But what did the two people in the Villa say to that? Nothing. The Rittmeister preferred to sit silently beside his wife. “Do just as you think best, Herr Pagel,” she said. “You have the authorization.”
“But your father …”
“Oh, father doesn’t mean it so badly! You will see. When everything’s in a complete muddle, he will come and put everything to rights—beaming because of the chance to be so clever. Isn’t that so, Achim? Papa was always like that.”
The Rittmeister nodded and smiled.
“But I have no money for wages!” cried Pagel despairingly.
“Sell something or other—sell cows, sell horses! What do we need with horses at the beginning of winter, when work’s at an end? Don’t you think so, Achim? In winter one doesn’t need horses.”
“No.” He is of the same opinion; in winter one doesn’t need horses.
“The lease prohibits the sale of livestock. Live and dead stock, madam, does not belong to you; it belongs to the Geheimrat.”
“Have you become Herr von Studmann? Why, you’re already talking of the lease! Dear Herr Pagel, don’t make difficulties for us. You have full authority! It’s only a question of a few days more.…” Pagel looked questioningly at Frau Eva. “Yes,” she went on suddenly fervent, “I am convinced that our search will soon be successful. The fat man has turned up again in his bowler hat.… We hadn’t seen him for a time, and we had almost given up hope.…”
Pagel went. Pagel raised money and paid the wages. Or Pagel could not raise money and he paid the people with grain and potatoes, a sucking pig, butter, a goose …
He sat at the typewriter: “We have still roughly four thousand hundredweights of grain lying unthreshed.…” Is that true or is it a lie? he thought. I don’t know. I haven’t kept the grain books for weeks; I’d never get them right now. Whoever takes over from me can only believe that I’m criminally thoughtless. Nothing balances.… If the Geheimrat gets to see it … He sighed. Oh, life’s no fun, I don’t enjoy it. Even when I think of Petra, I no longer enjoy it. If I ever really do reach her, I’m sure I’ll cry and cry purely because of loss of nerve. But I can’t run away now, though. I can’t leave them in the lurch. They wouldn’t even be able to borrow the petrol for their damned car!
“That’s the third time you’ve sighed, Herr Pagel,” said Amanda Backs from the window, “and it’s only half-past eight in the morning. How are you going to get through the day?”
“That’s what I often ask myself,” replied Wolfgang, grateful for the distraction. “On the whole, however, the day itself sees to it that you get through it, and usually no day is as bad as I feared it would be in the morning, and none so good as I had hoped, either.”
Amanda Backs looked impatiently out of the window; this sententiousness did not please her. Then she screamed, in horror. “Herr Pagel, look!”
Pagel sprang to the window …
He saw something coming across the Geheimrat’s park, creeping on arms and legs.
For a moment he stood transfixed.
Then he shouted: “The forester! Now they’ve killed the forester, too!” and he ran from the room.
II
It had not been very hard for Pagel to get the old forester out of his sickbed again—not half so difficult as the doctor had thought. A man who had passed his whole life in the fresh air felt his head swim when he was always shut up in a stuffy room. “I’m afraid the walls will collapse on me,” he complained to Pagel. “It’s all so small—and she won’t have a window open.”
Perhaps it was not the confinement or the lack of air, or the bees who had to be prepared for the winter, or the hunting dog who wanted to be fed every day, that brought the forester so quickly out of his bed—perhaps it was “she,” his wife, who more than anything sickened him of his room. They had spent a whole lifetime side by side—till they couldn’t bear the sight of each other. Day after day they passed by one another without exchanging a word. He would go into the kitchen, make his coffee and butter his bread, and then, when he had left, she came and made her coffee and buttered her bread. They had long passed beyond disgust, hate and aversion; now they did not exist for one another at all. For a very long time. Before he opened his mouth she knew what he would say, and he knew everything about his wife; how peas agreed with her, and that when the wind was in the south she couldn’t hear with the left ear, and that lampreys tasted much better with than without a bay leaf.
“Move into another room,” proposed Pagel. “There are enough empty rooms in the house.”
“But my bed has always stood in this room! I can’t move it about at my time of life. I would never get to sleep.”
“Then go for a little walk,” replied Pagel. “Fresh air and a little exercise can only do you good, the doctor says.”
“Yes? Does he really think so?” asked the forester anxiously. “Then I’ll do it.” He was very willing to do whatever was ordered by the doctor who had procured so many good things for him: rest from work, sick benefit, splendid medicine that brought a man tranquil sleep. And he had promised even better things: the end of inflation, a pension, a peaceful evening to his life. So the forester went for a walk. But that again was a difficult matter. At no price would he go into the forest, which came right up to his house. He had seen enough forest in his life, much too much. Actually he couldn’t see the wood for the trees. He saw only so-and-so many cubic feet of timber, railway sleepers, wood for fellies, shafts for the wheelwright, stakes … And if he took a walk in the forest it would look, not as if he were ill, but as if he were on duty again. It would have been the same as for a sick clerk to go to his office for recreation.
In the other direction, however—toward the village—he also did not go. All his life the people had kept repeating that he was merely a lazybones who did nothing but walk about. He didn’t intend now to go for real walks under their very eyes; that would look as if they had been right in the end.
There remained then only one way for him, that which led past the potato clamps fairly directly to Neulohe Farm and the staff-house. Kniebusch therefore went only this way, with great regularity, several times a day; and with the greatest regularity he arrived several times a day in the staff-house.
With the forester it had come to pass that he, a very old man, had at last found a real friend—and Pagel did not want to disappoint this simple faith. Yet he sighed whenever he saw the old man approaching, to sit down and not take his eyes off him for half an hour at a time. He did not exactly intrude; he never spoke if Pagel was busy—at the most he let himself be carried away into a rare exclamation of rapture when Pagel was typing, such as: “Oh, how fast he does that! Like machine-gun fire! Splendid!” No, he did not intrude, but it was a little disturbing to have those seal-like eyes fixed upon one in a glance of unbounded devotion, enthusiastic friendship. Perhaps it was disturbing precisely because Pagel did not in any way return this emotion. He had no particular love for the aged, timorous forester. And what had he done to earn such friendship, after all? Practically nothing: a talk on the telephone with the doctor, a little charity, two or three short sickbed visits.…
When things got too bad Pagel would interrupt his work. “Come along, Herr Kniebusch; I must see if there are any more mouse holes in my potato clamps: I’ll accompany you the little distance.”
The forester always got up at once and came away willingly. It never entered his head that his friend wanted to get rid of him. When this had happened three or four times, however, it occurred to the old man that at least he could take one job off this friend’s hands, and now on his morning walk to the office he would go from one clamp to the other. “Stacks six, seven, eleven each have a hole,” he would report. “At the north end, middle, south end.” He was very exact.