IX

The student of philosophy, Kurt Brenckenberg, strolled between the

borders of the parsonage garden at Wengern and enjoyed the early

freshness of the sunny sabbath morning. He had slept late, shaved,

curled his moustache, and felt his mind full of sublime idealism and

his heart full of longing for a fair mistress. He also congratulated

himself on the heroic fortitude with which he had thrown off the

effects of the last night's carousal.

He smoked his cigar in a self-satisfied humour, waiting till his sister

should have finished ironing his shirt-collar, which she seemed to have

taken an endless time over.

"I shall be obliged to make a row about it," he said to himself.

Service in the parental establishment left much to be desired. When the

things came from the wash they were not fit to be seen. There was not a

trace in them of the stiffness and glaze which are the artistic

triumphs of the professional laundress. He who knew what was due to

himself as a corps-student felt it his duty not to neglect his personal

appearance, but to keep up the dignity of his "badges" daily and hourly

in face of the country bumpkins.

The eldest of nine olive branches, which had sprung from the nuptials

of old Pastor Brenckenberg, he had gone to the University in his

nineteenth year, it was vaguely reported, to study the dead and

Oriental tongues. Nothing more definite was ever gleaned about the

calling he had chosen, for he did not consider it seemly to discuss

such trivialities. He left that sort of thing to the "swats," as he

himself put it. It was quite undeniably certain, however, that he had

fought fourteen duels, and had been "gashed" nine times; that he had

been concerned in two scandals and a _praemisses praemittendis_

intrigue; and that he had cultivated the drinking of beer to a fine

art. Neither could it be disputed that he had been captain of two

_elite_ student clubs, _i.e_., the Westphalians and the Normans. He

boasted, therefore, the title after his name, Guestphaliae (XX),

Normanneaque (X), and thus he figured on the bills of exchange and

promissory notes which his father received periodically, accompanied by

a polite request for payment, till that worthy declared it must now

stop, and that the young lardy-da would not get a brass farthing more

out of him. He had remained firm, and his mother's tears and

intercession for her darling had been in vain.

One fine day at the beginning of February, in consequence of the

paternal hardness of heart, the son and heir arrived at the parsonage

and announced his intention of staying there for the present. In the

admiring eyes of his mother he blazed out as the possessor of a light,

braided suit, the coat of which was very narrow, and the trousers very

wide; of ribbons and badges denoting the colours of his corps; an ivory

scarf pin in the shape of the corps monogram; a gold bangle with a sham

thaler representing St. George and the dragon--also bearing the corps

monogram attached to it; a swagger walking-stick, on the knob of which

the monogram was engraved; a note-book full of the eternal monogram,

and a purse which contained no silver except the monogram on the clasp.

For the rest, his trunk had little else in it save a book of students'

drinking-songs, bound in calf, a few bills of exchange, a broken

meerschaum cigar-holder, and a whole pile of dirty, ragged linen,

marked above his name with the monogram in shot floss silk.

His mother, a worthy, hard-working and uneducated woman, was not a

little perplexed at the constantly recurring hieroglyphic, but she was

far too infatuated with her darling to think anything that he did

ridiculous.

While he was thus displaying his splendours to the open-mouthed

brothers and sisters, his father came in.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"It is impossible to go on studying without money," was the prompt

reply.

"Come to my study."

The doting mother foresaw a scene. She hung on her husband's arm and

stroked it coaxingly; but he shook her off with a rough exclamation.

A few minutes later two resounding boxes on the ear were heard coming

from the study, and the outraged remonstrance of a virtuous youth.

"Father, I am a corps-student!"

Almost at the same moment he flew back into the family sitting-room and

declared that he must go away again instantly. He had no home now, and

his mother must pack his things.

The packing was quickly accomplished; but when evening came, Kurt

Brenckenberg had not gone. The next morning, too, he appeared at the

breakfast table. He did not vouchsafe his father a glance, and once

more announced his determination to leave by the first train, as he had

no home. So it went on for several days, and his father, who might be

repenting his violence, let him alone.

When a week had passed, he caught his son by the button-hole, and

said--

"As you intend to go away to-morrow we will have a farewell drink

together to-day. Put on your cap and come along."

Kurt acquiesced, and two hours after midnight he played the part of the

good Samaritan by bringing home his father, whose drunken state, within

a circuit of six miles, no creature would have taken pity on. He made

up a bed for him on the sofa, so that his spouse should not be

disturbed in her slumbers. After this no more was said about his going

away.

The relations between father and son became day by day more intimate.

Since his own offspring had beaten him at beer drinking, he had made no

further attempt to assert his paternal authority, and allowed his son

to come and go about the house at any hours he pleased. Only he could

not give him money, for the noble youth's escapades had cleared him out

of a year's income in advance. As he himself put it, there was scarcely

a halfpenny left for the communion collection.

Through the winter Kurt Brenckenberg had lorded it, partly on the

neighbouring estates, partly in his father's house, where he was

dissatisfied with everything, and perpetually bullied and grumbled at

his brothers and sisters. He drank, composed songs, made himself

agreeable or arrogant according to the sex of his associates, borrowed

where it was possible to borrow, and cut as elegant an appearance as

was permitted by the increasing shabbiness of the last check suit

supplied by Kessel and Munchmann of Unter-den-Linden, on credit to

corps students. He got up private theatricals, contrived new figures

for the cotillion, gave fencing lessons, and had understood on the

whole how to make himself indispensable. Ladies gushed about him, but

men rather avoided him, because if they so much as looked at him

sideways, they were apt to be confronted with the disconcerting

question, snapped out in tone of intimidation: "Will you give

satisfaction?" Not that the sturdy young squires of the Hinterwald

district were by any means cowards. On the contrary, they had proved

often enough that they were ready where their honour was concerned to

engage in any daring combat. It was only in the case of this little

bristling fighting-cock, whom they regarded scarcely as their equal by

half, that they felt stiff and embarrassed. Often as he boasted of his

little adventures with pistols, he never gave a practical demonstration

of anything of the sort. He it was who for the most part at the

conclusion of the challenge formalities proved himself a model of wise

moderation. But even this fact resulted in the increase of his

reputation in the country-round, and made his pose as an irreconcilable

combatant the more effective.

For his part he felt it incumbent on him to continue the _role_ of the

celebrated Dr. Oswald Stein, who two generations earlier had turned the

heads of all the rustic young Pomeranian rustics, and he made no secret

that the ideal on which he modelled himself was the hero of

"Problematical Natures." Accordingly he had entered on a sentimental

love episode with the pretty daughter of Halewitz, and by the spring

hoped at last to have found his Melitta. For it was at about this time

that Ulrich von Kletzingk summoned him to Uhlenfelde to act as private

tutor to his little stepson. The boy was delicate, and not to be

overworked. So he had all the more leisure at his disposal in which to

pay court to the beautiful fair-haired mistress of the castle. It was

patent that she was a flirt. How otherwise would she have kept dangling

about her all the cavaliers, young and old, of the neighbourhood? She

also had some sense. For she did what she pleased, quite unconcerned by

the gossip of friendly neighbours. And the famous duel had proved that

she was in possession of an interesting past.

Nevertheless she had turned a deaf ear to his addresses. He had hardly

dared hope for anything but indifference. He languished at her feet,

despairing, full of worship and a desire to die for her; as the pages

of olden times had loved their queens, so he revelled in this hopeless

passion.

It seemed sometimes almost as if his homage rather pleased her, as if

she saw the necessity, as he did, for a little harmless romance with

the tutor. No check was put on his poetical effusions; his sighs and

half-intelligible speeches. He might, if he liked, break his neck in

knightly service, or, above all, attempt great things in verse. He

scattered his leaflets about the house and garden; sometimes he placed

them under her knitting or in an uncut book. Yes, he had even had the

temerity to put them under her pillow.

And in smiling silence she had ignored everything. Yet his unrequited

passion had not in the least altered his manner of life. He ate enough

for three, and drank enough for a dozen. He consorted with the

bailiffs, in the hopes that they might lend him money, and, after dark,

he flirted with the dairymaids and farm-wenches in the stables, or

under the elder-bushes by the water.

But this brilliant career, so rich in every sort of experience and

sentiment, was doomed and drawing to its close. His first hint that it

was so had been three days ago, when Baron von Kletzingk had informed

him, that for the present his services must be dispensed with, his wife

having emphatically expressed a wish to teach the boy herself for the

next few weeks. This decision alone might not have counted for much,

for Frau Felicitas changed her mind as often as a new idea came into

her curly head; but what upset him most was an unpleasant change in her

manner towards him which he had remarked several days previously.

She had become cold, almost severe, and when he had resorted to the

usual method of letting her know his feelings, she had, after morning

coffee, put a question to him, with a languid smile and yawn.

"How did these atrocious verses get into my basket of keys, Herr

Kandidat?"

This was rough on him, and really looked as if he were out of favour.

Nevertheless he was not the man to let a woman's foibles break his

heart, and in the Prussian Crown at Muensterberg, only the night before,

he had again thoroughly enjoyed a booze in his father's company. This

morning the sun laughed down on a world in which there was plenty and

to spare of women's love. If only he could have had his clean collar,

his satisfaction would have been complete.

He resolved to agitate for this end, and went into the half-dark front

kitchen where Lotty, his eldest sister, a lean, unattractive, blonde,

sulky and faithful as a beast of burden, was ironing the Sunday clean

linen on a large board.

"Am I at last to get a decent rag to put round my neck?" he shouted at

her.

Dumbly she handed him a collar.

"Do you call _that_ a collar?" he cried, twirling the limp strip round

his fingers. "Do you call that piece of dish-clout a collar, I say?"

"If your linen isn't starched to your liking, get it up yourself," the

sister answered snappishly, and put the bellows in the fire under the

iron-rest till smoke and cinders flew about the room.

"It's a disgrace," Kurt said, "that a man should be compelled to

interfere in such sordid household matters."

"Why don't you earn money enough to keep a laundress of your own?"

asked his sister.

Instead of an answer, he threw the collar at her head, and she screamed

out for help to her mother.

She appeared on the scene in a white dressing-jacket, and her grizzled

hair caught up with a celluloid comb. Three of the small fry trotted

after her. She was already worried and irritable.

"Can't you be quiet?" she stormed. "Father is busy with his sermon, and

you are behaving like heathens."

"Heathens," replied Kurt, "are at least in the happy position of not

requiring clean linen, as they prefer to go naked."

"Yes, you ungodly lout," cried his mother, whose admiration for him had

long ago ebbed. "You are a precious, good-for-nothing----"

"You are a lout. A lout you are," he trolled forth, mimicking her. "A

lout. Ha, ha!"

The harassed mother began to cry for vexation, and the little ones

following her example, the Sunday morning concert of praise was in full

swing.

Meanwhile, Pastor Brenckenberg, suffering from severe headache,

sat brooding over a bulky book of sermons at the half-cleared

breakfast-table in the parlour.

He was a corpulent man of over sixty, tall, with massive shoulders and

a red, coarse neck. He wore his thin, much-greased hair parted in the

middle and combed smoothly behind his ears, so that it framed his big,

bloated face with locks like those with which Christ is depicted in

sacred art. In spite of the hanging cheeks and moist, protruding,

sensual lips, there was an expression of power and strength about his

countenance which inspired a certain reverence and respect. Twenty-two

years before, the old Squire Sellenthin had appointed him tutor and

bear-leader to his wild, unmanageable son Leo, though he might be

thought hardly suitable for the post, his drinking-bouts as a student

having been the talk of the country-side. But the keen insight into

character of the old man of the world had not been at fault in this

instance. The new private tutor ruled with a rod of iron, and at the

same time made himself invaluable as a perpetrator of dry jokes and an

indefatigable boon companion.

And when Leo was ready for the gymnasium, a bright-eyed, plucky boy in

his teens, thoroughly well trained and prepared, Herr von Sellenthin

bestowed on the convivial clergyman the living of Wengern, of which he

was the patron. On the strength of this the pastor at once made haste

to renew an old attachment, the existence of which no one had had any

suspicion, and with the love of his youth as his bride, and a bonus

which his squire had given him, began to populate the empty old

parsonage as speedily as possible.

Hypocrisy and unctuous piety were not in this man's line, and no one

could deny that he was possessed of a certain vein of cynical good

humour; but woe to the erring sheep who fell a victim to his righteous

anger.

One of the stories told of him, as a warning to others, was that of the

overgrown hobbledehoy, who had been in the act of taking himself off to

America, and leaving the girl he had brought to shame behind him. When

it had come to the pastor's ears, he had seized him by the throat and

had so nearly throttled him, that the seducer, black in the face, had

sunk on to his knees and implored him to let him go, promising to marry

the girl on the spot, and to stay in the country and work honestly to

support her and the child.

Yet, in spite of his iron rule amongst his flock, he himself had no

scruples in indulging in his own weaknesses. The Sunday after, he would

kneel in front of the whole congregation, wringing his hands, his face

streaming with tears, and send up fervent supplications for Divine

forgiveness, for his own and his brother's sins. Sometimes, when it

chanced that an up-to-date town clergyman, who was in the habit of

entertaining his parishioners at home with sermons of a liberal

tendency, interlarded with quotations from Goethe and Lessing, occupied

the pulpit at Wengern in his stead, he would say that sort of thing was

priestly clowning, and reminded him of "Abraham a Sancta Clara." The

natives were not cultivated enough to appreciate it.

The old man had long been a thorn in the flesh of the church-wardens.

Several times, at Church council meetings, the subject of his

resignation had been broached, but owing to an official report to the

effect that the standard of morality was higher in the parish of

Wengern than anywhere else in the province, it was decided to leave him

alone. The flock loved their shepherd because he reflected their own

vices and weaknesses, and their own rough, though cute, mental fibre.

This morning Pastor Brenckenberg found it difficult to attune his

thoughts to the Holy Scriptures. He had chosen the unexciting theme of

harvest, taking for his text the verse from the second of Corinthians:

"He that had gathered much had nothing over, and he that had gathered

little had no lack."

A propos he had tried to hang together a few consolatory reflections on

the consequences of the wet summer--the diseased potato crop, the

rotten fruit, and to give voice to joyous thanksgiving that at last God

had let the glorious sun shine on the harvest-fields. But this

"drivel," as he expressed it, nauseated him. He was in a mood to

thunder and bruise. He would like to have something to curse.

"Shall I give them 'Hell' again, freshly furbished up?" he asked

himself. But he had dealt with this subject only a fortnight ago. "I

must let their burns heal first, and then I can go for them once more."

Also, the Last Judgment; the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, in its modern

application to Berlin and the Social Democrats; the baby-farming murder

case; the diphtheria outbreak; one and all had been used in previous

sermons.

He meditated and meditated; but the more he did so the worse his

headache became, and the more irritably wiry his well-oiled hair.

"Next time the lad shall not tempt me," he said, and savagely pushed

back the cup of coffee and milk which had grown cold.

The door opened, and Kurt, who had won his point and got a starched

collar, came into the parlour, smiling amiably.

"Have you slept well, papa?" he asked carelessly. The old man

threatened him with his open hand. "I'll never do it any more on a

Saturday night, you young dog," he roared at him. "How am I to compose

my sermon on Sunday with a splitting head?"

Kurt perceived that his father was not in a humour to be trifled with,

and poured himself out some coffee from the big brown family jug in

silence. The old man shut up the folio before him with a furious bang.

At that same moment a sombre female figure passed by the vine-embowered

casement, a cloud of black gauze flapping behind her.

The Countess Prachwitz's low muffled alto sounded in the outer hall.

The pastor pricked up his ears.

"Get out with you," he commanded his son, and stood all expectation

awaiting the entrance of the visitor, with his brows drawn together in

straight lines and wearing his most scowling bull-dog expression.

Kurt, subdued, with his coffee-cup in one hand and a buttered roll in

the other, slipped out by a side door. He would have given something to

catch a few crumbs of the conversation, for since his flirtation with

little Elly his conscience with regard to Halewitz was anything but

easy.

The pastor and Countess Johanna were closeted together for more than an

hour. The organ strains began to come from the church, and already the

stream of worshippers was thinning, but the two still continued to

converse in low eager tones. The pastor's wife had knocked twice

warningly, and had twice been sent away. At last, when the clock chimed

half-past nine, they came out into the hall, the countess with

compressed lips and traces of tears about her eyes, the pastor with the

dark frown of the avenger upon his brows.

"You may depend on me, my lady," he said, as he stood looming within

the doorway. "I will do what lies in my poor power to bring him to

penitence."

She gave the Frau Pastorin her hand and patted the watered curls of the

little ones, who stood round gaping up at her, then glided out without

bestowing a look on Kurt.

"My gown; my bands!" cried the old man in a voice of thunder, when the

door had closed behind her; and while his wife, who had been eagerly

awaiting this command, rushed to invest him with the robes of his

spiritual office, he murmured to himself with grim satisfaction, "Now I

have got a subject. Aye, and what a subject! Old boy, congratulate

yourself."

X

At the same hour the Halewitz state-carriage drew up before the gateway

of the farm at Wengern.

The party from the castle were coming to church to return thanks for

the master's happy return.

The two young girls in their white muslins (grandmamma believed in

simplicity of attire) walked in front, their arms round each other, and

their faces grave. Leo followed with his mother leaning on his arm. He

swung along, broad-shouldered and well-groomed, glorying in the full

consciousness of having returned to a noble heritage. His white

waistcoat gleamed like freshly fallen snow, and the seals which hung in

festive array against the slender roundness of his figure made, as he

walked, a slight jingle which was pleasing to his ear, and heightened

his good-humour with himself and the world.

And what a Sunday morning it was! The fields that had been already

cleared, glittered like gold-embroidered tapestry, and the meadows,

where the grass was beginning to recover from the stroke of the scythe,

were spangled with a thousand dewdrops. The village, wrapped in its

sabbath calm, lay in the shade of its limes, still tinged with the

lingering rosiness of dawn. Everywhere crooked sunbeams danced on the

smooth roadway, and from the cottage chimneys curls of smoke rose gaily

into the blue canopy, where they melted in shining wraiths, like the

vapour from sacrificial altars. Sunflowers and hollyhocks bloomed in

the villagers' gardens--the whole picture breathed forth a faint

prescience of autumn, a promise of harvest and enjoyment of the fruits

of the earth. The people who stood before their doors bared their

heads, and the children, overcome with shy awe, crept away under the

bean-stalks.

"Come along to church," he called to the men. "Those who are pious in

the morning are welcome to a free beer-drinking in the afternoon."

He wanted every one to rejoice with him, and to be as thankful to the

Almighty as he was. His mother felt a soft pressure on her arm. She was

walking beside him in her black satin dress and silver embroidered lace

shawl, full of a pride and joy too great for words.