Wolf Among Wolves (96 page)

“Thank Heaven!” said Pagel submissively.

“I have to be away tomorrow,” went on Studmann, “so I will also get a start on with this business—put an advertisement in the town paper, and settle things with the labor exchange.”

“You’re going away? Now, when the convicts … !” Frau von Prackwitz was very annoyed.

“Only a day in Frankfurt,” said Studmann. “Today is the twenty-ninth, you know.” Frau von Prackwitz didn’t understand. “The rent is due the day after tomorrow,” he added with emphasis. “I’ve already been in negotiation about it, but now it’s high time to scrape together the money. The dollar is a hundred and sixty million marks, and we shall have to raise an enormous amount—at any rate, an enormous amount of paper.”

“Rent! Rent! When convicts are loose in the district!” cried Frau Eva impatiently. “Did my father press for—?”

“Herr Geheimrat said nothing, but …”

“I am certain my father would not approve of your going off at this moment. In a way, you have taken over the job of protecting us.” She smiled.

“I shall be back by evening. In my opinion, the rent ought to be paid exactly on the minute. That is a point of honor with me.”

“Herr von Studmann! Papa loses nothing if he gets the rent a week later at the current dollar exchange. I will speak with him.”

“I don’t think the old gentleman will prove very amenable. You have just heard him demand that the harvesters’ barracks be immediately put into its former condition.”

“Anything might happen now, any minute!” pleaded Frau von Prackwitz. “Please, Herr von Studmann, don’t leave me alone now … I have such a disagreeable feeling.”

Herr von Studmann was embarrassed. For a moment he looked at Pagel, who was himself looking silently out of the window, but he immediately forgot about him again. “I would really like to say yes, but I’m sure you’ll understand; I don’t want to have to ask the Geheimrat for a postponement. It is really a point of honor. I took the management over from Prackwitz, and I am responsible to him. We are able to pay—I’ve gone into that thoroughly. I don’t want to look ridiculous. In life we have to be exact, punctual.…”

“Ridiculous!” cried Frau von Prackwitz angrily. “I tell you it’s the same to my father when we pay, since my husband’s not here. He’s only like that in order to annoy him. I tell you, when I think of the Villa, alone there with Vi and those stupid servants and the still more stupid Räder, and over five hundred yards to the nearest cottage.… Oh, it’s not that!” she exclaimed, irritated and surprised at meeting another Studmann and learning something at last of the drawbacks of pedantry and trustworthiness. “I have a disagreeable feeling, and I don’t want to be alone these next few days.”

“But you have nothing to fear,” declared Studmann, with that obstinate gentleness which can drive excited persons mad. “The gendarme officer is also of the opinion that the convicts have left the district. After all, an agreement
is an agreement, especially among relatives. It must be carried out to the letter, and I am ultimately answerable for that. Prackwitz would rightly be able to reproach me—”

“The Rittmeister!” said Pagel in a low voice from the window. “He’s driving up to the farm now.”

“Who?” asked Studmann, dumbfounded.

“My husband? I thought he was shooting his five-hundredth rabbit!”

“Impossible!” said Studmann, yet in that moment he saw the Rittmeister getting out of a car.

“I had this uneasy feeling all day,” declared Frau von Prackwitz.

“Just what I thought,” said the Rittmeister entering, to shake hands, beaming, with the surprised trio. “A full council meeting once more to debate those quite insoluble problems my friend Studmann always solves in the end. Fine! Just as I thought; everything the same. Don’t pull such a face, Studmann. Your still unknown friend Schröck asks, by the way, to let you know you are, now as formerly, the right man for him. I’m good only to shoot rabbits. But, tell me, my dears, what are all the green frogs doing in Neulohe? I saw a whole section marching away into the woods. Is my father-in-law thinking of catching his poachers? That reminds me, I met our old Kniebusch this morning in the station at Frankfurt, quite broken up; his case is on today, about Bäumer.… So none of you, including my respected father-in-law, has been fretting himself much about the old chap. He might really have been spared that! Well, I shall have to get down to work again. And the gendarmes? Convicts have bolted? The gang’s withdrawn?” He laughed heartily, dropping into a chair. And the more he caught sight of the surprised, embarrassed faces, the more he laughed.

“But, my dears, you didn’t need to get rid of me for that. I could have committed such stupidities by myself. Magnificent. I suppose mother-in-law is shivering with fright as usual? And the young gentleman here doesn’t think of joining in the drive? Well, if I was your boss, Pagel, you’d have to go. It’s a question of honor; there ought to be someone at least from the estate. Otherwise they’ll think we’re afraid.…”

“Very good, sir,” said Pagel. “I’ll go.” And went.

“There!” beamed the Rittmeister. “Now he’s out of the way. The youngster can’t be always standing round here without lifting a hand; after all, he’s supposed to be working here. Well, children, now tell me your worries. You can’t imagine how fit and rested and restored I feel. Every day a pine-needle bath and ten hours’ sleep—that does one good! Now then, Studmann, out with the worst. What about the rent?”

“I am fetching the money tomorrow from Frankfurt,” replied Studmann without glancing at Frau von Prackwitz.

Strange. All of a sudden he no longer felt so pleased that he had had his way about that trip.

VIII

When toward evening the milk cart came back to the farm, and the milkman handed over the postbag, Studmann found in it a letter from Dr. Schröck which threw some light on Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz’s sudden return.

Dear Herr von Studmann [read the letter from the gruff and rather truculent consultant for nervous and mental disorders] this will reach you at the same time as your friend Prackwitz, who did not become mine. A visit from him as a paying patient will always be a pleasure to me, but to avoid misunderstandings I should like to inform you now that psychopathic persons like Rittmeister von Prackwitz, unstable and inclined to moods of depression and excitement, with a considerable craving for self-assertion together with weak intellect, are not really curable—certainly not at his age. What is required in most cases of this sort is to encourage interest in some harmless occupation, such as stamp collecting, cultivating black roses, or finding out the German for foreign words; then they can’t do any damage and may even become bearable.

I had got Herr von Prackwitz almost as far as five hundred rabbits and was making extremely broad hints about the record being a thousand when he—devil take him!—hit on the idea that he ought to cure my patients, since I couldn’t. This he set about doing with all the enthusiasm of the ignoramus. There is a Russian princess who has been with me for over eight years, believing herself pregnant all the time and who has been going round a pond in my park these eight years, convinced that, if she circles this pond ten times a morning, she will be delivered. What he did was actually to drag this excellently paying and completely satisfied patient, weighing two and a half hundredweight, ten times round the pond; whereupon, if she did not give birth, nevertheless her heart and mental condition are in a state of collapse. He asked a beautiful schizophrenic for a lock of hair, the girl cropped herself bald—and the visit of her relatives is expected. With his fists he attempted to change the peculiar disposition of an unfortunately abnormal gentleman who had made certain proposals to him; and in his innocence he helped Reichsfreiherr Baron von Bergen, whom you have met, to escape again. In short, through Herr von Prackwitz I have lost patients to the value of about three thousand gold marks monthly. Therefore I say, thus far and no farther. I have made it clear to him that his presence in Neulohe on the first of October is absolutely essential—I am aware, of course, of all his troubles—and he is in agreement with this.

Should you, dear Herr Studmann, be inconvenienced by his return, this will make me very glad, because I take it that you will then come here all the sooner.

Yours, etc., etc.

“Well, well,” sighed Herr von Studmann, striking a match and setting fire to the letter. “So he’s back again to help us over October first. It ought to be all right; at least he doesn’t seem so touchy now. If only he won’t do anything too silly. Considerable craving for self-assertion together with weak intelligence! Nasty, but I’ll manage somehow.”

Studmann was to make a mistake. Herr von Prackwitz had, on the very day, several irreparable blunders behind him.

IX

As the Rittmeister earlier that morning had jumped at the very last moment into a compartment of the train from Berlin to Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, he had been greeted by a very surly voice. “Beg pardon, full up.”

Although an obvious lie, because only two of the eight seats were occupied in a compartment already in motion, it was not this which had made the Rittmeister flush. He had recognized the face of the man who was so impolite. “Oh, no, my dear Lieutenant, I am not always turned away so easily as from my own wood,” he said smilingly.

The Lieutenant too flushed deeply, and replied also with an allusion to that earlier event: “Out of your father-in-law’s wood, I think, Rittmeister?”

They smiled at each other, both recalling the scene in the Black Dale, the sentry’s whistle, the Lieutenant’s abrupt order to retire. Both gentlemen were thinking themselves very intelligent and superior to the other; the Lieutenant because he had concealed from the father his connection with the daughter, and the Rittmeister because, in spite of the other’s rudeness, he had found out about the buried weapons.

Their next remarks were worthy of notice. The Lieutenant said in a friendly, innocent way: “And how is your daughter?”

“Thank you, quite well,” replied the Rittmeister. Good bait catches fine fish, he thought and went on: “Everything all right in the Black Dale?”

“Yes,” said the Lieutenant coldly.

Conversation was over. Each of the intelligent pair believed he had found out what he wanted—the Lieutenant that the daughter had not prattled—the Rittmeister that the arms were still in the wood. Instinctively both looked across at the third man in the compartment. He, busy with a paper, sat silently in his corner, but now looked up, lowering his paper.

Although he, like the Lieutenant, was in mufti, his face and the way he held himself betrayed one whom the constant wearing of uniform had made stiff. In spite of his far too large lounge suit, the officer could be seen in him—it was not necessary to observe the monocle hanging from a wide black cord or the Hohen-zollern order in his buttonhole. His glance, heavy and slow, had been made cautious by endless experience. The bloodless face, with its thin skin, looked as if it were supported on the bones without interposing flesh; the scanty pale-blond hair was carefully flattened down in long wisps, through which a parchmentlike skin gleamed. The most noticeable thing about this barely disguised death’s head was the mouth, a mouth without lips, a line sharp as the slit of an automatic machine, a mouth which appeared to have tasted every bitterness.

I must have seen him somewhere, thought the Rittmeister, quickly visualizing the picture pages of those journals seen in recent weeks.

With a slender-fingered, trembling child’s hand, the disguised officer raised his monocle and the Rittmeister felt himself scrutinized. But just as he was about to introduce himself, the glance passed on to the young Lieutenant.

“Herr von Prackwitz, tenant of an estate at Neulohe, retired cavalry officer,” said the Lieutenant hurriedly. One felt that the glance had given him a jerk.

“Delighted,” said the other without, however, giving his own name, which did not at all disturb the Rittmeister, who knew that it was really his duty to have recognized a high officer. The monocle fell. “But sit down! Had a good harvest?”

Rittmeister and Lieutenant sat down. “Oh, the harvest’s not altogether bad,” replied the Rittmeister with the caution usual among farmers, to whom praise of a harvest seems like a challenge to heaven. “I was not in Neulohe these last weeks,” he added.

“Herr von Prackwitz is the son-in-law of Herr von Teschow,” explained the Lieutenant.

“Evidently,” said the officer mysteriously. To what this “evidently” referred, whether to the absence from Neulohe or to the family relationship, was not evident. Or it might refer to the harvest.

The Lieutenant, whose name—as the Rittmeister now noticed—had also not been mentioned, assisted again: “Herr von Prackwitz is the tenant of his father-in-law.”

“Clever man,” said he with the monocle. “Visited me once or twice recently. You know that?”

The Rittmeister did not, and couldn’t imagine what his rustic father-in-law might have to do with this parchment-like soldier. “No,” he said, confused. “I’ve been away, as I mentioned.”

“Clever,” said the other gratingly. “The kind who always pay only when they have the goods in their hand. Family feelings hurt?”

“Oh, no!” protested the Rittmeister. “I, too, am always having difficulties with—”

“Who wants to join the trip must first take his ticket,” proclaimed the officer with a bitterness which no word in the conversation made understandable. “Won’t perhaps even know the definition. You understand?”

The Rittmeister did not, but he nodded profoundly.

“Suppose,” went on the officer, “you have a car …”

“I haven’t,” explained the Rittmeister. “But I shall buy one.”

“Today? Tomorrow?”

“Certainly in a few days.”

“Either today or tomorrow, otherwise no use,” said the officer, seizing hold of his paper again.

“I don’t know.” The Rittmeister hesitated. Was this man with the monocle a representative of a motor-car factory? “After all, it’s a large sum of … I don’t know if the money …”