, the chief guards and their assistants cursed the principle—but quietly. The girls in the kitchen cursed “the conceited clown”—only very loudly.
Marofke was always finding something wrong. First the mutton was too fat, then the pork was too scanty. There had been no peas for three weeks, but white cabbage had been cooked twice a week. The men didn’t return punctually from work, and the meals were not punctual. That window had to be walled up, otherwise the prisoners could see into a room occupied by girls. It was not permissible for the lavatory next to the barracks to be used by villagers—women, for instance. It was likewise not permissible for women to let themselves be seen near the gang at work; it might excite the men.
There was no end to it. Yet this potbellied rascal made life damned easy for himself. He usually left the supervision of the gang to his subordinates, the four warders, and sat almost the whole day in his barracks, drawing up lists in a self-important manner, or writing reports to the prison administration, or striding restlessly through the rooms, pulling every bed to pieces, for inspection. A spoon handle from which a prisoner had made himself a pipe cleaner aroused him to intense thought. What could it signify? A pipe cleaner, of course; but whoever could make that could also make a skeleton key! And he inspected every lock, every iron bar, every socket. Then he strode to the closet, lifted up the lavatory seat, and looked down to see if there was only toilet paper or perhaps the torn bits of a letter there.
But most of the time he sat outside the barracks in the sun, twiddling his thumbs over his fat belly, eyes half-closed, thinking. The people who saw him sitting there so comfortable and sleepy laughed at him contemptuously. For in the country it is a shame for any healthy man to laze during the harvest. Everyone is needed; there are not enough hands.
But it must be admitted that the principal warder was not daydreaming in the sun; he actually was thinking. He thought uninterruptedly of his fifty prisoners. He recalled their sentences, their crimes, their ages, their relations with the world, how much time each had still to serve. He examined their characters man by man, he thought of incidents in the prison, trifling events which, however, vividly revealed what a man was capable of. When the men ate, rested, talked, slept, he observed them. He noticed who spoke to whom; he noticed friendships, hostilities. And as a result of his observations and reflections there was a continuous redistribution; enemies were placed together, friendships were torn asunder. Those who hated each other had to sleep in neighboring beds. Continually Marofke changed the order of sitting at table; he decided who should work by himself, whom the warders must always keep their eyes on.
And the prisoners hated their Marofke like the plague; the warders, to whom he gave endless trouble, cursed him behind his back. At the slightest contradiction he went scarlet, his fat belly shook, his hanging chops trembled. “I make you responsible for it, warder!” he shouted. “You have sworn an oath to do your duty!”
“These fault-finders always exist!” said Studmann with disgust. “It’s best to let them alone. Even God wouldn’t do anything right for them!”
“No!” said Pagel. “This time you are wrong. He is a really cunning fox. And efficient.”
“Now I ask you, Pagel!” said the irritated Studmann. “Have you ever seen this man doing regular duty like his colleagues? Yes, sit in the sun and think out new complaints, that’s all he can do. Unfortunately, I can’t say anything to the fellow; he’s subject only to the prison authorities. But you can be certain if I were his superior I’d give that fat fellow a bit of exercise!”