And Pagel had had to go to Frankfurt in charge of the attaché case with the money, Finger the chauffeur not having been authorized to receive the full sum. In the back Frau von Prackwitz sat alone, erect on the edge of the seat, her white face pressed against the window. From time to time she called, “Stop!” Then she would get out and inspect the ground. “Go on slowly!”
She had seen a piece of paper in the ditch; she ran after it. That she hadn’t really expected to find there a message from her daughter was to be seen in the unhopeful way in which she unfolded it. “Go on slowly!”
Again and again she cried out: “Slower! Slower! I want to be able to see each face.” At a speed of fifteen miles an hour the powerful car crept along the roads.
“Slower!”
Ten miles an hour.…
“This is what she always does now,” the chauffeur had whispered. “It doesn’t matter to her where I drive, as long as she can get out and look around. As if the fellow would be still here in the neighborhood!”
She had gone into a road warden’s house. “I’m only allowed to go fast through villages and towns,” explained the chauffeur. “She thinks no doubt that the pair are utterly alone. Well, I’m glad I’m through with it today.”
“Aren’t you at all sorry for her?”
“Sorry? Of course I’m sorry for her. But after all I’m driving a sixty-horsepower Horch and not a pram. Do you think that’s a pleasure for a chauffeur, to loiter about like this?”
Frau von Prackwitz came out of the warden’s house. “Go on slowly!”
Pagel would have liked to hurry. They had to pay for the car before twelve o’clock. Studmann had strictly enjoined this; at twelve the new dollar rate would be announced.… But he said nothing.
It was three o’clock before they reached the town. The dollar was then 320 milliards as against 242 that morning—payment had taken all the rent. In fact there was even a small debt remaining. “Of no importance,” said the gentleman politely. “You can settle that at your discretion.”
Pagel knew that this would be very important to Herr von Studmann. He had hoped Pagel would still bring back a considerable amount as a loan. It would of course be even more important to Studmann that nothing had come of the meeting he had requested at six o’clock. Frau von Prackwitz had stood Pagel up in a local bar. She’d left to fetch the new chauffeur. Hours passed until she returned; the big new car stood driverless on the street. “This is Oskar,” she said and sat down exhausted. “Oskar is the son of a housekeeper of Papa’s. I remembered him. He’s a motor engineer by trade.”
“I have a driver’s license, also,” said Oskar. He was a young fellow about twenty with enormous hands and a face which looked as if roughly formed from a lump of dough; but he appeared good-natured, if a trifle simple.
Frau von Prackwitz swallowed one cup of coffee after the other, eating nothing. “Make a good meal, Oskar. We’ve a long way before us.”
“You ought to eat something, too, madam.”
“No, thank you, Herr Pagel.… Oskar knew Violet; he will help me to find her. How old was Violet, Oskar, when you left Neulohe to be apprenticed?”
“Eight.”
“At least he will drive as I want, isn’t that so, Oskar?”
“Of course, Frau von Prackwitz. Always very slowly and looking at everyone. I understand. I read about it in the papers.”
Frau von Prackwitz shut her eyes for a moment. Then she said emphatically to Pagel, “I noticed quite clearly how unwillingly this man Finger drove as I wished him to. You all now do what I want unwillingly—you too, Herr Pagel!”
He moved away.
She said, “For goodness sake, let me do what I want. Isn’t it me who’s lost a daughter, after all? If only one of you had been clever enough before! But being clever now? What’s the point of that?”
Pagel was silent.
When they had at last driven off it was after six and quite dark. Wolfgang hadn’t been able to understand why they didn’t go direct to Neulohe instead of by a long roundabout way; why, in spite of the darkness, they seldom drove faster than fifteen miles an hour; why they had to stop again and again while Frau Eva went a few paces into some unknown wood. Wolfgang understood nothing of all that.
Perhaps she just wanted to be alone. Perhaps she only stood there waiting in the dark night, till the engine noise in her body had died away, and the beating of her own heart was again palpable. Did she think that if she felt her own true self that she would feel her daughter, once a part of that self, as well?
Did she stand there awaiting some vision in which they would come through the wood—he and she, the lost ones? Did she see him in front, his bloodless face lowered, the thin-lipped mouth compressed—and her daughter half a pace behind with closed eyes, still in sleep, as the mother had last seen her? Did she see the two wandering homeless over a cold and alien earth, where no hospitable door opened to them, no friendly word ever reached them?
It had been only a little while ago that Pagel had informed her that everything was different from what she feared, that no furtive lover was to be sought for, that the enemy was the manservant. “But that is impossible! I’ll never believe that,” she had cried.
Then she had believed it. She saw the two of them—and it seemed to her that they must eternally be together without a word, each silently chained to the other by the same hellish torment. She saw the pair so plainly that she imagined the servant must be wearing gray gym shoes with grooved rubber soles and Violet a man’s faded overcoat above a dress which did not fit properly because he had put it on while she slept.
Oh, those men, those police, those people from the Public Prosecutor, with their important airs, always ringing up, sending messages, wanting to know this, or measure some shoe! They would never find Violet, she was certain. She alone would meet the girl, some day or other. It didn’t matter where she waited. It just had to be outside—sometime, when the right moment came, she would be on the right spot. Hadn’t those people even wanted to carry out a kind of search of Violet’s room, fingerprints on the windowsill, a hunt for letters? She hadn’t allowed it, but simply locked the room. What was the good of such investigations now? Violet’s room belonged to her mother; when she came home utterly exhausted from her excursions, too tired even to weep, she would, after quickly looking at Achim, unlock the door and sit down by the bed. First she threw an anxious look at the window. But this was locked fast. She hadn’t been careless. Her daughter could sleep on undisturbed. She lay in her bed. Gradually the mother went to sleep too, in the wicker chair next to the empty bed—wishes became dreams! Eventually she slept soundly. Only the next day, when she awoke, did she change, wash herself, and prepare herself for the new day. These mornings, which filled her whole room with a wretched gray pallor, when the childish squabbling of the Rittmeister and his caregiver could be heard so embarrassingly clearly, and when, after the oblivion of sleep, the sense of her loss made itself felt like a consuming fire in her slowly awaking brain … But then there was the car, she would set out at once; she must hurry, the reunion with her daughter was perhaps close at hand. That foolish pedant of a Studmann had no idea what this car meant to her! It was the bridge into the future, her only hope. Yes, indeed. He had asked for a very urgent, hurried and private interview with her, but here she was standing in the wood and it was nine or ten o’clock. He didn’t understand that you don’t leave someone who’s been struck down by misfortune—! Perhaps she was only standing there because he was waiting for her!