An Old Heart Goes A-Journeying (7 page)

“He’s the man for me,” thought the Professor. “I am sure I shall not knock at his door in vain.”

He came out of the cold into the warmth, out of the darkness into the light. The doorbell above his head jingled and before him, in the parlor, sat Farmer Tamm, with large countenance glistening over a platter piled mountain-high. On his right sat his wife Lowising, on his left his son Maxe.

“I’m not at home, I’m eating,” bellowed Tamm, peering and blinking at the visitor in the doorway.

The visitor stood still and silent.

“Papa!” cried Frau Lowising, “it’s the old Professor that went to Schlieker’s about Marie. Hütefritz told us . . .”

She jumped up, took the old man by the hand, led him into the lamplight, and looked at him with anxious eyes. But as she watched him, with a smile of resignation and bewilderment on his face, she could not help smiling too. First she smiled, then she laughed, and soon the two men were laughing too. Presently the room reechoed with “Haha!” and “Hoho!” and “Hihi!” and “Hold me! Hold me! I oughtn’t to laugh like this on a full belly.”

The old Professor stood there completely lost in all this laughter, and unable to help wondering whether anyone had ever laughed at him like this before.

Then he bethought him of his quiet study and the silent Frau Müller, where nothing of this sort could ever come to pass. . . .

Suddenly the farmer’s wife exclaimed in a horrified tone: “My dear Professor, it’s a sin and a shame for us to stand here and laugh at such a fine gentleman—silly countryfolk like us. Be quiet, Maxe! Go fetch a mirror. You’ve no idea what you look like, and you needn’t tell us who is responsible. We all know Schlieker around here, Herr Professor. And now show the gentleman his face, Maxe.”

The Professor looked into the mirror, and he saw that while stroking and feeding the cat he must have transferred a good deal of coal dust to his own person. His whole face was smeared with gray and black, but the dirt lay most thickly coated round his lips. His supper
had certainly disagreed with him, but when he saw what he had really swallowed with his bread and butter, his stomach turned positively sour.

No Professor of Divinity at the Royal Prince Joachim Grammar School on the Grünewaldstrasse in Berlin-Schöneberg had ever seen such a reflection of his own face; no wonder the good Kittguss examined it with great thoroughness, yet when he had finished his inspection, he merely observed in a mild tone: “But Herr Schlieker is not responsible for this, dear lady. It comes from feeding the cat in the coalshed.”

“Oh, my God!” moaned fat Tamm from his sofa. “Just like the black king at Bethlehem. I can’t bear it—hold me, please!”

But someone else appeared to need holding rather more than fat Tamm, for the Professor suddenly announced in a plaintive voice: “I don’t want to cause any inconvenience, but I think I’m going to faint.”

With these words he collapsed upon Frau Lowising’s buxom person, and if she had not caught him promptly, he would have crashed on to the stone floor.

Farmer Tamm had to eat his favorite dish, hashed goose and roast potatoes, by fits and starts—and they were cold into the bargain. For the farmer kept on running out to see that Professor Kittguss was comfortable in bed and that the bricks against his poor cold feet were not too hot. Later he trudged down in person to the inn, and consulted Otto Beier, the innkeeper, as to what food and drink would revive the old gentleman.

Returning with a bottle of fine old Bordeaux, he repaired to the kitchen where he and his wife concocted a sweetened negus, into which they also stirred the yolk
of an egg. They also arranged to drive the old man to the station next morning in the cart, and send him home: “He’s no match for the folk here, certainly not for Schlieker, nor even for Marie. And what is he doing here anyway? So long as the Schliekers don’t get themselves into trouble, it’s none of our business what they do.

We don’t want to cross Schlieker’s path and we certainly should if the old man stopped in this house.”

But when they took the mulled wine in to the Professor, he was sitting bolt upright in bed, gazing at them with large vacant eyes. They urged him to drink his draught and lie down again and get some sleep—but he gently asked for the Bible from his bag.

When they gave it to him, the book opened of itself at the Revelation of St. John, but the Professor turned to the earlier pages. He looked through the whole New Testament, and then went back farther still to the
Psalms of David. And here he came upon the tenth psalm about the insolence of the Enemy, and among much else he read:

“Why standest thou so far off, O Lord: and hidest thy face in the needful time of trouble. The ungodly for his own lust doth persecute the poor. . . . His mouth is full of cursing, deceit, and fraud; under his tongue is ungodliness and vanity. He sitteth lurking in the thievish corners of the streets; and privily in his lurking dens doth he murder the innocent. . . . Arise, O Lord God, and lift up thine hand: forget not the poor! . . .”

Then Professor Kittguss looked sadly at his hosts, sighed deeply, turned over on his side and closed his eyes. Whereupon the Tamms tiptoed from the room taking the lamp with them.

So Professor Kittguss lay alone in the darkness. He felt very sad, very disheartened, and very sick. He was ill at ease in this strange bed, and strange thoughts tormented him. Just eight and twenty hours had passed since that half-witted emissary entered his little prophet’s chamber in Berlin, and here he lay, at the end of his physical powers, and weary, deathly weary in the spirit. . . . And tomorrow he would have to go to see Paul Schlieker again, and again contend with guile and fraud. What was he going to do? What did he mean to do? What in all the world
could
he do?—

The Professor flung himself upon his other side, but that was equally uncomfortable. He thought of writs and prosecutions and all the complications and horrors of the law—and it seemed that he was standing at his desk in his old classroom, confronted by a very singular class. He included bearded faces that seemed familiar
and yet strange; Hütefritz was there too, and the old man who climbed the woodpile after the ham. There sat fat Farmer Tamm, his wife Lowising, and their sturdy son; and sitting side by side and holding up their hands like school children were Paul Schlieker and his wife Mali.

The Professor had set out on his blackboard the equation that was to solve the chronology of the Apocalypse. He looked at it for an instant—it was correct. But the Professor called on none of those who had put up their hands, he looked anxiously at the corner by the stove. The room was rather dark there, but he thought he could distinguish a faint glimmer against the shadows, and he murmured softly: “Rosemarie!”

Slowly she walked up to the desk, and again he saw the starry radiance in her blue-gray eyes, and his heart grew sick within him.

She ignored the piece of chalk he offered her to solve the equation; she lifted the sponge from its bowl and wiped off his blackboard, figure by figure. But as the figures vanished one by one, the blackboard seemed to envelop his room, and the darkness deepened, until the old Professor could see nothing but the shimmer of a girlish form.

“Rosemarie!” he cried, “what are you doing?”

Then the shimmer vanished too. And he was alone, and very much afraid.

Again it seemed to the Professor that he was in bed: but was he dreaming or awake? He heard a faint tapping against the window, and then a soft voice whispering: “Godfather! Wake up, Godfather!”

He got out of his bed, opened the window and a
shadow in the darkness said: “Godfather, can’t you help me? I’ve got to wash dirty clothes all night for punishment because you came, and I’m so tired that my legs are numb.”

But the Professor answered irritably: “Can’t you keep quiet? I’m an old man, and all I want is rest and peace. You have brought me to this detestable village among all these detestable people, and tonight you rubbed out my equation, which was all I had in life. We must all bear our own troubles, and I can give you no help.”

It seemed to the Professor that the shadow wept softly and vanished into the night: a bush stood where it had been. Sadly the Professor closed the window, went back to bed, and fell to worrying because he had spoken so harshly to the shadow. Finally, he sank into a deep and dreamless sleep, and when he awoke it was light and bright October sunshine filled his room.

Beside his bed sat Frau Lowising. Regarding him with kindly eyes she said: “Well, Herr Professor, now you can have a decent breakfast, and when you feel up to it, you must dress and our Maxe will drive you to the station. No one has ever got the better of the Schliekers, and you’re not likely to succeed. Rosemarie isn’t a complete angel, you know, and even if she has to do a little farm work and look after those babies, it’ll do her all the good in the world. But if you really want to help her, and if you’ve got money to spare, send a bit to the Schliekers every month; not too much, thirty marks, say—and make it a condition that they treat Marie properly. They’ll do anything for money—it might even make them kind to a child.”

When he awoke, the Professor still had a clear recollection
of his dream, and he wanted to interrupt Frau Lowising and ask her whether Rosemarie had really come to his window in the night and called for help. But as the old dame continued, the dream faded, and what she said seemed very sensible.

At first he did exclaim, rather nervously: “Do you really think so?”—but in three minutes he was convinced that she was right, and that his money would do more for Rosemarie than he could.

“True,” he nodded, conscious of a growing sympathy for this kindly dame.

“Very well then, Herr Professor,” said Frau Tamm with a sigh of relief, “you’d only have got yourself into all sorts of trouble here. Maxe will take you in the dogcart. It’s such a nice day, there’s still a touch of summer in the air.”

“Yes, indeed,” said the Professor, glancing over his shoulder at the window. “The world looks very bright and cheerful today.”

But they were wrong: Lowising Tamm, the farmer’s wife, and Professor Gotthold Kittguss of Berlin were both wrong. It was not going to be a bright and cheerful day: Professor Kittguss of Berlin was about to be engulfed in the darkness of the darkest night.

In which Professor Kittguss receives a second summons from the angel

P
ROFESSOR
K
ITTGUSS
sat very snug and comfortable at Maxe’s side on the box seat of the dogcart, while the two brown horses trotted briskly down the sandy path that had seemed so wearisome when he trudged up it the previous afternoon. And the still, peaceful countryside, with the falling autumn leaves, should have done his heart good—but the Professor did not feel at all comfortable. Far from it.

It gave him pleasure to ponder on the labors of sixteen quiet years, and on the verse with which he would be dealing next. . . . This uneasy feeling must be due to his exertions of the day before. . . . Yes, of course . . . that must be the explanation.

After a while they came in view of a gate in the hedge. On it sat a small boy, swinging his legs and playing a mouth organ. The Professor recognized him at once as Hütefritz. The boy, too, recognized the Professor, and the song of the brier rose came to a sudden halt. The
boy’s eyes widened until they were as large as the saucers in the fairy tale; he stopped swinging his legs and stared, dumfounded, at the Professor in the dogcart.

The latter looked at Hütefritz again, and began to feel so uneasy that he was on the point of asking Maxe to stop; he wanted to get out of the cart and explain to the boy that he could do nothing for the little girl by staying here—he would send some money from Berlin, and that would set everything to rights.