Chapter XX: Act V (3)

But now the daring man begins his work indeed. He fetches up another rope and lays it as a rotary ring round the post below the pommel of the steeple. To this he fastens his tackle with three blocks, to the tackle the rings of his hanging seat. A board to sit on with two places cut out to allow his legs to hang down, and with a low, curved back, on either side boxes for slates, nails and tools; in front, between the places for his legs, a little anvil on which he hammers the slate to the shape he wants it with his slater's hammer; this apparatus, held by four strong cables which unite above to form two rings for the hooks of the tackle, is the hanging-seat as he calls it, the light craft in which he sails round the roof of the steeple high in the air. By means of the tackle he easily pulls himself up or lets himself down as high or as low as he likes; the ring above turns round the steeple with the tackle and hanging-seat in whichever direction he desires. A gentle kick against the roof sets the whole in motion, for him to stop where he pleases. Soon no one stands below any longer looking up; the slater at work is no longer any novelty. The children turn again to their old games. The jackdaws grow accustomed to him; they regard him as a bird, like themselves, only bigger, but peaceful, as they are; and the clouds in the sky have never troubled themselves about him from the beginning. The ladies envy him his view. Who can look out so freely across the green plain and see how mountains range themselves behind mountains, first green, then growing bluer and bluer to where the sky, even bluer than they, rests on the last ones! But he troubles himself as little about the mountains as the clouds trouble themselves about him. Day after day he works on with iron and claw-hammer, day after day he hammers slates and drives in nails, till he is done with hammering and nailing. One day man, tackle, ladder and scaffolding have disappeared. The removal of the ladder is just as dangerous as its setting up; but no one below folds his hands, no mouth extols the achievement of the man between heaven and earth. The crows wonder for a whole week and then it seems to them as if years ago they had dreamt of some odd bird. Far below the tumult of the wanderers of the earth still sounds, high above the wanderers of the sky, the silent clouds still continue in their vast course, but no one flies around the steep roof save the cawing swarm of jackdaws.

It was proposed to put the whole management of the repairs in Apollonius' hands. In order not to hurt his brother's feelings, he begged the council to arrange differently. He was so anxious not to hurt his brother that he did not even say why he asked this. His work in Cologne had accustomed him to act independently; he foresaw that his brother, as he had found him again, would be the cause of many a hindrance. He knew that he was taking a heavy burden upon himself when he promised the inspector that the work itself should not suffer by reason of the two-headed management. The honest man, who guessed Apollonius' purpose and only respected him the more on that account, obtained the consent of the council for him, and silently resolved that wherever it should be necessary he would take the part of his favorite and uphold the latter's orders against those of his brother.

It was a difficult task that Apollonius had set himself; it was much more difficult than he knew. His presence at home had not pleased his brother from the beginning; Apollonius attributed that to the influence of his sister-in-law; since then he had grown even more estranged from him--and no wonder! Apollonius had already become acquainted with his brother's vanity and greed for honor, and what had happened since then had made the latter feel himself slighted in favor of Apollonius. His sister-in-law's dislike Apollonius thought he could overcome in time by honest endeavor, his brother's injured greed of honor by outward subordination. If there was no further obstacle in the way, he might hope to perform the task, difficult as it seemed. But what lay between him and his brother was something different, very different, from what he thought; and that he did not know it only made it more dangerous. It was a suspicion, born of the consciousness of guilt. Whatever he did to clear the apparent obstacles out of the way could only increase the real one.

Apollonius soon saw that the system to which he had become accustomed in Cologne, the rapid and carefully planned coöperation, did not exist here, nor even such methodical management as his father had formerly maintained. The slater had to wait for fifteen minutes and longer at a time for the slates; the tenders dawdled and had a good excuse for doing so in the slackness and laziness of the cutters and sorters. His brother laughed half compassionately at Apollonius' complaint. Such system as he demanded did not exist anywhere and was not even possible. In his own mind he made fun again of the dreamer who was so unpractical. And even if the system had been possible the work was done by the day. Wasted time was paid for just the same as that properly applied. And when Apollonius himself tried to put an end to the old method of jogging along, his brother saw in him again the time-server of the inspector and the council, while he saw himself as the straightforward man who disdained such tricks. He persuaded himself that Apollonius wanted to unseat him altogether, and had even worse intentions in his mind--in which, however, he should not succeed with all his cunning, although he had come home on purpose to do so. And still he thought the dreamer would make a fool of himself if he tried to carry out what he himself, who knew the world, could not succeed in doing;--he who was keener in action than even old Blue-coat had been in his day.

Fritz Nettenmair thought he was outdoing the old gentleman when he whistled still more shrilly on his fingers, coughed still more wrathfully and spat still more decisively. The qualities in the old gentleman that had really commanded respect, the consistency which, even where it degenerated into obstinacy, compelled esteem, the calm, self-contained dignity of a capable personality--these he failed to see. Not possessing them himself, he lacked also the desire to perceive them in others. Just as his figure was absolutely at variance with the bearing of the old gentleman which he sought artificially to assume, so too his lack of repose and inward stability constantly contradicted it. He seemed merely to have borrowed the old gentleman's diplomatic manner of speaking in order to show his own superficiality and emptiness. Then at times he would suddenly lapse from the stiff demeanor of the wearer of the blue coat into his own patronizing joviality and onto a plane where joking rubs out with dirty fingers the line between superior and subordinate as if it had never existed. Then when he forcibly jerked himself back just as suddenly into the person of authority, he did not regain the respect he had lost, he merely offended. To all this was added the fact that he knew himself to be excelled by some of his workmen, and in difficult cases was obliged to let them do as they liked.

Apollonius, on the contrary, had by nature and by virtue of the training that he had received at his cousin's what his brother lacked; he possessed dignity of personality, consistency to the point of obstinacy. His inward sureness made him authoritative; he did not have to exert himself to be so--he was raised above the necessity of demanding respect by visible effort which so seldom attains its purpose, indeed usually defeats it. And so he succeeded in doing what he wanted. Soon the work was being carried on in the most systematic order, and all those concerned seemed to feel contented under the change--all except Fritz Nettenmair. The rapid coöperation that moved as on the track of an invisible necessity made the figure in the blue coat in which he felt himself so big, superfluous. Another reason for uneasiness was that the new system came from his brother; from him whom he already had so much to forgive and whom he wanted less and less to forgive. He did not know, or did not want to know, what charm a self-contained personality exercises, although he himself was obliged to acknowledge it against his will, and still less that he lacked this and that his brother possessed it. He had agreed in his own mind that his brother had used means which he was pleased to feel himself too noble to apply. In that way Apollonius had won the people away from him. The latter had no suspicion of what was going on in his brother's breast; he was on his guard against him, as one must be against cunning persons, for such enemies can only be defeated with their own weapons. The brotherly friendliness and respect with which Apollonius treated him was a mask behind which he thought he could certainly hide his sinister plans; he would pay him back and make him more easily harmless if he hid his watchfulness behind the same mask. Apollonius' good-natured willingness outwardly to subordinate himself to him appeared to his brother like derision in which the workmen, won over by the deceitful one, knowingly took part. In his sensitiveness, he himself resorted to the means that he assumed his brother employed. He was prevented from opposing him openly by the fact that Apollonius impressed him himself, even though he would not have acknowledged this to be the reason. He laid the blue coat of thunder aside and descended to the very lowest rung of his joviality. He began by hints and then gradually by words to show his sympathy with the workmen who groaned beneath the tyranny of a time-serving intruder, as he proved to them; as he had not the courage to incite them to open rebellion he sought to lead them to commit single petty acts of mutiny. He began to treat them to food and drink daily. They ate and drank, but remained as before in the course that Apollonius marked out for them.

The common man has a child's keen eye for the strong points and weaknesses of his superior. This endeavor, which they saw through, lost Fritz Nettenmair the last vestige of the men's respect; it taught them, if they did not already know it, in whose bad books they might safely come, in whose they might not. And if they had been uncertain, the inspector's different behavior toward the two brothers might have determined them. And as they were not so finely organized, and also had not the same reasons as Fritz Nettenmair, their opinion made itself undisguisedly plain. They took liberties with him which showed him that the success of his condescension was entirely different from what he had intended. Then he drew the cloud of the blue coat once more wrathfully about him, whistled more shrilly than ever, so that the big bell on the other side resounded, was doubly bombastic and raised his shoulders as high again toward his black head. The wrath and decision of his former coughing and spitting was child's play to those he displayed now. But the workmen soon knew that this went on only in Apollonius' absence; and his chance appearance, like the rising full moon, disconcerted the heaviest thunder-storms.

Fritz Nettenmair was obliged to despair of reëstablishing his lost importance on the scene of the repairs. Naturally he added also the result of his mistaken measures to Apollonius' ever-growing account. The feeling that he was superfluous seized him as it had his father, but not with quite the same effect. What the little garden was to the old gentleman the slate-shed now became to the elder son; at least as long as he saw Apollonius on the hanging-seat or on the church roof. But now he also brought the blue coat with him into the living room. His children--and this was easy as he himself did not trouble himself about them--had also been won over by his brother, by reprehensible means, of course. The reprehensible means were just those which he himself never applied: unintentional kindness and love that was wise in its severity. But even in his wife he began to see more and more one who was to some extent his brother's ally in the latter's conspiracy against him. He saw this long before he had the slightest real cause to do so, and that was the shadow that his guilt threw across the future of his imagination. Its old law was to compel him, by reason of the wrongness of his means of defense, to make of this shadow a real, living form and to place it in his life as a retributive force.

Vague, premonitory fear that fluttered by in momentary clear intervals, seemed to tell him that his changed behavior toward his wife must hasten this change. At such times he suddenly became doubly pleasant and jovial with her; but even this joviality bore something of the nature of the sultry soil from which it grew.

One cure for such a disease is highly praised; that is diversion, self-forgetfulness. As if the navigator should forget himself at sight of the threatening reef, as if every one should forget himself wherever double foresight is necessary! Fritz Nettenmair took the cure.

From now on he was never missing at a ball or any public amusement; he felt himself to have fled the danger forever if he were absent only for an hour from the place where he saw it threatening. He was more out of his house than in it--and not he alone. He thought the cure still more necessary for his wife than for himself. His vengeful self-consciousness assumed what lay as a mere possibility in the future to be a reality of the present. And his wife was still so much on his side that she was now angry with his brother to whose influence she attributed the change in her husband's behavior--only not in the way in which it really was responsible.

Apollonius, who was oppressed by all this as by a heavy cloud, an uncomprehended intuitive feeling, understood only this: his brother and his sister-in-law avoided him. He kept away from the places to which they went. The inmost need of his nature, the tendency to gather together rather than to dissipate, in itself, would have led him to do so. Solitude became a better cure for him than diversion proved to be for the other two. He saw how different his sister-in-law was from what she had seemed to him to be before. He was obliged to congratulate himself that his dearest hopes had not been fulfilled. His work gave him enough sense of himself; whatever gaps remained the children filled.

And the old man in the blue coat? Has he in his blindness no suspicion of the clouds that are piling up all about his house? Or is it such a suspicion that grips him at times when, meeting Apollonius, he exchanges indifferent words with him? Then two powers strive on his brow which his son, confronted by the shield over his father's eyes, does not see. He wants to ask something but he does not ask. So thick is the cloud that the old man has spun about him like a cocoon that there is no longer any way through it from him out into the world nor any, leading from outside in to him. He behaves as if he knew about everything. If he did not do so, he would show the world his helplessness and himself challenge it to abuse this helplessness. And if he should ask would people tell him the truth? No! He believes the world to be as obdurate toward him as he is toward it. He does not ask. He listens where he knows he is not seen listening, straining feverishly to catch every sound. And in every sound he hears something that is not there; his strained imagination builds boulders of it that crush his breast, but he does not ask. He dreams of nothing but of things that bring disgrace on him and his house.

It is the nature of guilt that it entangles not alone its author in new guilt. It has the magic power of drawing into its fermenting circle all who surround him and of ripening in him whatever is bad to fresh guilt. Well for him who successfully defends his unblemished heart against this magic power! Even if he cannot save the guilty one himself, he may be an angel to the others. Here are these four human beings with all their differences of individuality, held together in one knot of life which is being consumed by the guilt of one! What destiny will they spin for themselves, the people in the house with the green shutters?

Weeks had now passed since Apollonius' return and still he had not realized his sister-in-law's fears. During the first few days Fritz Nettenmair read in her demeanor a convulsive effort to pull herself together, a desperate endeavor to be prepared; now this gave way to something that appeared to be amazement. He, and he alone, saw how she began to observe his brother more and more courageously when he did not suspect that her gaze rested upon him. She seemed to be comparing his personality, his behavior with her expectation. Fritz Nettenmair felt in her soul how little the two agreed. He took pains to nurse his young wife's dislike of her brother-in-law back to its old strength. He did so, feeling all the time how vain his effort was; for a single glance at his brother's gentle, upright countenance must tear down what it had taken him days laboriously to build up. He felt how delicately he ought to go to work and how roughly he really did so; for the same power that sharpened his feeling for the degree carried him beyond it as soon as he came to act. He knew that what he had begun must complete its course to his ruin. He sought forgetfulness and drew his wife ever deeper with him into the whirlpool of diversion.

Medicines taken in too large doses are said to have the opposite of the desired effect. Thus it was with Fritz Nettenmair's medicine; at least as regarded his young wife. In the midst of every-day domestic work she had formerly longed for the festival of pleasure; now that this had become her every-day atmosphere her longing was for the quiet life of her home. Satiated with the marks of honor bestowed upon her husband by the important people, she now began for the first time to notice that there were other people who measured him according to a different standard. She began to compare, and the important people fell lower and lower in her eyes beside the every-day people. She thought of the dull ball on the evening of Apollonius' arrival.

She was sitting in the garden sewing while the old gentleman dreamt his heavy midday dreams. She felt so peculiarly happy at home. Her boys were playing at her feet, as quietly as if the old gentleman had been present, or no, not like that, for if he had been in the little garden they would not have dared to go in there at all. The little girl had thrown her arms round her mother, who seemed herself to be still a girl, so chaste did she appear. Now the child raised her little head with old-fashioned earnestness, looked meditatively at her mother and said: "Whatever can be the reason?"

"Reason of what?" asked her mother.

"Whenever you have been with us and then go away, he looks after you so sadly."

"Who?" asked her mother.

"Why, Uncle Apollonius. Who else could it be? Did you scold him, or slap him as you do me when I take sugar without asking? You must have done something to him, or he wouldn't be so sorry."

The little girl went on chattering and soon forgot her uncle over a butterfly. Not so her mother. She no longer heard what the child said. What a queer feeling was this that had come over her, happy and unhappy at the same time! She had let her needle fall without noticing it. Was she startled? It seemed to her that she was startled, much as she would have been if she had been speaking to some one and suddenly realized that it was not the person she thought. She had thought that Apollonius wanted to insult her, and now the child told her that she had insulted him. She looked up and saw Apollonius coming from the shed toward the house. At the same moment another man stood between her and him as if he had grown up out of the earth. It was Fritz Nettenmair. She had not heard him approaching.

After putting an indifferent question he went on with strange haste to speak of the "dull ball." He repeated what people had said about it, told her how offended every one felt that Apollonius had not asked her for a dance, not even for the first one. It was curious that when he reminded her of it now she felt it more keenly than ever; but not with anger, only with sad pain. She did not say so; she did not need to. Fritz Nettenmair was like a man in a magnetic sleep; from the leaf of a tree, from a picket in the fence, from a white wall he read, with closed eyes, what his wife felt.

"We shall soon get rid of him, I think," he went on as if he had not been reading from the stable-wall. "There is no room here for two households. And Anne is accustomed to plenty of space."

That was the name of the girl with whom Apollonius had been obliged to dance at the dull ball and see home afterward. Since then she had often been at the house on pretexts which her crimson cheek branded as lies. Her father too, a much-respected citizen, had sought Apollonius' acquaintance, and Fritz Nettenmair had furthered the matter in every way he could.

"Anne?" cried his wife as if shocked.

"It's good that she can't lie," thought Fritz Nettenmair with relief. But it occurred to him that her inability to disguise her feelings would also promote his brother's evil plan. He had sought to make her jealous as a last resort. That had been foolish of him, and he already regretted it. She could not pretend; and even if he were still the dreamer of old, her excitement could not but betray to him what was going on in her breast, could not but betray it to herself. And then--once more he had reached the point to which every conclusion led him; he saw her awakening to an understanding of herself. "And then"--he forced the words out so that every syllable tore itself on his teeth--"and then--she'll learn to know what it means!"

His brother expected him in the living-room. "Of course, now that he knows I saw him, he must make some excuse for having passed by here when he thought she was alone." Thus thought Fritz, and followed his brother.

Apollonius was really waiting for him in the living-room. He wanted to see his brother in order to warn him against the evil-looking workman. He had heard much that was suspicious about him, and knew that his brother trusted him implicitly. "And so you order me to send him away?" asked Fritz; and this time he could not help allowing his spite to gleam through his disguise. From the tone in which he spoke Apollonius could not fail to read his real feeling. It was: "So you want to force your way even into the shed too, and drive me out of it. Try it, if you dare!"

Apollonius looked into his brother's eyes with unconcealed pain. He brushed the lapel of his brother's coat as if he would wipe away whatever clouded the relations between them, and said: "Have I done anything to hurt you?"

"Me?" laughed his brother. His laughter was intended to mean: "I'm sure I don't know what!" But it really meant: "Do you ever do anything else, do you ever want to do anything else, but just what you know will hurt me?"

"For a long time I have wanted to say something to you," went on Apollonius, "I will tomorrow; you are not in the right humor today. You had to know what I have told you about the workman, and it wasn't meant as you have taken it."

"Of course! Of course!" laughed Fritz. "I'm convinced that it wasn't so meant."

Apollonius went and Fritz supplemented his speech with, "it was not meant as you would have me believe, old fox. And wasn't it meant as I took it? You think--The workman is a bad fellow; but you would never have warned me if you hadn't needed an excuse." He turned on his heel with a movement that suggested his feeling of superiority. In his desolate state of mind it had pleased him to make successful use of his father's diplomatic method of concealing his thoughts by half expressing them.

His pleasure was short-lived; his old worry fastened him again to the rack. And a newer one had been added to it. He had neglected the business. In his master's absence from the shed the workman had had opportunity enough to steal, and had certainly made use of it. It was long since Fritz had done any work at the church; Apollonius had been obliged to engage another workman and put him in his brother's place. He had earned nothing now for a long time and yet never missed any public amusement. The esteem of the important people showed a growing inclination to fall, and could only be kept up by increasing quantities of champagne. He had plunged himself into debt, and continued to add to his obligations daily. And yet the moment was bound to come when the appearance of prosperity which he had been at such pains to sustain would disappear.

Anne Wohlig had often been at the house since Apollonius' arrival; and Christiane, with the credulity which in simple souls is the natural consequence of their own truthfulness, had seen nothing suspicious in her most far-fetched pretexts. This was not so today. She had suddenly grown so keen-sighted that what she recognized to be an excuse assumed in her eyes the proportions of an unpardonable crime. She disliked any girl that could be so double-faced, and she herself was too honest to hide her opinion. Anne sought the reason for Christiane's treatment of her in the latter's dislike of her brother-in-law. It was well known that she begrudged the poor fellow his brother's affection. She herself had said that she would turn him down if he should dare to ask her for a dance. And Apollonius' appearance showed that she made it impossible for him to enjoy his stay in his father's house. Vexation made Anne honest, too, and she expressed her thoughts as far as she could without touching on the delicate point of her own feeling for Apollonius. Christiane was now obliged to hear the same reproach from a stranger's mouth that she had already heard from her own child.

The girl went. Apollonius, on his way back from his brother, passed by again. He was still in time to see Anne leaving. But nothing showed in his face to confirm Christiane's only half understood fear.

The child had said: "You have done something to him." Anne had said: "You hate him, you won't let him enjoy himself." And the sad glance that he sent after her--she herself caught him now and then unnoticed--said the same thing. Like a flash of joyous light it came into her mind that he did not look sadly after Anne--nor joyfully either. His gaze was as indifferent as it was with every one else. She had been told: "You hate him, you have offended him and you want to hurt him." And she had believed that he hated her, that he wanted to hurt her. And had he not done so? She looks back into the time long past when he insulted her. It is long now since she had felt angry with him for it; she had only feared a fresh insult. Could she still be angry, when he had become such a different man, when she herself knew that he would not offend her, when people said, and his own sad glance confirmed it, that she offended him? And she let her thoughts run back eagerly, so eagerly that the music sounded again about her and she sat again among her girl friends, in her white dress with the pink sash, in the shooting-house, on the bench in front of the windows; and she got up again, driven by a vague impulse and, dreaming, made her way among the dancers to the door--there she saw outside, was it not the same face that looked after her now when she passed, so honest, so gentle in its sadness? Was it not the same peculiar sympathy now as then, that followed her every step and never left her? Then, she had avoided him and looked at him no more, for he was false. False? Is he false again? Is he still false?

* * * * *

All day long Fritz Nettenmair thought of what it could be that Apollonius wanted to say to him tomorrow: "Tomorrow, because I am not in the humor for it today? In the humor? I've let the fox see my hand. If I hadn't, he would have blurted it out; now I have warned him and made him cautious. I am too honest with a player who cheats so; I am bound to lose. Good; I will be 'in the humor' tomorrow, I'll act as though I were blind and deaf, as if I didn't see what it is he is trying to do, even if it were still clearer. A cobweb on the lapel of my coat so that he may have something to brush off! I can't bear to have a fellow like that look into my face--the hypocrite!"

Thus prepared and resolved to outdo the fox in cunning, even though it should put his self-control to the severest test, Apollonius found his brother waiting for him the following day. Apollonius too had resolved on his course. He was determined not to let himself be confused today by any mood of his brother's; everything depended on shutting off the source of all these moods. Fritz wished him the most unembarrassed, jovial good morning that he could command.

"If you will listen to me calmly and in a spirit of brotherliness," said Apollonius, "I hope that this will be the best kind of a morning for you and me and all of us."

"And all of us," repeated Fritz and put nothing of his explanation of the three words into his tone. "I know that you always think of us all, so speak out merrily from your heart; I'll do the same."

Apollonius omitted his intended introduction. He had learnt to be wise and cautious; but to be wise and cautious toward a brother would have seemed to him to be duplicity. Even if he had known of his brother's duplicity he, unlike the latter, would never have thought of meeting him with the same weapons. Even in the face of his experience he would have persuaded himself that he was mistaken.

"I think, Fritz," he, began cordially, "we should have been different toward each other from what we have been." He good-naturedly took half the blame on himself. In his own mind his brother put the whole of it on him, and was about to assure him jovially of the contrary when Apollonius continued. "Things have not been the same as they used to be between us, nor as they should be. The reason for this, as far as I know, is only your wife's dislike of me. Or do you know of any other?"

"I know of none," said his brother shrugging his shoulders regretfully; but he thought of Apollonius' return against his advice, of the ball, of the conference in the church loft, of his being pushed aside in the matter of the repairs, of his brother's whole plan, of that part of it that had been and of that part which was still to be carried out. He thought that Apollonius was occupied only in trying to put it into execution, and of how much depended on his guessing Apollonius' next intention and bringing it to naught.

While he was thinking this, Apollonius went on speaking, with no idea of what was passing in his brother's mind. "I do not know what it can be that has made your wife dislike me. I only know that it cannot be anything that I have done intentionally. Can you tell me what it is? I do not want to accuse her; it is possible that there is something about me that displeases her. And if so, then it is certainly nothing that should be praised or spared. And I should be the very last to spare myself if I only knew what it is. If you know, please tell me. If it is anything bad you must not spare me, even if it should cause you pain to tell me. If you know it and don't tell me, that can be the only reason. But you would not offend me by telling me, really, Fritz."--

Fritz Nettenmair did what Apollonius had just done; in his own mind he measured his brother by himself. The result was bound to be to Apollonius' disadvantage. Apollonius took his thoughtful silence for an answer.

"If you do not know," he went on, "let us go to her together and ask her. I must know what I ought to do. Our life cannot go on like this. What would father say if he knew? I reproach myself day and night that he does not know. It is better for us all, Fritz. Come, let us not put it off."

Fritz Nettenmair heard only his brother's presumptuous demand that he should take him to her! That he should take him to her now! Did Apollonius already know of her state and want to take advantage of it? The question was superfluous; if they saw each other now they could not fail to understand each other. And then it would be there, the thing that for weeks he had not allowed himself an hour's rest in trying to prevent. Then it would come to pass, the thing of which he knew that it must come and the coming of which he had yet made desperate efforts to hinder. They must not see each other face to face now; they must not see each other now until he had built a new dividing wall between them. Of what? He had no leisure to think of that now. He must have some pretext on which to prevent the meeting, must have time to find an excuse. And merely to gain time he said laughingly:

"Of course! Ask her freely and cheerfully. Whoever asks is told. But how do you come to think of that just now? Just now?" A thought that flashed overwhelmingly into his mind involuntarily expressed itself in this question. Apollonius was already at the door. He turned back to his brother, and answered with a gladness that seemed fiendish to the latter because he did not look into the other's honest face. If he had, Apollonius would have caught something of the devilish fear that disfigured his brother's countenance. And still, perhaps he would not. He might have thought his brother ill, so entirely was he without the slightest suspicion of anything in his proposal that could inspire his brother with fear. In fact he thought that what pleased him must please his brother also.

"Before," replied Apollonius, "I was obliged to fear that I should make her still more angry. And that would have been even more disagreeable for you than for me."

His brother laughed and nodded in his jovial way with his head and shoulders merely for the sake of doing something. And his: "And now?" sounded as if it were half stifled with laughter, not with anything else.

"Your wife has been different for some time," went on Apollonius confidingly.

"She is"--answered Fritz Nettenmair's start against his will and wanted to say what he considered her to be. It was an evil word. But would he himself who had made her that tell him so? No, it has not yet come to pass, what he fears. And even if it is bound to come; he can still delay it. He forces himself not to give utterance to his excitement. He would like to ask: "And how do you know that she--is different?" But he knows that his voice would tremble and betray him. He must know who has told his brother. Has he already spoken to her? Has he read it in her eyes at a distance? Or is there a third person involved--an enemy whom he already hates before he knows whether he exists?

Apollonius seems to have caught something of his brother's unfortunate gift of reading another's thoughts. His brother does not ask; his face is turned away; he is seeking like a desperate man and cannot find; and yet Apollonius answers him. "Your little Annie told me," he said, and laughed as he thought of the child. "'Uncle,' said the odd little thing, 'mother is not so cross with you any more; go to her and say you won't do it any more; then she'll be kind again and will give you sugar.' That's how she put the idea into my head. It's wonderful how it sometimes seems as if an angel were speaking out of a child's mouth. Your little Annie may have been an angel to us all."

Fritz Nettenmair laughed so boisterously at the child that Apollonius' laughter caught fire again from his. But Fritz knew that it was a devil that had spoken out of the child's mouth. Yet he laughed--so hard that it did not strike Apollonius how forced and disconnected his reply was. "Well then, tomorrow, as far as I'm concerned, or even this afternoon; now I can't possibly spare the time. Now I'll go down with you to St. George's. I have a necessary errand to do tomorrow! Oh, the confounded child!"

Apollonius had no suspicion how seriously the laughing "confounded" was meant. He said, still laughing at the child himself, "Good. We'll ask tomorrow then. And then everything will be different. I am looking forward to it as gladly as the child, and you are too, I know, Fritz. We'll make it a very different life from what we have been leading." Kindhearted Apollonius rejoiced so heartily at his brother's joy! He continued to do so even after he was up again on his swinging seat, flying round the church roof.

Just as restlessly hovered about his brother's fear the sinister something that hung above him and threatened to engulf him; still more industriously did his heart hammer away at the crumbling plans to hinder the fall: but the ship of his thoughts did not hang between heaven and earth, held by the light of heaven. It pitched deeper and ever deeper between earth and hell, and hell branded him ever darker with its fire.

Toward evening Christiane was suddenly aroused from her dreaming by two men's voices. She was sitting in the grass not far from the closed door of the shed. Fritz and his brother had just entered the shed from the street at the back. She heard him teasing his brother about Anne Wohlig. Anne was the best match in the whole town--and Apollonius was a rascal who knew the world and the species that wore long hair and aprons. Anne was already sewing away at her outfit, and her cousins were carrying the news of her approaching marriage to Apollonius from house to house. Christiane heard her husband ask when the wedding was to be. She had been about to move away; now she forgot to go, she forgot to breathe. And then she almost gave a jubilant shout: Apollonius had said that he was not going to marry at all, either Anne or any one else.

His brother laughed. "Then that's why the evening you came back you didn't dance with any one but Anne and took her home afterward?"

"I would have danced with your wife," replied Apollonius. "You warned me that she would turn me down because she was so set against me. Then I didn't want to dance at all. You brought Anne up to me, and when you went you asked her if I might see her home. I couldn't do anything else under the circumstances. I have never thought of Anne in connection with--"

"Marriage?" interrupted his brother laughing. "Well, she's pretty enough to--amuse yourself with too, and it's worth the trouble to make her perfectly mad about you.

"Fritz!" exclaimed Apollonius, displeased. "But you're not in earnest," he added to soothe himself. "I know you know me better; but even in fun it isn't right to jest lightly about a respectable girl."

"Pshaw," said his brother, "if she behaves like that herself! What does she come to the house for and throw herself at your head?"

"She hasn't done that," answered Apollonius hotly. "She is a good girl, and comes here without any thought of wrong."

"Yes, or you would have put her right," laughed Fritz, and there was mockery in his voice.

"Did I know what she thought?" said Apollonius. "You've teased her about me and me about her. I have done nothing that could have awakened any such thoughts in her. I should have thought it a sin."

The men went back the way they had come. It did not occur to Christiane that they might have come along the path where she stood. All that was open and true in her rose in indignation against her husband. It was not other people who had lied to him; he himself was false. He had lied to her and to Apollonius and she had erred and had hurt Apollonius, Apollonius who was so good that he could not bear to hear Anne made fun of, who had certainly never made fun of her. Everything had been a lie from the beginning. Her husband was persecuting Apollonius because he was false and Apollonius was good. Her inmost heart turned away from the persecutor and toward the persecuted. Out of the rebellion of all her emotions a new and sacred feeling rose triumphant, and she gave herself up to it with the complete abandon of innocence. She did not know it. Oh, that she might never learn to know it! As soon as she learnt to know it would become a sin.--And already the steps were rustling through the grass that were to bring her the bitter knowledge.

Fritz Nettenmair had to erect a new dividing wall before he could bring his brother to his wife. He came for this purpose. His gait was uneven. He was still choosing and could not decide. He became even more uncertain when he stood before her. He read what she felt in her face; it was too honest to conceal anything; it knew too little of what it spoke to think it must hide this feeling. He felt that he could do nothing more with her by repeating the old slanders. He knew that petty absurdities are better fitted to destroy a growing interest than are gross faults. He imitated Apollonius going back along a way along which he had already passed with a light, for fear that he might have let a spark fall; he showed how his brother could not rest at night for thinking that perhaps a workman had not deserved the harsh word that he had spoken to him in the heat of the moment, how he sprang up out of bed to straighten the position of a ruler that he had left lying crooked on the table. At the same time Fritz kept on blowing imaginary fluff from his sleeves. He saw indeed that his efforts were having an opposite effect to what he wished. Irritated by this he went on to stronger measures. He pitied poor Anne whom Apollonius had made fall in love with him by hypocrisy, and told how coarsely he made fun of her in public.

A dark red had come into his young wife's cheeks. Frank, simple natures have a deep hatred of all duplicity, perhaps because they feel instinctively how defenseless they stand before such an enemy. She was trembling with emotion as she rose and said: "_You_ might do that; he could not."

Fritz Nettenmair was startled. In the sight of the figure that stood before him full of contempt there was something that disarmed him. It was the power of truth, the loftiness of innocence confronting the sinner. He pulled himself together with an effort. "Did he tell you so? Have you got so far already?" he said, forcing the words out between his teeth. Christiane wanted to go into the house; he stopped her. She wanted to tear herself away.

"You have lied about everything," she said. "You have lied to him. You have lied to me. I heard what you said to him just now in the shed."

Fritz Nettenmair drew a breath of relief. So she did not know everything. "Was I not obliged to?" he said, his eye scarcely able to stand the purity of her gaze. "Was I not obliged to in order to prevent your disgrace? Do you want the fluff-picker to despise you?" Now her eyes made him drop his. "Do you know what you are? Ask him what a woman is who forgets her honor and her duty. Of whom do you think as you should think only of your husband? When you creep about like a wench in love wherever you think you will see him? And you think that people are blind. Ask him what he calls that kind of a woman? Oh, people have fine names for a woman of that sort."

He saw how she started, shocked. Her arm quivered in his hand. He saw she was beginning to understand him, was beginning to understand herself. He had feared her obstinacy--and behold, she was breaking down! The angry red faded in her cheek and a blush of shame flushed wildly over its pallor. He saw her eyes seek the ground as if she felt the gaze of all men fixed upon her, as if the shed, the fence, the trees all had eyes and they were all staring into hers. He saw how in the suddenness of her perception she called herself one of the women for whom people have such fine names.

The pain poured its rain over her burning cheeks that bled with shame and her tears were like oil; the fire grew when a voice sounded from the shed and his tread was heard. She tried to tear herself violently away and looked up with a half wild, half imploring glance that, dying, sank again to the ground before the thousand eyes that were fixed upon her. He saw that the eye of the man who was coming through the shed was the most terrible of all to her. He was again in possession of all his courage.

"Tell him,"--he forced the words out softly--"what you want of him. If he is as you think he is he must despise you."

Fritz Nettenmair held the struggling woman fast with the strength of the victor until he had beckoned to Apollonius, who stepped questioningly out of the shed, to come over to him. He let her go and she fled into the house. Apollonius, shocked, stopped halfway up to him.

"You see how she is," Fritz said to him. "I told her you wanted to ask her. If you like we will go after her, and she must confess to us. I'll see whether my wife can safely insult my brother, who is so good."

Apollonius had to restrain him. Fritz would not consent at first. Finally he said: "Well, now you see, at least, that it is not my fault. Oh, I am so sorry!"

There was an involuntary dismay in the last words which Apollonius connected with the failure at a reconciliation. Fritz Nettenmair repeated them softly, and this time they sounded like a mockery of Apollonius, like mocking regret at the failure of a sly trick.

Christiane had rushed into the living-room and bolted the door behind her. She was not thinking of Fritz; but Apollonius might come in. She turned over and over the feverish thought of fleeing out into the world. But wherever she thought of herself, on the steepest mountain, in the deepest valley, he met her and saw what it was that she wanted and he had to despise her. Little Annie was in the room; she had not noticed the child. All the mother's life was engaged in her inward struggle; Annie could not tell from her mother's look what was going on within her. She drew her mother onto a chair, threw her arms round her in her usual fashion and looked up into her face. Her gaze struck her mother as if it came from Apollonius' eyes. Little Annie said:

"Do you know, Mother, Uncle 'Lonius"--the mother jumped up and pushed the child away from her as if it had been he himself. "Don't tell me anything more about--don't tell me anything more about him!" she said with such angry fear that the little girl stopped speaking and began to cry. Little Annie did not see the fear, she saw only the anger in her mother's action. It was anger at herself. The little girl lied when she told her uncle of her mother's anger at him. He did not need to be told. Had he not seen her red cheek himself, when she fled from his and his brother's question; the same red of angry dislike with which she had received him when he came home? Oh, from then on life was curiously sultry in the house with the green shutters for days and weeks.

Fritz Nettenmair was very little at home. From early in the morning till late at night he sat in a public house from which the door in the church roof and the hanging seat on the tower could be seen. He was more jovial than ever, and treated everybody in order to forget himself in their insincere admiration.

In the shed and in the slate quarry the disagreeable-looking workman took his place. Until he came home late at night, the workman wandered back and forth in the passage leading from the living-room to the shed. There had been some cases of theft in the neighborhood, and the workman stood watch; Fritz Nettenmair had become a very anxious man about his home. Other people wondered at Fritz Nettenmair's confidence in the workman. Apollonius warned him repeatedly. Of course! He had good reason not to desire any watch kept, least of all by this workman who did not like him. And that was just why Fritz Nettenmair trusted the workman and would not listen to warnings. When Fritz Nettenmair said to his brother: "I am so sorry," he had just caught sight of the workman. The latter's grin showed him that the workman saw through him and knew what it was that he feared. He ground his teeth; half an hour later he intrusted him with the watch and his place in the shed and the quarry. It needed but few words. The workman understood what Fritz told him that he must do; he also understood what Fritz did not tell him and what he must do nevertheless. Fritz Nettenmair had as little confidence in the fellow's honesty in the business as had Apollonius; but the man's dishonesty there secured him his honesty where he needed it more.

The old gentleman in the blue coat had worse dreams than ever; he listened more anxiously than ever to every fleeting sound, heard more in it, and added ever greater loads to what lay on his breast. But he did not ask.