Haase was silent for a long time. At last he said peevishly: “You’re a young man, and I’m an old one. I’ve a farm, Herr Lieutenant, and I must look after it. We Haases have been living here since time immemorial, and I wouldn’t like to meet my father and grandfather in the hereafter if I’d played fast and loose with the farm.”
“And if you retain it by fraud, that wouldn’t matter at all?”
“It isn’t fraud,” cried the magistrate heatedly. “Everybody does it. Besides, Herr Lieutenant,” and his face wrinkled in a grin, “we’re human beings, after all, and not angels; my father now and again sold a horse as a good draught animal when it wasn’t. We are cheated and we cheat for once—I think that God does forgive, too; it isn’t just a bit of writing in the Bible.”
The Lieutenant had already started another cigarette. What the magistrate thought about God didn’t interest him. He was more concerned that things should first improve in this world. “A match, forester!” he ordered, and the forester, who had been playing with the tassels of the curtains, sprang forward.
“Take cover,” ordered the Lieutenant, and Kniebusch jumped back into the curtains.
“If you don’t do what I tell you,” declared the Lieutenant stubbornly—for he could be just as obstinate as an old farmer—“if you don’t do what is the simple duty of every decent fellow, I’ve no use for you in our Cause.”
“I always thought you needed us,” rejoined the magistrate, unmoved.
“And if you aren’t with us, Haase,” the Lieutenant continued, undaunted, “and we take command in a month or two, do you think that matters will turn out so very much in your favor?”
“Lord!” said Haase, unperturbed. “If you’re going to punish everybody who hasn’t been with you, Herr Lieutenant, there will be a deal of weeping and wailing in all the villages. And you won’t be appointed Minister of Agriculture, either, Herr Lieutenant,” he mocked.
“All right,” said the Lieutenant curtly, and picked up his cap from the sofa. “So you don’t want to, Haase?”
“I have said what I’ll do,” repeated the other stubbornly. “I won’t give notice and I’ll give the equivalent of ten hundredweights of rye.”
“We’ve finished with each other, Haase,” said the Lieutenant. “Come along, forester; I’ll tell you where the meeting’s taking place this evening. Not here, anyhow.”
Haase would have liked to say something more, but he pressed his thin lips together. The Lieutenant was no bargainer; you could not beat him down; he demanded everything or nothing. But since the magistrate did not wish to grant him everything, he remained silent.
The Lieutenant stood in the doorway of the house and looked across at the farm. Behind him, silent, stood Forester Kniebusch and his dog. The Lieutenant might have been reluctant to step out into the lessening, but still sufficiently heavy, rain. But he wasn’t thinking of the rain at all; he was looking absent-mindedly at the open barn floor, where, before knocking off for the day, they were hurriedly unloading the last cartful of rye saved from the storm.
“Herr Lieutenant,” said Kniebusch cautiously, “you could, perhaps, hold the meeting at Farmer Bentzien’s.”
“Bentzien, yes, Bentzien,” said the Lieutenant thoughtfully, and watched the unloading. He could hear the rustle of the dry straw. He had not been in the Great War—too young for that—but he had served in the Baltic Provinces and Upper Silesia and had learned the lesson that tenacity of purpose decides the issue. He had told the magistrate that they had finished with each other; Haase might think so, but the Lieutenant hadn’t yet finished with him. “Benzine,” he muttered. “Wait for me here, forester,” he said hastily.
And with that he went into the house again.
Less than five minutes afterwards the forester was called inside. Haase sat at the table and wrote a confirmation that he forewent his right of extinguishing the mortgage and that he pledged himself to pay an interest of forty hundredweights of rye in two half-yearly installments. The magistrate was inscrutable, and the Lieutenant was inscrutable, too. The forester could have sobbed with joy, but was afraid to, lest the agreement be rescinded. So he hid his feelings, with the result that he made a face like red lacquer nutcrackers.
“So that’s that,” said the Lieutenant and scrawled his name as witness. “And now go and call the people together, Kniebusch. Here, of course! Farmer Bentzien? Benzine doesn’t come into consideration now!”
And he laughed maliciously. The magistrate, however, remained silent.
The conversation between Lieutenant and magistrate had been very brief.
“Tell me, Haase,” the Lieutenant had said on re-entering, “it has just occurred to me—what about the fire insurance?”
“The fire insurance?” asked Haase dumbfounded.
“Yes, of course.” The Lieutenant spoke impatiently, as if a child ought to understand the reason for his question. “How much are you insured for?”
“Forty thousand.”
“Paper marks, what?”
“Ye-e-e-es.” Very long drawn-out.
“I think that’s about forty pounds of rye?”
“Ye-e-e-es.”
“Isn’t that damnably careless? With a barn full of dry hay and straw?”
“But there isn’t any other insurance,” the magistrate had cried despairingly.
“Oh, yes there is, Haase,” the Lieutenant had said. “That is, when you’ve called in Kniebusch and written down what I tell you.”
Whereupon the forester was called in.
VII
Retired Oberleutnant von Studmann, reception manager, had a very unpleasant experience that afternoon in the hotel. About three o’clock, at a time when travelers do not arrive by train, there appeared in the entrance hall a rather tall, powerfully built gentleman, faultlessly dressed in English cloth, a pigskin case in his hand. “A single room on the first floor, with bath but no telephone,” he demanded.
He was told that all the rooms in the hotel had telephones. The gentleman, who seemed to be a little over thirty, could contort his pale, clean-cut face into most horrifying grimaces. This he did now to such effect that the porter started back.
Studmann came closer. “If you wish it, the telephone could of course be removed from the room. At any rate …”
“I do wish it!” the stranger barked. Then, without any perceptible change of mood, he asked gently that the electric bell in his room should also be disconnected. “I dislike modern technical apparatus,” he added frowningly.
Von Studmann bowed without speaking. He was expecting a demand that the electric light be cut off, but the gentleman either did not regard electric light as belonging to modern technical apparatus, or he had overlooked the point. Preceded by the bedroom waiter with the registration form, he went upstairs muttering, followed by a page with the pigskin case.
Von Studmann had been in a metropolitan caravanserai long enough not to be surprised at any request from a visitor. His composure was not easily ruffled; there had been the South American lady, traveling alone, who had screamed for a commode for her little monkey; there had been the distinguished elderly gentleman who, emerging from his room in pajamas at two o’clock in the morning, had requested in a whisper that he be furnished with a lady, at once, please. (“Don’t pretend; we’re all men.”) Nevertheless something about this new visitor warned Studmann to be careful. Ordinarily the hotel was patronized by ordinary people, and ordinary people prefer rather to read of scandals in the newspapers than to experience them. The reception manager’s instinct warned him. He was not affected so much by the silly requests as by the grimacing and shouting, and the man’s restless glances, now arrogant, now furtive.