The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Xix Part 16

They had now reached the end of the garden path, stood still a moment, and looked out over the garden gate upon the stubble-fields and cropped meadows. Behind them the woods formed a blue-black frame about the picture, yellow in the sunshine--that dense pine forest that extended unbroken to the Russian border.

"I do not know whether I am mistaken," the professor began again, "but it seems to me as if good looks were more general in the present generation than in my youth. Nowadays every one looks well."

"Possible," replied the count, "but perhaps we are accountable for it, too. We now have the right perspective, and you know that pictures grow more beautiful when viewed from the right distance. But above all, Professor, we need that. In our old age we wish to have beautiful youth about us, we demand beauty of youth. That is very egoistic. We enjoy it at our ease. But poor youth. Do you think 'being beautiful' is easy?

Beauty complicates destiny, imposes responsibilities, and above all it disturbs our seclusion. Imagine, Professor, that you were very beautiful. With every human being you encounter your face establishes some relation, affects him, forces itself upon him, speaks to him, whether you will or no. Beauty is a constant indiscretion. Would that be agreeable?"

"I ... I suppose I can't just imagine myself in that situation,"

replied the professor.

The count smiled his restrained, somewhat crooked smile. "Yes, yes, we two have been spared these difficulties."

Then they turned and walked back toward the house.

On the porch they found Countess Betty, Count Hamilcar's sister, who had been managing his household and bringing up his children ever since he became a widower. She was dressed in her imposing white lace burnous. The white face with its little pink cheeks looked very small under the great lace cap fashionable in the sixties. Aunt Betty was sitting as at a sick-bed beside the reclining chair on which her oldest niece Lisa had stretched herself. Lisa, the divorced wife of Prince Katakasianopulos, wearily leaned her head back and half closed her eyes. Short tangled brown curls hung into the delicate pale face in a kind of Ophelia-coiffure. She wore a black lace dress, for ever since the annulling of her marriage she liked to dress in black. She had made the acquaintance of her Greek at Biarritz, and had obstinately insisted on marrying him. But when Prince Katakasianopulos proved himself an impossible spouse, the family was happy to be rid of him again.

Lisa, however, had since then retained a tragic something which Aunt Betty treated as sickness and invested with the most solicitous care.

The tutor, a stately Hanoverian, and Bob, the youngest of the family, had also appeared on the scene.

"How do you feel, Lady Princess?" asked the professor.

Lisa smiled faintly. "I thank you, a little weary."

"We need rest," opined Aunt Betty.

In the background Bob's unmannerly voice echoed, "Wary."

The count looked discontentedly at his daughter. "For excessively lyrical nerves," he said, "perhaps a little employment would be advisable."

"Why, Hamilcar," parried Aunt Betty.

Lisa raised her eyebrows resignedly and turned to the tutor to begin an amiable conversation: "Is it as hot as this in your home, too, Mr.

Post?"

Upstairs Billy appeared at the door of the sun-parlor in a white dress with red roses at her belt, and as she came down the steps to the porch, all looked up at her and smiled involuntarily. She smiled too, as if bringing something pleasant. Bob voiced the general feeling by crying, "Today Billy looks first-cla.s.s again." Boris followed her and at once took possession of her, to talk to her in a low voice. He always spoke with ladies in that way, as if what he said were confidential.

All the inmates of the house were now a.s.sembled, except the professor's wife. She always kept people waiting.

"Oh yes, my wife," remarked the professor, "she gives me sufficient proof that time is something subjective. She always has her own."

At last she came, heated and with fluttering red cap-ribbons. They could go to dinner.

Count Hamilcar loved this situation: to sit at the head of the long table, look down the lines of young faces, and hear the buzzing of the lowered voices. That cheered him. Then he kept up the conversation, and tried to have it agreeable and harmonious. But today something like a discordant note came into it.

They were talking politics. The professor was a patriot and a National Liberal. He interrupted the consumption of his peas, seized a crouton with thumb and forefinger, gesticulated with it, and said enthusiastically,

"Now, if you please, in science I as a scholar follow reason and logic quite unreservedly, wherever they may lead me, but in politics it is different, there an important factor is added, an emotion, the love of the German fatherland. Understanding and logic must share the supremacy with love, no, what am I saying--they must be subordinate to love; yes, actually subordinate. So I too am quite ready to be at times illogical for love of the fatherland. Yes, my dear count, I am."

He looked triumphantly about him and laughed.

"Surely, surely," said the count, "it would be a bad thing anyway, if we were not now and then willing to be illogical."

Here Boris bent forward and began to speak with his slightly singing Slavic accent and his trilled r:

"You are quite right, Professor, but it need not always be love, it can also be hate. To us Poles hate is sacred too."

The count lifted his eyebrows and bent over his plate. "I have noticed," he said with an acrimony that surprised them all, "that hate as an occupation blunts the intellect."

Boris paled. He was about to flare up. "I beg your pardon, uncle," he began, but then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled ironically. Both Billy and Marion, who sat opposite him, blushed and looked anxiously at him. The two children farther down the table snickered. There was an awkward pause, until the professor hastily began to speak again. Boris was silent, looked down with an injured expression, and refused all food. Billy and Marion had also lost all pleasure in eating, and were glad when the meal ended.

The sun was already shining quite aslant through the fruit-trees when coffee was served on the porch. Count Hamilcar smoked a cigarette and looked complacently down the garden, which was again teeming with life.

At this hour his eyelids always grew a little heavy. Yonder along the box-hedge Boris and Billy were walking up and down. Boris was speaking eagerly, making large gestures with his slender white hand, so that his many rings sparkled in the sun. There was in this something that displeased the count, but he did not wish to be vexed while in this agreeable situation. But when he rose and went to his room to rest a little, he met his sister. He stopped, laid one finger along his nose, and said, "Betty, as I was going to say."

"What then, Hamilcar," said the old lady, bending her head very far back so as to look into her brother's eyes.

The count pointed through the window toward the box-hedge: "Those two out there, you ought to watch a little."

"Oh, Hamilcar," said Betty, "do let the young folks talk to each other.

We were young once ourselves."

Again the count smiled his restrained, crooked smile. "Certainly, Betty, we were young once, too, and it would surely be good if our children had their own advantage from this experience of ours. Polish brandy-eyes produce an unhealthy intoxication; we have had enough and to spare of the Greek variety. You ought to watch a little."

With that he went into his room and stretched out on his sofa. He loved this half hour of rest. He closed his eyes. The windows were wide open.

From the garden the voices came in to him, as they called, sought, and joined each other, and with them was the unwearying chirping of the field-crickets. "How busy they are at their work," thought the count, "what a hurry they are in; it sounds as if each one were madly reeling the thread off a spool. How those spools hum, how feverish is the unrest in them." He felt agreeably aloof from this unrest. As he dozed off, the voices seemed to withdraw, to become subdued. "Yes, yes, it must be so, the restless voices move away, die away, and then--quiet.

Yes, it will be so--perhaps--we shall see."

Below along the box-hedge, however, Boris and Billy were still walking up and down. Boris was talking pa.s.sionately at Billy. He was quite pale with eloquence, and knew how to put a wonderfully unreserved pathos into his words.

"I know your father does not like me; he wishes to humiliate me. Of course we are not loved here in your land. We are the irksome ones all through history. Obstinate idealists are not loved. He who is born with a pain, he who is brought up for a pain, is uncongenial, I know. To be unhappy is out of date here among you, it is not _comme il faut_."

"Oh, Boris, why do you talk so," said Billy in a voice hoa.r.s.e with emotion, "we people here, all of us, like you."

Boris shrugged his shoulders. "All of us, good heavens, as if I cared about that. But you, Billy, I know you are good, you are for me,--but no, not as I understand it. Look, we Poles, all of us going about with a wound in our hearts, understand love differently. We demand a love which will take our side unconditionally, without a question, without looking around, which is wholly, wholly, wholly for us. But," and Boris made a gesture as if he were casting a world from him, "but, where do we find such a love?"

The sun was now hanging above the fringe of forest, a raspberry-red disk. Billy stood still and looked wide-eyed at the sun. The dark blue of those eyes became bright with tears, and two tiny red suns were reflected in them.

"Oh, Boris, why must you talk so," she struggled to say, "of course you know--what shall I do, what can I do?"

"You can do everything," retorted Boris mysteriously.

Billy's heart swelled painfully with vast compa.s.sion for the handsome pale lad before her, and it really seemed to her at this moment as if she could do anything and everything for him.

The garden was now quite red with the light of evening. Everywhere the young girls and men were standing together, excited by the violent, many-colored light as by a festal illumination. Egon von Hohenlicht was making the professor's daughters laugh, always simultaneously. Moritz was walking about with Marion between the beds of stocks, and they were speaking of Billy. Even little Miss Demme and the stately Hanoverian were standing together a little to one side and whispering. Lisa had had the reclining chair carried out to the gra.s.s-plot under the pear-tree. There she lay motionless, as if she feared a movement might disarrange the lovely ruddy light that floated over her. Lieutenant von Rabitow had stretched out on the turf at her feet.

"Oh, how beautiful that is," said Lisa with a softly plaintive melody in her voice, "seeing it thus, one would not believe that there is so much pain on this earth too."

"Quite right," remarked the lieutenant, "but we must not think of that.

When I have taken my bath in the evening and finished my toilet, and go down into the street,--the restaurants are prettily lighted, and when I turn a corner sharply I b.u.mp into dear little giggling girls, and then I reflect a little and ask myself where I am going--why, then I drive out of my own head the thought of being on duty tomorrow, with recruits, et cetera."

"I believe you are happy, Lieutenant von Rabitow," said Lisa softly.