The Strong City Read online

  He sat before her, his ruined body perched on a high stool, his brush in his hand. He peered at her intently. His brush moved delicately. Then he peered again, and paused.

  “What’s the matter, Tina?” he asked, anxiously.

  She was surprised. “Nothing. Why?”

  “I thought you looked a little feverish. There, turn your head a little, more this way. Are you sure you are well? There’s quite a color on your cheeks.”

  Yes, he was sure of it. Over Ernestine’s pallor was a faint rosy patina, just visible, but giving her face a freshness and roundness he had never seen before. He studied her thoughtfully.

  “You look as though you’ve fallen in love,” he said, lightly.

  Ernestine’s eye flew swiftly to the angel before she could control herself. She was extremely embarrassed, then, and bent her head. She laughed a little. “I’ve been sitting for hours in front of the fire,” she answered. “My face is hot.” She paused. “Baldur, do you suppose any one ever looked like that angel?”

  He turned his head and reflectively regarded the statue. “The sculptor had a model, no doubt. But sculptors always glorify the model in their work.” He was silent a moment. “However, I’m sure there must be millions who look like that. Thousands, anyway. Not that I’ve ever seen one, though.” His lip curled wryly. “For instance, you don’t think Father, or I, look like that, do you?”

  But her eyes gazed at him seriously. “Sometimes, Baldur, I think you look like that statue. Not that your features are so big or hard. But there’s something—”

  He inclined his head indulgently. “Thank you, Tina. But I’m afraid you’re prejudiced in my favor. Lift your chin a little. That’s better.” He frowned at the miniature, then, with a sigh, put aside his brush. “It’s no use. The light gets worse every minute.”

  Ernestine left the chair and went to the fire, where she rubbed her small dry hands. Baldur watched her acutely. She was quiet and colorless as ever, but he thought he detected a secretive excitement in her. He spoke to her. She did not answer. She was absorbed in some wistful, restless dream.

  “I hope,” he thought, sadly, “that it’s someone decent. Poor little Tina.”

  When she had gone, he tried to sit down and read. But nothing interested him. He tried to play some selections on his piano. The sound was mournful and hollow. Nothing satisfied or quieted him. He walked restlessly about his room. Everything was silent, except for the rush of the wind and the lashing of the rain. He stopped at last before the statue, and stood there for a long time, gazing up at the lifted and arrogant face.

  And then his vague and poignant, yet unaccustomed, melancholy passed away, and with it, this restlessness. His old calm returned, serene and silent as a winter sunset, which promised nothing and hoped for nothing.

  When he had been younger, the years of his great pain and suffering had also been years of joy and inner excitement. He had believed himself endowed with some immortal gift. Crippled and in torment though he was, he had gone to New York, to get expert criticism of his writing, music and painting. He had come back, spent and broken and mute with a still and desperate muteness. He had discovered that he had little gifts, the dilettante’s gifts, pleasant and pretty. Only in his music was there a promise, but even there it was insufficient. All the beauty, fire and splendor of his mind and spirit were doomed forever to be pent up behind the hand of mediocrity. Painfully, at times, they could emerge in a faint cry, a line of loveliness, a gleam of color. But the skill was not in his hand, for there was an eternal formlessness in his spirit. He did not know that it is only the vision which is mortal which can be adequately expressed. Art must be made of clay, as well as flame, to be able to emerge in a magnificent form. There was no clay in him, and so his hand was bewildered and uncertain, thwarted by the intangibilities in his mind. Divinity, at the last, can only be expressed in silence.

  He had been twenty, then, and he had come home determined not to live any longer. There was nothing for which he could live, only pain and hatred and despair. Then there had been that morning when he had left his bedroom just before dawn and had painfully climbed to the fourth floor.

  He was never able to forget that dreadful climbing, and could never remember where the anguish was greater, in his mind or his body. He lost orientation. He was not climbing up marble steps in a ghostly dawn-light, with the intense yet echoing silence all about him. He was climbing up clouds, seeking oblivion and death. Then he had reached the top, and was leaning over the balustrade, looking down into the dark and diminishing well, whose bottom was only a pit of. darkness.

  He leaned there for a long time. It seemed eternity to him, with emptiness open before him and darkness all about him.

  And then, as he waited, a curious calm and serenity came over him, as he looked down into death. It was a calm and serenity without words or fully developed thoughts. He could not explain it; he could only experience it. His pain lifted, and he grew old and quiet. There was no comfort in him, no expectation. Merely a cessation of suffering and a rising of peace.

  It was nearly an hour later that he crept down to his room and went to his bed. There, he slept profoundly. When he awoke, the calm was still with him, the serenity unshakable. He had looked into the nothingness of death, and he had come back. Nothing, thereafter, could move or disturb him much. He had taken on invulnerability.

  His pain of body did not decrease with the years. But his pain of mind had gone forever. Everything that happened to him became small and without meaning in the gray light of his experience. He was protected from emotion. He could go about his music, his writing and his painting without ambition or heart-burning. They were like small gardens he was cultivating in quiet peace.

  It was only on rare occasions, like today, when the old restlessness plagued him. But soon he could smile at it, and turn away from it, as from an old but wearisome acquaintance.

  He slept deeply and unmovingly, sometimes with the help of drugs to relieve his physical pain, but mostly because of the tranquil immobility of his mind. When he had been younger, he had not slept, and had lived only in misery, because of desire. Now he was purged of all desire. If this were death in life, as he sometimes suspected, he was grateful, and set up fresh psychological defenses against the uneasy gnawing of desire. Not to desire anything at all! It was to live in a glass bell, seeing everything, but always insulated against raw attack, suffering, clamor and fury. If, as he sometimes ruefully told himself, he contemplated his navel, there was a certain stability in his navel, at least, and certainly a great deal less danger than in the world beyond it. Moreover, there were many more things less pleasant to contemplate.

  And so, insulated against desire and emotion as he was, he could observe the little world about him with superficial detachment, and a steadily lessening sense of participation. He could look at his father, knowing him completely, but entirely indifferent both to his abuse and his hatred. Sometimes, he was even slightly amused, but it was an amusement languid with boredom. He was sorry for his mother, but it was a sorrow without indignation or pain. He was quite fond of her, but here again emotion was not involved in his fondness. Until very recently, he had been fond of Ernestine in the same way. It was only in the last few days that a faint stinging sliver had pierced his consciousness when he saw her, or thought of her. It took considerable effort on his part to repress these stingings, and sometimes he felt fear. Consequently, he tried to see as little of her as possible.

  He had no friends at all. He lived his long days and dreamless nights in a state of suspension. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered to live. But then, it was more of an effort to die than to live, and he had looked at death once, and remembered.

  If he truly loved anything, it was his statue of the praying angel. He began to identify himself with it; it was an extension of himself. It was only marble, but he gave it his own soul. He did not realize this consciously, and was not to realize this for some time still in the future. But in some hardly co
nscious way he thought of the angel’s body as his own, and thought that the soul of the angel was in himself. Only once had this grotesque idea risen to the surface of his conscious mind, and though he had laughed suddenly and indulgently at it, its influence remained with him.

  In a lesser way, he also identified himself with the noble busts of the heroes, musicians and poets in his room. They were in truth his friends. He needed no others. They were part of him, and he was part of them.

  After his long contemplation of the angel, he moved away serenely, limping slowly and unsurely. He paused to look at the miniature he was painting of Ernestine. He was surprised as he looked at it, and lifted it to the light to study it more closely. Yes, he had caught her pathetic shyness and simplicity, and with it, a certain delicate grace of expression. A psyche-like expression, he thought, pleased. He had no delusions that Ernestine possessed any brilliancy of intellect or any subtleties. But he knew there was a clearness in her, a purity, which was infinitely touching.

  He put down the miniature, sighing. The stinging sliver stung his numb flesh again, and the restlessness returned.

  CHAPTER 6

  There is nothing so desolate as rain and wind in a strange land, thought Emmi Stoessel, nothing which can strike so formidably and mournfully on the mind and the heart. She paused to look through the streaked window as she lifted the coffee-pot. There was nothing much to see through this window except the narrow chasm of the “court” between the long and gloomy apartments on Mulberry Street. The opposite brick wall ran with mingled soot and rain, and what little light crept down the five-story well was dim and gray. She was like a prisoner, gazing despairingly at the walls of her prison.

  The kitchen of the apartment was large, clean and as bright as the flickering gas jets could make it. She had the Teutonic woman’s instinctive love for order and cleanliness, and the bare boards of the floor were scrubbed to a golden yellow, as was the wooden table on which she had set breakfast. Even the chairs were scrubbed to that smooth hue, and the sinkboards. She, herself, had papered the walls with gay red roses, and had hung flowered cheap curtains at the window. It was her own hands which had braided and made the small round rag-rugs scattered on the floor, and even the wooden cupboards above the black-iron sink. She had learned to work very hard in America, she, Emmi Hoffstedter whose father had been an army officer in Bavaria, and herself a schoolmistress.

  With a sternly repressed sigh, she went to the table and poured the coffee into two thick white mugs. A smell of hot baking bread came from the black, cast iron coal range whose huge bulk was the largest thing in the room. She then went to the bare wooden stairway at the end of the kitchen and called urgently: “Egon, you must hurry. It is late, almost seven.” Her strong rather harsh voice, was commanding. She listened for the reply which came, eager, gentle, placating, and then went back to the stove to replace the pot and to look into the oven, where fresh hot twists of bread had turned brown. She removed the tray and examined the bread carefully. But all this was with an air of abstraction. She was frowning. She frowned so often that two deep clefts had formed between her brows, giving her an impatient, and even angry, expression.

  While she waited for her husband, she again stared through the window at the wall of the court, and the clefts deepened between her eyes.

  She was a very tall woman in her late forties, hard and angular of frame. Her shoulders were as broad as a man’s, and there were no softnesses, no curves, on her spare long bones. Though it was so early in the morning, she wore her best black bombazine dress, as spare as herself, and with not even a suggestion of a bustle upon it. Over this dress she had tied a long crisp white apron, and the large bow of it added an incongruously feminine touch to her grenadier’s figure. The round white lace collar, so high about her corded throat, was fastened with a beautiful brooch of gold filigree and pearls, but even these failed to soften the lines of her strong harsh chin and jutting cheekbones.

  Strength was in the bones of her long rectangular face, pale and almost bleached in color. Her mouth was firm, rigid and uncompromising, a thin wide streak without rosiness or gentleness. Above this mouth was her finely shaped large nose, high-bridged and almost fleshless. Beneath thick light-brown frowning brows were her eyes, like direct blue lightning. Her light-brown hair, masses of it, was braided sternly and piled in a thick crown on the top of her almost arrogant head. She was a handsome and masculine woman, for all her spareness and rigidity and lack of softnesses and grace. She might command little love, but she would always command fear and respect, for there was no craftiness in her severe expression, no deviousness, no falseness. Moreover, there was a compactness and directness about her, not only in her movements, but in the swift hard glances of her small eyes and the set of her pale lips. One knew that here was a woman of great honor, power and pride, even though it was easy to guess that she knew no subtleties, no lavish gentlenesses, and no compromise. What she saw, she saw clearly and straightly, with bitter strength and hardness, and with extraordinary intelligence, and integrity.

  Her hands, long and as large as a man’s, were scrubbed and reddened and chapped, hands made for work and accomplishment. But they were not a peasant’s hands. The fingers were well shaped and aristocratic, for all the marks of hard work. Her son, Franz, was a younger and masculine replica of her, at least physically. Mentally, she would think with bitterness and weary contempt, they had no common meeting-ground of minds. That was the most painful fact in her existence, and one to which her uncompromising nature was never reconciled.

  She had endured everything for the sake of Franz. Her whole life had been lived for one purpose, since his birth. But everything had been useless, all her sacrifices and her pain, her hopes and her work, her dreams and her passions. No matter what she did, at any time, during all her waking hours, she thought of little except all this. And even at night, she dreamt of it, she awoke, aching spiritually with an almost unbearable agony.

  What did it matter what one suffered if the suffering were justified? she would often think. No matter what anguish one bore, no matter what torment and frustration and passing despair, it was as nothing if what one worked for was accomplished. But to endure all this, and then to be thwarted at the last, and to see the work of years wasted and lost—this was the most dreadful thing of all, and not to be forgiven. She felt that Franz had mortally injured her, because her life, in him, had been without accomplishment. He had made a mockery of her years of work and sacrifice and pain. He had made them as nothing.

  Even as she waited for her husband, Egon, she thought of this, and the clefts between her brows became even deeper, and the lines of her mouth were both cruel and embittered. She stood in rigid silence before the stove, not moving, hardly breathing, but there emanated from her rays of anger, rage and despair, and heavy grief.

  Franz had once said to her, with amusement: “It is not inner righteousness which makes you so uncompromising and obstinate mother. It is just your damned Prussianism.” He had said much worse things to her, but though she forgot these, she never forgot nor forgave this remark. The reference to “Prussianism” was the great insult, for to her it seemed that Prussianism was the most frightful manifestation of Bismarck’s new Germany, and the thing from which she and her husband had fled with loathing and hatred. It was the supreme motivation which had impelled her into exile, and had changed her life. She had been born in Bavaria of a Bavarian mother and a Prussian father. She had hated her father from the earliest childhood. To her, he was a combination of everything she detested: cruelty, harsh discipline, lack of kindness and affection, and inhuman implacability. Her mother, whom she had loved passionately, had died in the atmosphere he had created. Two things, therefore, prevented her from forgiving Franz: her own hatred of everything which her father represented, and a subconscious but horrified suspicion that she resembled her father in many ways. Sometimes, when glancing in the mirror, she saw the vague shadow of her father’s features in her own. This caused her to avo
id mirrors. Therefore, she was most outspoken in her denunciations of “vanity” and “self-love,” and often declared that female decadence had begun on the day when mirrors were invented. There was only one mirror in the whole dreary flat on Mulberry Street, and that was in the dark bathroom behind the kitchen, where her husband and son shaved. When cleaning that bathroom, she would avert her eyes, in order to avoid glancing at her reflection. She felt a glow of righteousness in this, and often spoke of her lack of personal conceit and vanity. And in her, always, lurked the repressed fear that she was much like her father.

  She heard her husband’s soft uncertain steps on the stairs. She returned to the table and stood near it, like a soldier preparing for duty. Egon Stoessel emerged into the warm kitchen, shivering, and trying to hide his discomfort, as always, with a gentle and placating smile. He was a frail small man, some inches shorter than his wife, with the scholar's long pale face and short-sighted eyes. On his long nose he wore pince-nez with a black neat ribbon. Behind the pince-nez his eyes, soft brown and timid yet curiously courageous, looked out with sadness and gentleness. He, too, had been a teacher, and this was evident in a certain preciseness in all his movements, and a certain spinsterlike care in enunciation and inflection of speech. His mouth, faintly tremulous, and always eager to smile, was a woman’s mouth, tender and deprecating. He might not inspire respect in the more robust, but he almost always inspired affection, for he was timid kindness itself. Unobtrusive, vacillating, hesitant and unopinionated though he was, his wife adored him with a cold stern adoration. She also ruled him with the same sternness, and frightened him almost continually.

  He was partially bald, and neatly combed his thin strands of light brown hair over his knotty skull. His large cartilaginous ears gave his head a pathetic appearance of alarm, for they distended themselves from his head in an attitude of flight. Thin, bent, defensive, with delicate veined hands, he wore neat but shiny black broadcloth, and white stiff shirts. His black cravat was neatly folded about his scrawny neck. The gold watchchain which hung from his vest seemed too heavy for that fragile body. He was a bookkeeper in Hans Schmidt’s factory offices. He rarely talked to his fellow clerks, and then only in the softest, gentlest voice in which the guttural German accent was, incredibly, made musical. He worked diligently and accurately, and was much esteemed by his office superiors. He had never confessed this to Emmi, but his whole being yearned only for peace and quietness, and rustic obscurity. Many years ago, Emmi had believed he had had as violent a hatred and scorn of Prussianism as she had, but though he was horrified at everything Prussian, and shrank from it, wounded and distraught, he did not hate it, or scorn it. To him, it was a manifestation as dreadful as storm and natural fury, and he wanted only to hide from it and forget it. Emmi’s active struggle against it, and her violent denunciations of it, distressed him almost as much as did the thing which caused them. He might have made a compromise with it, in his little Bavarian village and in his little Bavarian school, by the simple method of ignoring its existence among his books and manuscripts. But he had come to America with his wife and his child, for it was more arduous to oppose Emmi than to accede to her.