"I was very sorry for it," answered the housekeeper coldly and formally.
"Why?"
Runtze turned to the wooden frame on which the sausages hung, and began to stroke one of them gently with her hand. "Why, it"s this way," she said, "a countess must be like an almond that I have soaked well in hot water and slip out of its skin, beautiful and white."
Billy had once more bent over her chicken-wing. "Oh, that is it," she said as she ate, "but Bonnechose says, _cette pauvre_ Runtze has had her own romance and her own unhappy love-affair."
The corners of the housekeeper"s mouth were drawn down still lower and more tartly. "In our station all sorts of things can happen: we love for a while and then again we don"t and are at peace. But with our mistresses it is different. If there is a hole in the cover of the old sofa down in my room, I don"t care, and some time when I have time I mend it; but the company rooms upstairs must be spick and span, and that"s what I look out for every morning."
"I believe he was a miller?" asked Billy in a businesslike tone.
"Yes, a miller."
"Fair-haired?"
"No, red-haired."
Billy, her hunger now appeased, leaned back in her chair. "Oh, red-haired, that"s very pretty sometimes, and his face powdered with flour and the red hair with it. But I am done now." She stood up. "I thank you, Runtze, your meal was very good."
"That is the main thing," said the woman, "you are in love, and then again you are not, but you always have to eat."
Billy went out, but she did not feel like going back up to her room, which was so full of terrifying dreams. She walked down the corridor to the outside door which led into the garden. It was the hour at which she had been accustomed to go about of late anyway. Even to herself she seemed ghostly and uncanny. But the garden was delicious, homelike. A bit of a moon and very bright stars were in the sky. The mist had advanced from the meadow into the garden. It was creeping over the patches of turf and the beds. The flowers looked black, standing in the white mists. A very intense joy warmed Billy"s heart as she found that this familiar reality had waited here for her and that she once more belonged to all this. She walked along the gravel paths, she pa.s.sed her hand over the dew-laden tops of the roses and dahlias, she ate some of the currants, she stood under the barberry bushes and breathed in the moist, earthy smell that rose out of the old box there. But as she walked thus, a more powerful agitation came over her. All these spots spoke of Boris; she saw him and felt him again, and longing for him again made her wretched and sick. Slowly she had returned to the house, now she stood before the quietly sleepy garden-facade, saw Boris standing on the porch again, or coming down the garden-paths and looking into the evening sun with his dreamy eyes, and she again heard him speaking in his solemn, singing voice of the pain suffered for the mother-country. How could she go on living without all that? Suddenly it struck her that a kind of noiseless unrest was going through the sleeping house. There was light at Lisa"s window, and behind the shades Lisa"s shadow moved back and forth. Billy recognized distinctly the figure in the long nightdress, her loose hair hanging down her back. "Why doesn"t she sleep," she thought, "why is she walking around?--after all it"s my love-affair, not hers." But Aunt Betty"s window next door was also lit up. And there was the shadow of Aunt Betty"s big nightcap, too, and beside it another big nightcap. How the two nightcaps gently moved toward each other, swaying and quivering.
Why weren"t they sleeping, all of them? Was it on her account? And there on the other side, light there too, and behind the shades another shadow walking restlessly to and fro. Now the shadow approached the window, the shade was raised, the window opened, and Billy saw her father lean out: his hands tore open the shirt at his breast, and in the scanty moonlight his face seemed quite white, only the open mouth and eyes laying black shadows on it. So he stood there, drinking in the night air greedily and anxiously. Billy retreated behind the box-hedge.
She was shivering with fear. Good heavens, what ailed them all! Was it not as if she had died and were now stealing about the house as a spirit, to see how all of them were mourning for her in there.
Cautiously keeping to the shadows, she walked over to the avenue of maples. She felt impelled to look up from there at her balcony and the window of her room. On the bench facing her window some one was sitting asleep, his head drooping on his breast. It was Moritz. Billy stood still before him. The good lad, he had sat here and looked up at her window; the thought gave her the feeling of a delicious, warm shelter.
Moritz grew restless, opened his eyes, and looked at her.
"Ah, you, Billy," he said, as if he had expected her.
Billy smiled at him. "Have you been sitting here, Moritz, to look up at my window?"
"Yes," answered Moritz crossly.
"That is nice," said Billy. She sat down on the bench beside him and leaned slightly against his arm. "Do you still love me?"
"Yes," said Moritz in the same cross tone, "but why should that matter to you?"
"Oh," said Billy plaintively, "it is very important, for I feel as if I had died, and when a person is very much loved, then ... then I think he comes to life again."
Moritz was silent a moment, and when he began to speak a great agitation made his voice hesitant and awkward. "Oh Billy, if I could help you."
"How can you, Moritz?" answered Billy, and he could hear from her voice that she was weeping. "I--I--am longing so terribly for Boris." The arm against which Billy was leaning trembled slightly; it was as if its muscles tightened.
"That--" hissed Moritz between clenched teeth, "you must not think of him ... how could he do that to you ... he had no right to die ... and not die that way, even if life had been twice as loathsome to him ... a man who loves doesn"t do such a thing; that was base."
For a moment it grew quite still. Moritz merely felt the girlish body lean a little more heavily on him. At last Billy began, and it sounded like the faint wail of a child: "Is he dead?"
"What, Billy, you didn"t know--"
"Yes I did, I knew it, I feel now that I knew it all the time--and even over there when I came away from him." She was silent a while, and it grew so still that they heard the night-dew trickling through the leaves. Suddenly Billy raised herself, stood before Moritz white and erect, brushed the hair from her forehead, while the moonlight rested on her face, which seemed queerly pale and calm, and said in almost a matter-of-fact tone, "Will you come along, Moritz?"
"Where to, Billy!"
"I _must_ go to him, you can see that; I left him once before. He can"t stay there alone in that terrible room. The Jewess is looking at him and the children are standing in the door. No, I will not forsake him again; but alone through the forest again--please, Moritz, come along."
She swayed slightly, propped herself on Moritz"s shoulder, and then sank down quietly and heavily before him.--
Billy had been sick for a long time. Now it was a sunny September afternoon, and she was for the first time permitted to go out into the garden. On the patch of turf under the pear-tree Billy sat wrapped in shawls, her face haggard and transparently pale, and in her eyes the lazily relishing glance of the convalescent, who likes to let his eyes rest a long time upon objects. On the other gra.s.s-plot Lisa was lying in her reclining chair, and Madame Bonnechose sat beside her, knitting a red child"s stocking. Countess Betty and Marion never stopped running along between the rows of dahlias to and from the house and the gra.s.s-plots. Count Hamilcar was taking his afternoon stroll. He walked slowly down the garden-path, leaning heavily on his cane; from time to time he stopped, sniffed the scent of the ripe fruit, the flowers, and the fading leaves, and put on a stern, angry face, for he was indeed vexed. Here lay these two beautiful creatures now, blighted by life, crumpled up, attacked from ambush. Why? Why this barbarity? Why this waste? He drew up his gray eyebrows discontentedly and blinked out at the fringe of forest which lay far away in a violet haze. Was it not perhaps a misunderstanding, his misunderstanding, this charming culture that he had carefully erected like a fence about himself and his dear ones? Could one learn how to live here? As he pa.s.sed Lisa, he heard her say in her elegiac fashion,
"I do not believe that Billy can understand a great pain, or that she can enjoy it, for we must be able to enjoy even our pain."
"Enjoy, _ma chere, quelle idee_," said Madame Bonnechose, without looking up from her knitting.
The count pa.s.sed on and came to a stop before Billy. "Well, how are you?" he asked a little sternly.
Billy flushed. "Thank you, papa, well. I wanted to tell you something."
"Oh, you did." The count sat down on a garden-chair facing his daughter and looked attentively at her.
"I wanted to ask you," began Billy, looking up into the pear-tree, "I wanted to ask you if you have forgiven me."
"Yes, certainly," the count slowly replied, as if he had been given a problem to solve. "When we pardon some one, we wish by doing so to help him get over something he has experienced or done. In this case, of course, that is my liveliest wish."
Billy leaned her head back satisfied, and gently moved it to and fro on her pillow as fever-patients are wont to do. "When we are sick," she said, "time goes faster, I think; what went before the sickness lies so far away. It seems to me as if I had done so much during this time of sickness, and especially I have walked a great deal, always walking, always on the way, and always such wonderfully strange roads. I don"t remember much of it all, I only know one thing: I was walking along a yellow country road and ahead of me some one was walking, and somebody ahead of her, and so on; there were many figures, and they were all wearing my brown rain-coat and my muslin dress with the pink carnation figure, in fact they were all Billys, and I knew the point was for me to catch up with the Billy that was ahead of me. That seemed very important to me."
"H"m," remarked the count, "an interesting dream. Those are our mirrored images that become emanc.i.p.ated in our dreams. And now," he smiled at his daughter, "now you think you have caught that other Billy."
Billy still kept looking up at the pear-tree, and gently rocked her head. "Now I am quite happy," she said meditatively, "but perhaps I ought not to be. Lisa says that any one who has a great grief should stand before it like a soldier on guard."
Count Hamilcar angrily thrust out his underlip and said sharply, "To stand before one"s follies like a soldier on guard is certainly not commendable."
Billy did not seem to hear him. She still kept on dreamily talking to the little golden-yellow pears that hung over her: "And to be faithless, to be faithless is so terribly villainous."
The count bent forward, lifted his extended index finger in the sunshine, and said slowly and impressively, "My daughter, provision is made that we shall not be faithless, but remain true, to our sad or foolish experiences. They run after us in any case. Perhaps we are continually changing, and that is well. But the score always remains the same. To come back to your remarkable dream, when the one Billy has successfully caught the other Billy, you can be sure that the old Billy gives all the burdens she has had to carry to the new one to take with her. That is and must be so."
"All--for ever," said Billy under her breath, and she looked at her father with a glance of such helpless fear that he dropped his eyes, for a keen compa.s.sion caused him almost physical pain.
"Well, well," he rejoined, "when there are as many Billys as you have before you, there cannot fail to be many pleasant things to take along."
"Yes, don"t you think lots of good things must still come?" cried Billy. The count looked up in surprise. He saw that Billy had raised her arms and clasped her hands over her head, and she was smiling a wonderfully expectant smile.
"Oh, that"s it," he murmured, "why, then, in that case--" He rose, brushed Billy"s cheeks hastily with two fingers, and slowly walked back up the garden-path. Not much need for consolation in that quarter. This child was far ahead of him in her faith in life; there was nothing further for him to say. He sat down on the bench at the edge of the meadow, wishing to sun himself. How they loved life, these poor children, and how they trusted it! Yes, and life wants that: to be loved, so as to be cruel. Perhaps a good method, always supposing there is a purpose in it. He gently pa.s.sed his hand over brow and eyes: if only sympathy were not so exhausting, always to share the lives of others, although--to be sure, three-fourths of our life lies somewhere in the lives of others. If we cannot share that, only one-fourth is left to us, and that is too little for intoxication, that is almost abstemiousness. Oh, very well, abstemiousness generally results in comprehension, only in this case comprehension is not so simple. He squeezed his eyelids together as if wishing to gather into his eyes and crush to powder the flaming gold of the afternoon light. How _was_ that?--he was trying to recall a verse in Homer. His memory left him in the lurch, too: how does it go where Hector"s soul is wailing aloud because it must give up its beloved life? He could not recall it. Poor devil, by the way, right out of the midst of his intoxication. One of the great flies now came flying past Count Hamilcar with softly buzzing wings. He went "brrr" with his lips and smiled a really cheerful smile as he watched how this queer bundle of gauzy wings and golden gossamer floated deliriously through the sunshine. "Mad with life," he thought, "if all this only has some object. At any rate there is more chance for meaning than for the lack of it, although--if I am a digit in the great calculation, then to be sure I have a meaning, but that is no reason at all why the result under the black line must have a significance for me." The point was to be a digit in the result under that line.
However, thinking exhausted him. Why must we always think?--another prejudice. Let us not think, but breathe. He leaned back and opened his mouth a little. Breathing too might have been made an easier and simpler affair. He was cold, doubtless he would have to walk a little further; he tried to rise, but his legs would not carry him. He stretched out his long arms as if wishing to get an armful of sunshine, and his face a.s.sumed a vexed, anxious expression; then he fell back, became quite still, and collapsed, leaning a trifle crookedly over the arm of the bench in that weary movement which the first moment of death brings to man, before its chill severity comes. The sun was already low, bathing the mute figure in ruddy light, a gentle zephyr stirred a gray tuft of hair on the pale temple, and the big fly flew back again with a buzz past the white nose, motionless now. Round about, the ripe fruit fell heavily upon the turf, making the whir of the field-crickets cease for a moment. But yonder under the pear-tree sat Billy, looking into the evening sun with feverishly shining eyes, and still smiling her expectant, longing smile.
THOMAS MANN