Moreover she had done something, the idea of which had come on seeing her father drink the two cognacs. The afternoon before, at her uncle’s, she had had quite a lot of liqueurs; how many she didn’t know and neither did her father. But the drink had done her good. It had given her courage to defy her mother, which she would never otherwise have dared; it had made her combative and cheerful. And when her father after breakfast went out to put on his coat, she had swiftly poured herself a cognac in his glass, while watching the door. She had filled it to the brim and emptied it at a gulp. Almost automatically she had, like her father, let a second drink follow the first.
And now she was curled up comfortably in the car, warmly covered, while the country glided slowly across the windows—an endless expanse of fields deserted except for a few plow teams in the distance or the long rows of potato diggers shifting forward on their knees, the three-pronged hoe in hand. A moment they raised their heads and looked after the car speeding by. Next the almost unending woodlands, where trees were often so close to the road that branches rustled across the windows, startling the motorists, who then laughed at their fright and saw that the glass was bedewed with drops of water from the branch.
The roads from Neulohe to Ostade were bad, softened by rain and cut up by the potato carts, so that the powerful car could not show its speed; at barely twenty miles an hour Finger drove her cautiously over the potholes and through the puddles. Despite this low speed, however, the deep note of the engine, the car’s elastic springing, its effortless gliding, produced in Violet a feeling of peaceful strength. The engine seemed to transfer a portion of its unused forces to her, and this sensation was heightened by the alcohol circulating through her tranquil body. First a warmth, then in the form of many different images which faintly and fleetingly arose in her, but nevertheless left her with a feeling of something like happiness. Her young body had greedily drunk down the poison. Her tastebuds had risen up against the alcohol, and her body had shaken as she quickly drank it down. But the more her tongue rejected it, the more another instinct in her had welcomed it, whether it was her brain or an even more mysterious center of the body, which often contradicts our sense of what we should hate or what we should love. To drive like this was complete happiness, and peace.
But it had to come. In the moment when she was thinking most pleasantly of the reunion with her Lieutenant, the Rittmeister asked rather abruptly: “How did you come to know this Lieutenant?”
“But, Papa, everyone knows him!”
“Everyone? I don’t know him!” contradicted the Rittmeister, annoyed.
“Papa, you were praising him to me only yesterday.”
“Maybe.” The Rittmeister was to some extent hit. “But I don’t know him—what we mean by knowing. We haven’t even been introduced. I don’t know his name, either.”
“Nor do I, Papa.”
“What? Nonsense. Don’t lie, Violet.”
“But it’s true, Papa. On my honor. The whole village calls him only Lieutenant Fritz, Papa. The forester told you that, too.”
“You never told me. You don’t trust me, Violet.”
“Of course I do, Papa. I tell you everything.”
“Not this about the Putsch and the Lieutenant.”
“But you were away, Papa.”
“Wasn’t he here before that?”
“No, Papa. Only the last few weeks.”
“Then he was not the same man who went with you and Hubert at night across the yard?”
“That was the forester Kniebusch, Papa! I’ve told you that a hundred times.”
“So your mother acted wrongly?”
“Of course, Papa.”
“I always told her so.”
The Rittmeister fell silent again. But this silence was no longer as somber as before. He felt that he had cleared up the matter in a very satisfying way; and what particularly pleased him was that once again he had proved his wife in the wrong. Because he felt inferior to her, especially now, he repeatedly had to prove that he was her superior. The only thought disturbing to this satisfaction was that Violet had wanted, behind his back, to send the letter of warning to the Lieutenant. That showed she had either no trust in him or that she was indeed secretly associated with the man.
Suddenly he turned hot at the thought that she was in any case lying to him. When she had met the Lieutenant near the arms dump, both had pretended not to know each other. Yes, the Lieutenant had been openly rude to her. Yet even so Vi had written him a letter! They had wanted to deceive him, therefore. Or the pair had actually only become acquainted later. In that case, why had she not given her warning about the forester verbally?
It was an extremely difficult case, a maddening and complicated affair. He would have to consider very deeply and be very cunning to get at the truth.
“Vi?” he said, frowning.
“Yes, Papa?” She was readiness itself.
“When we met the Lieutenant in the wood, did you know him then?”
“Of course not, Papa; otherwise he wouldn’t have been like that.” Violet felt her danger. Not desiring her father to follow up that line of thought too far, she decided on a counter-attack. “Papa,” she said energetically, “it seems to me you think with Mamma that I’m having affairs with men.”
“Not at all!” replied the Rittmeister hastily. The magic words “like Mamma” had broken down his defense at once. But he reflected a while before asking suspiciously: “What do you know about affairs with men, Violet?”
“Well, cuddling and so on, Papa,” said Violet with that girlish defiance which seemed to her suitable.
“Cuddling is a nasty word,” said the indignant Rittmeister. “Where do you hear that sort of thing?”
“From the maids, Papa. They all say that.”
“Our maids, too? Armgard? Lotte?”
“Of course, Papa. They all say that. But I can’t swear that I exactly heard it from Armgard or Lotte.”
“I’ll throw them out,” murmured the Rittmeister to himself. That was his particular way of annihilating the unpleasant things in life.
Violet had not heard him. She was very well satisfied with the path this examination was taking. She laughed. “A little while ago, Papa, I heard one of the girls in the village say to another: ‘Have you come to the pub to dance or to cuddle?’—I had to laugh so, Papa!”
“There’s nothing funny in that, Violet!” cried the Rittmeister indignantly. “That sort of thing is simply disgusting. I don’t want to hear anything more like that, and neither do I wish you to listen to such things again. Cuddling is an absolutely low word.”
“Isn’t it the same then as kissing, Papa?” she asked very surprised.
“Violet!” almost roared the Rittmeister.
The angry cry must have reached the chauffeur through the glass, for he turned round with a questioning face. By furious gestures Herr von Prackwitz showed him that he was to drive on and that it was nothing to do with him. But the chauffeur did not understand, put on his brakes, stopped, opened the window and said: “Excuse me, I haven’t quite understood, Herr Rittmeister.”
“You’re to drive on, man!” roared the Rittmeister. “Go on driving.”
“Yes, Herr Rittmeister,” replied the chauffeur politely. “We shall be in Ostade in twenty minutes.”
“Then get on.”
The window was closed and the car went on.
“Blockhead!” swore the Rittmeister at the window. Then to his daughter in a milder tone: “There is a respectable and a not-respectable term for many things. You don’t say, ‘What will you booze?’ but ‘What will you drink?’ So for kissing; a respectable person doesn’t use that other not-respectable word.”