Wolf Among Wolves (110 page)

The Lieutenant contemplated this picture. In him a sullen resolution was forming, something evil and very somber. He crossed the ground. Now I’ll see about it, he thought.

He stood right in the sentry’s way and looked at him challengingly. “Well, comrade?” he said. He knew the man and the man knew him; many times had the Lieutenant stood a round for him and his friends. Occasionally they had sat together, and once, when there had been a fight at a country dance, they had cleared the hall side by side. They were therefore very good acquaintances, but now the man was acting as if he did not know of any Lieutenant. In a low voice he said: “Be off with you.”

The Lieutenant did not move. He had become more sullen and addressed the sentry again, sneeringly. “Well, comrade, have you become so important that you don’t know me now?”

The man’s face did not change; he appeared not to have heard and marched past in silence. But after six paces he had to turn again and march back. “Listen, man,” said the Lieutenant this time, “I have nothing to smoke. Give me a cigarette and I’ll go away at once.”

The man gave a quick look to the left. The small door for pedestrians was open, showing part of a gravel path and the windows of the guardroom. Then he turned to the Lieutenant, whose face bore an expression of contempt, despair and anxiety hard to decipher. The sentry could make little of this face, but it held something threatening; otherwise he might possibly have dared to hand over a cigarette. As it was, he passed by without a word and about-turned at the sentry box. Some premonition led him to remove the carbine from his shoulder before approaching again.

The Lieutenant was possessed by a savage and reckless despair. It was now clear that the Reichswehr did not want to have anything more to do with them, that the sternest orders had been given not to associate with the outsiders. He was determined, however, that, whatever the circumstances, the man should enter into conversation. He wanted to quarrel with him and be taken into the barracks, if need be under arrest. Then he could ask the officer on guard what they had against them. And if he then heard something about an arms dump … Very well. All over. All—over!

It was a completely insane thought which was keeping him there in its power; as though the officer on guard would be inclined to give to an arrested person information which had been denied the comrades in liberty. But the Lieutenant was no longer rational. He had been quite right that his body’s cells could be infected by thought.… This time he let the sentry pass him unchallenged, but while his back was turned he lit a cigarette. Puffing away,
he watched the man returning and enjoyed the astonished and slightly foolish expression on his face when he saw one who had just asked for a cigarette now smoking. The Lieutenant held out a second cigarette and said: “Here, comrade, a cigarette for you because you didn’t have one for me.”

The man came to a halt and said firmly: “Go away or I’ll call the guard.”

“I’ll go when you’ve taken it,” declared the Lieutenant.

The man looked at him, made no attempt to take the cigarette, but raised his carbine a little. “Do be sensible. Go away,” he said at last.

The Lieutenant also desired to win over the other. “Comrade,” he said, “take the cigarette. Oblige me and take it. So that I know you are still my comrade. There!” He held it toward him. “If you don’t take it, I’ll have to give you a punch in the mug,” he added threateningly.

The man scrutinized him, serious and watchful. He made no attempt to take the cigarette but waited to see what the other would do.

A sudden thought made the Lieutenant almost mad with rage. “Ah!” he shouted. “I can see you think I’m drunk.… I’ll show you how drunk I am!”

He dropped his cigarette and at the same moment hit out at the soldier’s face. But, Heaven only knew why, the Lieutenant, usually a very skillful boxer, had no luck today. With a dull sound his fist struck the wood of the carbine stock, and a burning pain shot through his hand and arm. Then the butt hit him on the chest with great force and he tumbled over backwards. He felt that he would never be able to breathe again.

And as he lay there, battling for breath, with the sentry’s watchful eye on him as if he were a savage beast, and considered that he had not been arrested or taken into the barracks or fired upon, and remembered in the hundredth of a second that in his pocket there was a pistol with which he could pay back the shameful blow—then he was pierced by the thought that he had not only deceived his comrades about the betrayal of the dump and made fresh difficulties for them quite unnecessarily, but that he was also nothing but a coward. He was doing all this only to delay the journey to the Black Dale, to postpone the discovery of the truth, to steal a few more hours of life. His outer varnish disintegrated, colour seemed to peel off him; his whole existence seemed like the rotten carcass of an old wooden shipwreck. This is what you are! said the voice within him.

And while he lifted himself gropingly from the earth, while he walked on with aching limbs, taking no notice of the sentry, not even thinking of him—so completely had his new understanding extinguished all that had just happened—he could not help recalling again and again that summer morning in the wood when he had driven little Meier before him with a pistol. How he had despised the pitiful coward; what disgust had overwhelmed him at his
entreaties! And now the anxiety was gnawing at himself: Shall I be as cowardly? Will I even have the courage to press the trigger? How will I die?

This thought grew ever stronger in him, and in a few minutes was completely dominant.

How will I die? Like a man or a coward? Will my hand tremble perhaps? Will I shoot myself blind, as little Rakow did? God, how he screamed!

He shuddered, gripping the smooth pistol stock in his pocket as if it could give him that self-confidence which had never failed him his whole life long and which now, when death was near, so completely deserted him. I must be quick, he thought desperately. I must go quickly to the Black Dale, so that I can make certain. How can I live when I don’t even know if I am courageous enough to die?

And all the time, while every fiber in him seemed to be urging a decision, he was going painfully but persistently away from the Black Dale, from death, farther and farther away, toward the carrying out of a repugnant job of spying which was already of no purpose to him. But he was no longer aware of this. When he saw a small public-house which he had sometimes visited, it occurred to him that he could not possibly appear before the servant-girl Frieda in such soiled clothes, and he entered. Ordering a glass of beer from the landlord, he asked if he hadn’t some jacket which he could put on in place of his dirty one.

The landlord looked at him for a moment; he knew more or less, of course, whom the Lieutenant represented. He disappeared, to come back with a brand-new trench jacket. “I think it will fit you,” he said. “What’s happened to yours then?”

“Fell down,” muttered the Lieutenant. He had stripped off his own jacket and saw on the outside of the lower arm a large, highly-colored bruise. Without thinking he opened his shirt over the chest and found there the marks of the gun butt. Doing up the shirt again, he encountered the landlord’s eye.

“It hasn’t started already, has it?” whispered the man.

“No.” The Lieutenant put on the trench jacket. “Might be made for me.”

“Yes, I saw at once you’re about the same size as my boy. I bought him the jacket for tomorrow. My boy’s also going, Herr Lieutenant.”

“Good,” said the Lieutenant, taking a gulp of beer.

“You will see that I have the jacket back this evening, won’t you, Herr Lieutenant?” begged the landlord. “He wants to look decent when he goes tomorrow—it’s the first time he’s been in anything like this.”

“That’s all right,” was all the Lieutenant said. “What do I owe?”

“Oh, nothing,” replied the landlord quickly. “I’d like to ask, if you won’t think it—”

“Well?”

“Were you in the barracks?”

“No, I wasn’t in the barracks.”

“Oh! Then you won’t know, either. They say there’s something wrong there.” He looked expectantly at the other. Perhaps he was thinking of the blue-black patches on the Lieutenant’s body. “You don’t think, sir,” he went on earnestly, “that it’s likely to be serious tomorrow?”

“Be serious? How?”

“Oh, I only mean—serious. Fighting, shooting and so on. In that case I shouldn’t let my boy go.”

“Rubbish.” The Lieutenant laughed heartily. “What are you thinking of? Fighting, shooting! There’s nothing like that now. A
Putsch
like this is a really happy affair. There’s no heroic dying either, now. Heroic dying has been dismissed since 1918.” He stopped suddenly, as if disgusted.

“I don’t know if you are in earnest,” explained the landlord, “but I ask completely in earnest, Herr Lieutenant. Because I have only the one boy, that’s why! If something happened to him, who’d take over this house? One doesn’t want to have worked all one’s life for nothing. You ought to have seen the place when I bought it twenty years ago. A pigsty! But now! No, if I knew that it might be serious tomorrow—it would be too much of a pity about my boy. Otherwise he can gladly go—it’s also good for business, because we have so many customers among the military.”

The Lieutenant repeated his assurance that everything was all right and not at all dangerous, and once again he promised to send back the jacket in proper time that evening. Then he left. He had lied to the landlord, but what did that matter? A few lies more or less were not important now. Seen close at hand, it was enough to make one sick, the motives leading such people to join in. But perhaps his own motives seen close at hand were equally nauseating to Herr Richter. The weakening of his self-esteem had already made such progress that the Lieutenant could conceive this.

The short halt in the public-house, the two gulps of beer, had done him good. Now he stepped out and soon came to the little street of villas which was his goal. Pulling his cap down over his brows, the Lieutenant hurried on; he did not wish to be seen and recognized, here where so many of the officers lived.

A colonel of the Reichswehr inhabited the villa he was making for. Socially the Lieutenant had every right to press the button where the notice read: “Visitors only.” However, he didn’t ring here but went ten paces farther, to a small iron garden door with the notice: “Tradesmen.” He walked along a flagged path—the visitors’ entry was laid with black and white gravel—round the back
of the villa to where a clothes pole and dustbins stood. He did not, like the visitors, climb five steps up to the first floor with its mirrors, but went down five steps to the basement with its gratings on his way to the kitchen.…

The Lieutenant had always believed that the end justified the means. He had not been ashamed to turn the formerly very respectable Frieda into a contemptible house spy, since by this he had often learned garrison secrets of considerable utility. If he was now making this visit with less pleasure than formerly, that was not only because his whole state of mind was far from cheerful, but also mainly because he had never before come this way in daylight. Our daylight deeds bear one aspect, our deeds at night another. The colonel on the first floor had two daughters, and the Lieutenant had even danced with them in the past; it would be embarrassing should they see him on a visit to the kitchen. He was not ashamed of his actions, but he was ashamed of being discovered at them.

He was fortunate—stepping into the corridor he met no one other than the maid Frieda. She was coming out of her room, carrying a duster and dustpan.

“G’day, Friedel!”

Friedel, about twenty, full-breasted, with that somewhat sturdy rustic beauty of which not a trace is left in the twenty-fifth year, was a little startled. “Is that you, Fritz?” she asked. “Are you coming in the day as well, now? I’ve no time for you, though.” But she put down the duster and dustpan against the wall.

“Well, Friedel,” said the Lieutenant awkwardly, “aren’t you pleased to see me?”

She made no attempt to approach him, take him in her arms, kiss as usual. Generally she was radiant whenever she saw her Lieutenant. Who knew what the girl had been imagining to herself? Devoted infatuation, humble readiness.… And now?

She spoke very pertly. “I knew all morning that you would come today.”

“Oh-ho?” The Lieutenant aped astonishment. “Have you presentiments nowadays? Were you dreaming about me, eh, Frieda? Well, I felt that … I thought, see what’s happening to Friedel …” It was frightful, but he could not get into swing. He observed the girl, observed her with deliberation. Yes, a girl; she had a pleasant bosom, powerful hips, fine legs and ankles just a little too heavy … oh, it was no good, he couldn’t get going. Just a female, quite unimportant—and Friedel was not so stupid that she couldn’t notice that.

“Oh, so you felt like that, Fritz?” she said derisively. “But perhaps you’ve also heard what’s being noised around, that you’ve all slipped up on your Putsch—and now you want to hear what your Friedel’s got to say, eh?”

“Slipped up? How?” he asked, hoping she would start talking.

“Yes, pretend to be stupid!” she cried out furiously. “You know very well indeed. You’re in a funk, that’s why you’ve come. You’re a rotter. When I heard what the colonel was saying to madam this morning I thought at once, well, we’ll see now. If he comes today then it’s not because of you, Friedel; it’ll be to get you to talk, and you are only his spy. And you see, just a couple of hours, and here you are already. And you try to tell me you felt like that!” She snorted; her sturdy bosom moved vehemently. Seeing this the Lieutenant thought helplessly: It’s no good going on talking—I’ve got to find out what the colonel told his wife.

Suddenly without a word he passed by her and entered her bedroom. The bed was not yet made. There she had lain, there she had slept …

“Now I’ll show you how I feel,” he said, seizing the girl in his arms without worrying about her resistance; he never paid any attention to feminine opposition—that was only maidenly primness, affectation. With her fists she was pushing against his chest, against the painful chest, but he covered her face with his, mouth to mouth, hers closed firmly in denial. But he kissed and kissed her.… Now I am kissing her, he thought. Soon she will give way, her lips will open—and then I shall have to die. Because of my kisses she will blab, she will tell me everything. And then I shall have to go to the Black Dale and do what I told Violet—damned Violet!