Part 17

They were standing under a gas lamp at the Haller Gate. It was dripping rain, and they had raised their umbrellas. It was perfectly still; it was also late. Not a human being was to be seen anywhere. Carovius looked at the seriously offended young man, the young man looked at Carovius, then grinning a grin of embarrassment, and neither knew how to take the other.

“You are surprised,” said Eberhard, resuming the conversation. “You are surprised, and I don’t blame you. I am a discontented guest in my own skin; that much I can assure you. I am as abortive a creature as ever was born. I inherited far too much that is superfluous, and not nearly enough of the necessities. There are all manner of mysteries about me; but they are on the outside. Within there is nothing but stale, dead air.”

He stared at the ground as though he were talking to himself, and as though he had forgotten that any one was listening, and continued: “Have you ever seen old knights carved in stone in old churches? If you have, you have seen me. I feel as if I were the father of my father, and as if he had had me buried alive, and an evil spirit had turned me to stone, and my hands were lying crossed over my breast and could not move. I grew up with a sister, and I see her as though it were yesterday”—at this point his face took on an expression of fantastic senility—“walking through the hall, proud, dainty, innocent, with roses in her hand. She is married to a captain of cavalry, a fellow who treats his men like Negro slaves, and who never returns the greeting of a civilian unless he is drunk. She had to marry him. I could not prevent it. Somebody forced her into it. And if she is carrying roses now, it is as if a corpse were singing songs.”

Herr Carovius felt most uneasy. He was not accustomed to hearing things like this. Where he lived people called a spade a spade. He pricked up his ears and made a wry face. “It is the way he has been trained that makes him talk like that,” he thought; “it is the result of constantly sitting on gold-embroidered chairs and seeing nothing about him but paintings.”

“I am going to sit on such chairs too,” he was happy to think, “and I shall see the paintings, too.” He pictured himself between the Baron and the Baroness, marching up to the portals of the castle, flanked on either side by a row of liveried servants, the nervous masses catching sight of the splendour as well as they might. The rear of this procession was being brought up by the young Baron, who had returned home as the penitent Prodigal Son.

“One must have a feeling of personal security,” remarked Carovius. He wondered whether the Baron had reached his majority. Eberhard replied that he had just completed his twenty-first year, and that certain things had made him feel that it would be wise to live independent of his family and to renounce his claims to all family rights for the time being. What he really had in mind was the desire to avoid, so far as humanly possible, association with all professional money-lenders.

Herr Carovius felt that this was an extremely serious case. He claimed moreover to understand it perfectly and to be ready for anything, but insisted that nothing must be withheld, that he must be given undiluted wine. He made this remark just as if he were holding a glass of old Johannisberger out in the rain, sniffing as he did with appreciative nostrils.

“I am very discreet,” he said, “very taciturn.” He looked at the Baron tenderly.

The young Baron nodded.

“The wearer of purple is recognised wherever he goes,” continued Herr Carovius, “and if he lays the purple aside he stands at once in need of reticent friends. I am reserved.”

The Baron nodded again. “If you will permit me, I shall visit you in a few days.” With that he ended the conversation.

He started off toward the Avenue, walking stiffly. It was not hard to see that he was ill at ease. Herr Carovius walked away with mincing, merry steps down toward the small end of the alley, singing an aria from the “Barber of Seville” as he went.

At the end of the first week he was taken down with a disconcerting suspicion that the Baron had made a fool of him. He was filled with a wrath that had to be cooled. One morning, just as he was leaving his apartment, he saw two milk cans filled with milk standing in the outer hall. One was for the first floor, the other for the second. The milkmaid had placed them there for the time being, and had gone over to have a little morning chat with her neighbour. Herr Carovius went to his lumber-room, which also served as the kitchen, took down a jug of vinegar, came back, looked around with all the caution he could summon, and then poured half of the contents of the jug into one can and the other half into the other.

Two days later he decided not to give Cæsar anything to eat, so that he would terrify the neighbours by his howling. This worked. The dog howled and whined and barked night after night. It was enough to melt the heart of a stone. Nobody could sleep. Andreas Döderlein went to the police, but they told him that the case was beyond their jurisdiction.

Herr Carovius lay in bed rejoicing with exceeding great joy over the fact that the people could not sleep. He became enamoured of the idea that it might be possible, through some ingenious invention, to rob a whole city or a whole nation of its sleep. The inventor could then move about conscious of the fact that he was at once the distributor and the destroyer of the world’s supply of sleep. If he so elected to exploit his invention, he could revel in the sight of an entire people pining, drying up, and eventually dying from the want of sleep.

After Cæsar had become quite savage, Herr Carovius decided to unleash him. It was just after sunset. He slipped up to the beast from the rear, and opened the chain lock. The dog ran like mad through the court and the hall, and out on to the street.

Just at this moment young Baron von Auffenberg was entering to pay Herr Carovius that promised visit. He jumped back from the beast, but it sprang at his body, and in a jiffy the Baron was lying full length on the pavement. Cæsar left him, made a straight line for the open door of a butcher shop across the street, sprang in, and snatched a fancy cut from one of the hooks.

In order to see just how much damage the dog would really do, Herr Carovius ran after him, hypocritically feigning as he ran an expression of horror, and acting as though the beast had somehow broken his chain and got loose. The first sight that caught his eyes was that of the young Baron as he rose to his feet and limped over toward his host to-be.

The horror of Herr Carovius at once became real. With the diligence of a seasoned flunkey, he stooped over, picked up the Baron’s hat, dusted it, stammered all sorts of apologies, gazed at high heaven like a martyred saint, and brushed the dirt from Eberhard’s trousers. Then the dog came back, a huge piece of meat in his mouth. The butcher came to the door and shook his fists. The butcher’s boy stuck two fingers in his mouth, and whistled for the police. They came, too, and Herr Carovius had to pay for the meat.

He then took the Baron into his living-room, plying him in the meantime with innumerable questions as to how he felt. Having been stunned by the fall, the Baron asked to lie down for a few minutes on the couch. Herr Carovius granted his wish, smothering him with sighs of affection and exclamations of regret.

As the Baron lay on the couch, trying to regain his vital spirits, Herr Carovius went to the piano and played the rondo from Weber’s sonata in A flat major. His technique was superb; his emotion was touching.

After the concert the transactions began.

INSPECTOR JORDAN AND HIS CHILDREN

Benno Jordan was now a senior in the gymnasium and had begun to play mischievous pranks. He also declared that he was no longer minded to tolerate the tyranny of the school, and that he had not the slightest desire to enter the university. He was a wilful, obstinate boy with a marked tendency to sociability. He paid a great deal of attention to his clothes, and was proud of his handsome face.

After repeated conversations with the seventeen-year-old boy, Jordan decided to get him a job as a clerk in the offices of the Prudentia. He discussed the situation with the general agent, and Alfons Diruf gave his consent. Benno began his work at fifty marks a month.

When Jordan would come home of an evening, the first thing he would hear from Eleanore was that Benno had an engagement with some of his friends, and that they were in the Alfas Garden, or in the Wolf’s Glen, or in Café Merkur, where the orchestrion, then a new invention, was being played for the first time.

“Lord, what is to become of the next generation?” said Jordan, quite worried. “All they think about is having a good time. Why, I never in my whole life thought of merely amusing myself.”

Anxious about Benno’s behaviour, Jordan called on the chief of the clerical department. The little man with the waxened, weazened, face expressed himself as quite satisfied with the new employé. Jordan took him by the hand; it was his way of displaying gratitude. And he was grateful, though it was hard for him to subdue a feeling of solicitude. He recognised the boy’s external amiability, but felt convinced that this merely covered and concealed a decayed soul.