Beneath the Wheel (14 page)

Hellas now contained two empty desks and the latter of the lost two students was not as quickly forgotten as the first. Yet the headmaster would have preferred to be certain that the second one would be just as peaceable and well taken care of. But Heilner did nothing to disturb the calm of the monastery. His friend waited and waited, but no letter came. He had vanished, and his physical appearance and his flight gradually became history and finally turned into legend. After many further brilliant escapades and misfortunes the passionate boy finally came into the strict discipline that a life of suffering can impose, and though he did not become a hero, he at least turned into a man.

The suspicion resting on Hans, of having known about Heilner's flight plans, cost him the rest of the teachers' goodwill. One of them said to him, when he could not answer a set of questions: “Why didn't you run off with that fine friend of yours?”

The headmaster no longer called on him in class and merely cast disdainful sidelong glances. Giebenrath no longer counted, he was one of the lepers.

Chapter Five

L
IKE A HAMSTER
, its cheeks distended by a store of provisions, Hans kept himself alive for a spell by drawing on his previously acquired knowledge. Then a painfully drawn-out death began, interrupted by brief ineffectual spurts whose utter futility made even Hans smile. He now stopped torturing himself uselessly, gave up on Homer and algebra as he had on the Pentateuch and on Xenophon, and watched with disinterest how his teacher's valuation sank step by step, from good to fair, from fair to satisfactory, and finally to zero. When he did not have a headache, which was rare, he thought of Hermann Heilner. Wide-eyed, he dreamed his lightheaded dreams and existed for hours on end as if he were only half-awake. To the growing annoyance of his teachers, he had recently begun to reply to them with a good-natured, humble smile. Wiedrich, a friendly young tutor, was the only one distressed at the sight of this smile and he treated the failing boy with sympathetic forbearance. The rest of the staff expressed indignation, punished Hans by not calling on him, or tried to rouse his sleeping ambition with occasional sarcasm.

“In case you're awake, might I trouble you to translate this sentence?”

The headmaster's state of indignation was nothing if not dignified. The vain man had the gift of the significant glance and was quite beside himself when Giebenrath countered his majestically threatening roll of the eyes with a meek, submissive smile. It finally got on the headmaster's nerves.

“Wipe the abysmally stupid smile from your face. You've more reason to weep.”

A letter from Hans' father, beseeching him to improve, made a deeper impression. The headmaster's letter to Papa Giebenrath had frightened him out of his wits. His letter to Hans consisted of a collection of every encouraging and morally outraged cliché at the good man's disposal. It also revealed, though indirectly, a note of plaintive misery that distressed his son.

All these conscientious guides of youth—from the headmaster to Father Giebenrath, professors and tutors—regarded Hans as an impediment in their path, a recalcitrant and listless something which had to be compelled to move. No one, except perhaps Wiedrich, the sympathetic tutor, detected behind the slight boy's helpless smile the suffering of a drowning soul casting about desperately. Nor did it occur to any of them that a fragile creature had been reduced to this state by virtue of school and the barbaric ambition of his father and his grammar-school teacher. Why was he forced to work until late at night during the most sensitive and precarious period of his life? Why purposely alienated from his friends in grammar school? Why deprived of needed rest and forbidden to go fishing? Why instilled with a shabby ambition? Why had they not even granted him his well-deserved vacation after the examination?

Now the overworked little horse lay by the wayside, no longer of any use.

Toward summer the district doctor once more diagnosed Hans' difficulties as a nervous disorder, due principally to his growing. Hans was told to convalesce during vacation, eat well, run about the woods, and he would soon be better.

Unfortunately it never came to that. Three weeks before summer vacation Hans was given a sharp tongue-lashing by a professor during the afternoon lesson. While the professor shouted, Hans sank back in his bench, began to tremble and burst into a prolonged fit of weeping, disrupting the entire lesson. He spent the next half-day in bed.

The day following, he was asked during math class to draw a geometric figure on the board and demonstrate its proof. He stepped forward, but at the blackboard he felt dizzy, drew crazily with chalk and ruler, then dropped them and when he bent down to pick them up, he fell to the floor, unable to get up.

The district doctor was quite put out that his patient should indulge in such tricks. He ventured a cautious opinion, ordering an immediate sick-leave and calling in a nerve specialist. “That fellow will end up having St. Vitus's dance,” he whispered to the headmaster, who nodded and found it expedient to change his facial expression from the previous ungracious angry look to a paternal and sympathetic one—something which came easily to him and fit him well.

He and the doctor each wrote a letter to Father Giebenrath, put them in the boy's pocket, and sent him home. Then the headmaster's anger changed to profound concern: what was the Stuttgart school board, so recently upset by the Heilner case, to think of this new misfortune? To everyone's astonishment he even dispensed with a lecture suitable to the occasion, and during Hans' last hours in school treated him with an almost ominous affability. It was self-evident to him that Hans would not return after his sick-leave; this student, who had fallen so far behind, could not possibly make up the weeks and months he had missed even if he recovered completely. Although he bade Hans a hearty good-bye with an encouraging, “I hope we'll see you back here soon,” whenever he entered Hellas and caught sight of the three empty desks he felt a certain measure of embarrassment. He had trouble suppressing the thought that part of the blame for the disappearance of the two talented boys might yet be attached to him. But as he was a courageous and upright man, he eventually succeeded in dispelling these useless and gloomy doubts.

The monastery with its churches, gateway, gables and towers sank away behind the departing academician with his small suitcase; and in the place of woods and ranges of hills the fertile orchards of Baden's borderland appeared, then came Pforzheim and after that the first of the blue-black spruce-covered hills of the Black Forest, intersected by many valleys and streams. It seemed bluer and cooler, holding more than the usual promise of shady bliss. Hans contemplated the changing and increasingly familiar landscape with pleasure, until he drew near his home town; then he remembered his father, and a deep anxiety about his reception thoroughly ruined what little relief the trip home had afforded him. The trip to Stuttgart and the first trip to Maulbronn and all their expectation, excitement and anxiety came back to mind. What use had it all been? Like the headmaster, he realized that he would never return. This was the end of his academy days and of his studies, and all ambitious hopes. Yet the thought did not really sadden him now; only the fear of his disappointed father, whose hopes he had betrayed, weighed heavily on his heart. He longed for only one thing at present—to rest, to sleep, to cry, to dream as much as he wanted, to be left in peace. And he was afraid he would not be able to do this at home with his father. At the end of the trip, he had such a violent headache that he stopped looking out the window even though the train was passing through his favorite region, whose heights and forest he had roamed with such passion at one time. He almost failed to get off at the familiar railroad stop.

He stood there now, umbrella and suitcase in hand, while his father inspected him. The headmaster's last report had changed his disappointment and indignation into boundless fear. He had pictured Hans as hollow-cheeked and completely enfeebled; he found him looking thin and weak, but still walking on his own two legs. He felt a little easier now; but the worst thing was his secret dread of the nervous condition the headmaster and doctor had mentioned. No one in his family had ever suffered from nervous disorders. They always spoke of persons so afflicted with uncomprehending mockery or scornful pity, in the way they talked about lunatics. Now his own Hans was coming home with something like that.

The first day home the boy was glad to have been spared recriminations. Then he began to notice the shy and anxious care his father took of him with such obvious effort on his part. Occasionally he also became aware of his father casting peculiarly probing looks in his direction, regarding him with an unholy curiosity and speaking to him in a muted hypocritical tone of voice, observing him only when he thought Hans would not notice. The upshot of this was that Hans became even more timid; a vague fear of his own condition began to torment him.

When the weather was fine, he would lie for hours in the forest—and he felt soothed by this. A pale shadow of his former boyhood bliss touched his injured soul: pleasure in flowers and in insects, in observing birds or tracking animals. But this was short-lived. Most of the time he stretched out listless in the moss, suffered from headaches and vainly tried to think of something until daydreams returned to transport him into another realm.

Once he had a dream. He saw his friend Heilner, laid out on a stretcher. When he tried to approach, the headmaster and the teachers kept pushing him back, and whenever he advanced, they gave him short, painful jabs. The professors and tutors from the academy were not his only tormentors—the principal of the school and the Stuttgart examiners were also among them, all with embittered countenances. Suddenly the scene changed and the drowned Hindu lay on the stretcher, his comical father in his high top hat standing bowlegged by his side.

There was another dream. He was running in the forest looking for Heilner. He kept spotting him at a great distance among the trees but whenever he was about to shout his name he saw him disappear. Finally Heilner stopped, let him approach and then said: “Hey, you know, I have a sweetheart.” Then he broke out into a terribly loud laugh and disappeared in the undergrowth.

In the same dream he saw a slim and handsome man alight from a boat, with tranquil, godlike eyes and peaceful hands, and he ran up to him. The scene dissolved and he tried to remember what it meant until the sentence in Mark came back to him:

“Straightaway they knew him, they ran up to him.” Now he had to remember what form

was and what the present tense, infinitive, perfect and future of the verb were. He had to conjugate it in the singular, dual and plural, and he began to panic whenever he got stuck. When he came to himself again, he felt as if his head were sore inside. When his face involuntarily took on his old guilty and resigned smile, he instantly heard the headmaster say: “Wipe that grin from your face.”

All in all, Hans' condition showed little improvement despite the few days during which he felt better. On the contrary, everything was still going downhill with him. The family doctor, who had treated his mother and pronounced her dead and who attended his father when he came down with gout, pulled a long face and put off making a diagnosis from one day to the next.

During these weeks Hans realized for the first time that he had had no friends during his last two years in grammar school. Some of his former companions had left town altogether, and others, he noticed, had become apprentices. With none of them did he have anything in common, there was nothing he wanted from any of them, and none of them bothered with him. His old principal twice addressed a few friendly words to him. The Latin teacher and the pastor would give him a friendly nod when they met him on the street, but Hans was no longer any concern of theirs. He was no longer a vessel which could be stuffed with all sorts of things, no longer fertile ground for a variety of seeds; he was no longer worth their time and effort.