The Undying Past Part 17

She had become cold, almost severe, and when he had resorted to the usual method of letting her know his feelings, she had, after morning coffee, put a question to him, with a languid smile and yawn.

"How did these atrocious verses get into my basket of keys, Herr Kandidat?"

This was rough on him, and really looked as if he were out of favour.

Nevertheless he was not the man to let a woman's foibles break his heart, and in the Prussian Crown at Munsterberg, only the night before, he had again thoroughly enjoyed a booze in his father's company. This morning the sun laughed down on a world in which there was plenty and to spare of women's love. If only he could have had his clean collar, his satisfaction would have been complete.

He resolved to agitate for this end, and went into the half-dark front kitchen where Lotty, his eldest sister, a lean, unattractive, blonde, sulky and faithful as a beast of burden, was ironing the Sunday clean linen on a large board.

"Am I at last to get a decent rag to put round my neck?" he shouted at her.

Dumbly she handed him a collar.

"Do you call _that_ a collar?" he cried, twirling the limp strip round his fingers. "Do you call that piece of dish-clout a collar, I say?"

"If your linen isn't starched to your liking, get it up yourself," the sister answered snappishly, and put the bellows in the fire under the iron-rest till smoke and cinders flew about the room.

"It's a disgrace," Kurt said, "that a man should be compelled to interfere in such sordid household matters."

"Why don't you earn money enough to keep a laundress of your own?"

asked his sister.

Instead of an answer, he threw the collar at her head, and she screamed out for help to her mother.

She appeared on the scene in a white dressing-jacket, and her grizzled hair caught up with a celluloid comb. Three of the small fry trotted after her. She was already worried and irritable.

"Can't you be quiet?" she stormed. "Father is busy with his sermon, and you are behaving like heathens."

"Heathens," replied Kurt, "are at least in the happy position of not requiring clean linen, as they prefer to go naked."

"Yes, you unG.o.dly lout," cried his mother, whose admiration for him had long ago ebbed. "You are a precious, good-for-nothing----"

"You are a lout. A lout you are," he trolled forth, mimicking her. "A lout. Ha, ha!"

The hara.s.sed mother began to cry for vexation, and the little ones following her example, the Sunday morning concert of praise was in full swing.

Meanwhile, Pastor Brenckenberg, suffering from severe headache, sat brooding over a bulky book of sermons at the half-cleared breakfast-table in the parlour.

He was a corpulent man of over sixty, tall, with ma.s.sive shoulders and a red, coa.r.s.e neck. He wore his thin, much-greased hair parted in the middle and combed smoothly behind his ears, so that it framed his big, bloated face with locks like those with which Christ is depicted in sacred art. In spite of the hanging cheeks and moist, protruding, sensual lips, there was an expression of power and strength about his countenance which inspired a certain reverence and respect. Twenty-two years before, the old Squire Sellenthin had appointed him tutor and bear-leader to his wild, unmanageable son Leo, though he might be thought hardly suitable for the post, his drinking-bouts as a student having been the talk of the country-side. But the keen insight into character of the old man of the world had not been at fault in this instance. The new private tutor ruled with a rod of iron, and at the same time made himself invaluable as a perpetrator of dry jokes and an indefatigable boon companion.

And when Leo was ready for the gymnasium, a bright-eyed, plucky boy in his teens, thoroughly well trained and prepared, Herr von Sellenthin bestowed on the convivial clergyman the living of Wengern, of which he was the patron. On the strength of this the pastor at once made haste to renew an old attachment, the existence of which no one had had any suspicion, and with the love of his youth as his bride, and a bonus which his squire had given him, began to populate the empty old parsonage as speedily as possible.

Hypocrisy and unctuous piety were not in this man's line, and no one could deny that he was possessed of a certain vein of cynical good humour; but woe to the erring sheep who fell a victim to his righteous anger.

One of the stories told of him, as a warning to others, was that of the overgrown hobbledehoy, who had been in the act of taking himself off to America, and leaving the girl he had brought to shame behind him. When it had come to the pastor's ears, he had seized him by the throat and had so nearly throttled him, that the seducer, black in the face, had sunk on to his knees and implored him to let him go, promising to marry the girl on the spot, and to stay in the country and work honestly to support her and the child.

Yet, in spite of his iron rule amongst his flock, he himself had no scruples in indulging in his own weaknesses. The Sunday after, he would kneel in front of the whole congregation, wringing his hands, his face streaming with tears, and send up fervent supplications for Divine forgiveness, for his own and his brother's sins. Sometimes, when it chanced that an up-to-date town clergyman, who was in the habit of entertaining his parishioners at home with sermons of a liberal tendency, interlarded with quotations from Goethe and Lessing, occupied the pulpit at Wengern in his stead, he would say that sort of thing was priestly clowning, and reminded him of "Abraham a Sancta Clara." The natives were not cultivated enough to appreciate it.

The old man had long been a thorn in the flesh of the church-wardens.

Several times, at Church council meetings, the subject of his resignation had been broached, but owing to an official report to the effect that the standard of morality was higher in the parish of Wengern than anywhere else in the province, it was decided to leave him alone. The flock loved their shepherd because he reflected their own vices and weaknesses, and their own rough, though cute, mental fibre.

This morning Pastor Brenckenberg found it difficult to attune his thoughts to the Holy Scriptures. He had chosen the unexciting theme of harvest, taking for his text the verse from the second of Corinthians: "He that had gathered much had nothing over, and he that had gathered little had no lack."

A propos he had tried to hang together a few consolatory reflections on the consequences of the wet summer--the diseased potato crop, the rotten fruit, and to give voice to joyous thanksgiving that at last G.o.d had let the glorious sun shine on the harvest-fields. But this "drivel," as he expressed it, nauseated him. He was in a mood to thunder and bruise. He would like to have something to curse.

"Shall I give them 'h.e.l.l' again, freshly furbished up?" he asked himself. But he had dealt with this subject only a fortnight ago. "I must let their burns heal first, and then I can go for them once more."

Also, the Last Judgment; the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, in its modern application to Berlin and the Social Democrats; the baby-farming murder case; the diphtheria outbreak; one and all had been used in previous sermons.

He meditated and meditated; but the more he did so the worse his headache became, and the more irritably wiry his well-oiled hair.

"Next time the lad shall not tempt me," he said, and savagely pushed back the cup of coffee and milk which had grown cold.

The door opened, and Kurt, who had won his point and got a starched collar, came into the parlour, smiling amiably.

"Have you slept well, papa?" he asked carelessly. The old man threatened him with his open hand. "I'll never do it any more on a Sat.u.r.day night, you young dog," he roared at him. "How am I to compose my sermon on Sunday with a splitting head?"

Kurt perceived that his father was not in a humour to be trifled with, and poured himself out some coffee from the big brown family jug in silence. The old man shut up the folio before him with a furious bang.

At that same moment a sombre female figure pa.s.sed by the vine-embowered cas.e.m.e.nt, a cloud of black gauze flapping behind her.

The Countess Prachwitz's low m.u.f.fled alto sounded in the outer hall.

The pastor p.r.i.c.ked up his ears.

"Get out with you," he commanded his son, and stood all expectation awaiting the entrance of the visitor, with his brows drawn together in straight lines and wearing his most scowling bull-dog expression.

Kurt, subdued, with his coffee-cup in one hand and a b.u.t.tered roll in the other, slipped out by a side door. He would have given something to catch a few crumbs of the conversation, for since his flirtation with little Elly his conscience with regard to Halewitz was anything but easy.

The pastor and Countess Johanna were closeted together for more than an hour. The organ strains began to come from the church, and already the stream of worshippers was thinning, but the two still continued to converse in low eager tones. The pastor's wife had knocked twice warningly, and had twice been sent away. At last, when the clock chimed half-past nine, they came out into the hall, the countess with compressed lips and traces of tears about her eyes, the pastor with the dark frown of the avenger upon his brows.

"You may depend on me, my lady," he said, as he stood looming within the doorway. "I will do what lies in my poor power to bring him to penitence."

She gave the Frau Pastorin her hand and patted the watered curls of the little ones, who stood round gaping up at her, then glided out without bestowing a look on Kurt.

"My gown; my bands!" cried the old man in a voice of thunder, when the door had closed behind her; and while his wife, who had been eagerly awaiting this command, rushed to invest him with the robes of his spiritual office, he murmured to himself with grim satisfaction, "Now I have got a subject. Aye, and what a subject! Old boy, congratulate yourself."

X

At the same hour the Halewitz state-carriage drew up before the gateway of the farm at Wengern.

The party from the castle were coming to church to return thanks for the master's happy return.

The two young girls in their white muslins (grandmamma believed in simplicity of attire) walked in front, their arms round each other, and their faces grave. Leo followed with his mother leaning on his arm. He swung along, broad-shouldered and well-groomed, glorying in the full consciousness of having returned to a n.o.ble heritage. His white waistcoat gleamed like freshly fallen snow, and the seals which hung in festive array against the slender roundness of his figure made, as he walked, a slight jingle which was pleasing to his ear, and heightened his good-humour with himself and the world.

And what a Sunday morning it was! The fields that had been already cleared, glittered like gold-embroidered tapestry, and the meadows, where the gra.s.s was beginning to recover from the stroke of the scythe, were spangled with a thousand dewdrops. The village, wrapped in its sabbath calm, lay in the shade of its limes, still tinged with the lingering rosiness of dawn. Everywhere crooked sunbeams danced on the smooth roadway, and from the cottage chimneys curls of smoke rose gaily into the blue canopy, where they melted in shining wraiths, like the vapour from sacrificial altars. Sunflowers and hollyhocks bloomed in the villagers' gardens--the whole picture breathed forth a faint prescience of autumn, a promise of harvest and enjoyment of the fruits of the earth. The people who stood before their doors bared their heads, and the children, overcome with shy awe, crept away under the bean-stalks.

"Come along to church," he called to the men. "Those who are pious in the morning are welcome to a free beer-drinking in the afternoon."