The Sleepwalkers (69 page)

To my own surprise I had again begun to occupy myself with my thesis on the disintegration of values. Although I hardly ever left the house, my work proceeded but slowly. Nuchem Sussin often came to see me, seating himself on the grey tails of his frock-coat. He never unbuttoned it; it was probably a kind of shame that prevented him. I often asked myself how these people could put any trust in Dr Litwak, whose short jacket flouted all their prejudices. Until I came to the conclusion that the walking-stick he carried before him might represent a sort of substitute for his lack of coat-tails. But that, of course, was a mere assumption.

It took me a long time to find out what Sussin was really after. When he seated himself he never neglected to say “With your kind permission,” and after a short embarrassed silence he would then bring up some juristic problem: whether the Government was empowered to confiscate food or fat that was already in one’s house or on one’s plate; whether the maintenance allowance received by soldiers’ wives could be applied to taking out a life insurance policy … one simply could not tell what he was trying to get at, he seemed to be pulling wires at random, and yet one had the feeling that out of all this real problems were emerging, or that in his mind a juridical landscape lay outspread, which one was challenged to survey through these artificial and distorted lenses.

Even when he took up a book and held it in front of his shortsighted eyes, he seemed to be reading quite other things out of it. He had an immeasurable respect for books, but he could laugh uproariously over a few lines of Kant, and was astonished when I did not join in. So it seemed to him an extraordinarily good joke when he found this maxim while looking over Hegel:
The principle of magic consists in this, that the connection between the means and the effect shall not be recognized.
He certainly despised me for not seeing the funny side of things as he did, and strangely enough I was inclined to ascribe to him a truer, if also more complicated, insight than I myself possessed. In any case it was only at things such as these that I had ever seen him laugh.

And he had some feeling for music. A much-beribboned lute hung in my room. I imagine that it had belonged to my landlady’s son: he was either in captivity or missing. Every time he came Sussin begged
me to “play something” and would not believe me when I said I couldn’t. He thought I was too shy. But by way of this he managed at last to reach his real theme:

“Have you ever heard the people playing … the ones in uniform? … very beautiful.”

He meant the Salvation Army, and smiled guiltily at my guessing it.

“I’m going this evening to listen. Will you come too?”

Huguenau’s delight in the paper had not lasted long, not even for a whole month. It was still June, and Huguenau was sick of the whole business. In his first enthusiasm he had succeeded in bringing off the great idea of the special number and the Major’s leading article; but as nothing fresh had immediately occurred to him he had lost interest. It was as though he had flung a toy into the corner; he no longer liked it. And even although this dislike perhaps masked an intuition that one really could not make a great newspaper out of a provincial rag, yet he was merely aware of boredom, he simply did not want to hear anything more about it, and felt the independent reality of the newspaper routine as an interference with himself. If at one time he could not get quickly enough to his work, he now loved to linger in bed, dawdled unconscionably over his breakfast, and only with repugnance could drag himself to the backyard where the office was; indeed quite often it happened that he got no farther than the kitchen, where he discussed the price of food with Frau Esch. And if he finally did reach the editorial office, generally he clattered down the steps again in a little while and stole in to look at the printing-press.

Marguerite was playing in the garden. Huguenau shouted across the courtyard to her: “Marguerite, I’m in the printing-shed.”

The child came running, and they went in together. “ ’Morning,” said Huguenau curtly, for since Lindner and the assistant compositor had become his subordinates he had set himself to be as curt as possible with them. The two men, however, did not seem to worry much about that, and he had once more the feeling that they looked down on him as a man who knew nothing about machines. At present they were working in the case-room, and Huguenau, with the child hanging on to his hand, did his best to look over their shoulders with the air of an
expert, but was relieved when he was out of the case-room again and back beside his printing-press.

For he still loved the printing-press. A man who all his life has sold commodities produced by machines, but for whom factories and the possessors of machines remain in a class above him, a class he can never attain, such a man will assuredly regard it as a wonderful experience if he himself suddenly becomes the possessor of a machine; and it may well be that there will dawn in him that affectionate attitude to machines which one almost always finds in boys and in young races, an attitude that glorifies the machine and projects it into the exalted and free plane of their own desires and of mighty and heroic deeds. For hours the boy can watch the locomotive in the station, deeply content that it should shunt the trucks from one line to another; and for hours Wilhelm Huguenau could sit before his printing-press and watch it affectionately with the serious and vacant gaze of a boy behind his glasses, quite satisfied because it was in motion, because it ate up paper and gave it out again. And the ardour of his love for that living entity filled his being so completely that it left room neither for ambition nor even for any desire to understand that incomprehensible and marvellous mechanical function; admiringly and tenderly, almost timidly, he accepted it as it was.

Marguerite had crawled up on to the paper bales, and Huguenau sat on the rough bench which stood beside them. He gazed at the machine, gazed at the child. The machine was his property, it belonged to him, the child belonged to Esch. For a while they tossed to each other a sheet of paper rolled into a ball; then Huguenau grew tired of the game, he crossed his legs, wiped his glasses, and said:

“Something more could be made out of the advertising side.”

The child went on playing with the paper ball.

Huguenau continued:

“It’s worse even than I imagined. The paper was too dear at the price … all the same, we own the press; you like the printing-press, don’t you?”

“Yes, let’s play at printing-presses, Uncle Huguenau!”

Marguerite came down from her paper bales and climbed on to his knee. Then they took each other by the arms, threw their bodies rhythmically backwards and forwards, and punctuated the motion with: “Pum, pum.”

Huguenau put on the brake. Marguerite remained sitting stridelegs on his knees. Huguenau was a little short of breath:

“The paper was too dear … if things go well, we’ll bring the circulation up to four hundred … but if we can get two pages of advertisements it will pay and we’ll grow rich. Won’t we, Marguerite?”

Marguerite jumped up and down on his knee, and Huguenau set her in brisk trotting motion; she laughed, for it made her words come in jerks:

“Yes, you’ll get rich, you’ll get rich.”

“Are you glad, Marguerite?”

“Then you’ll give me lots of money.”

“Oho?”

“Lots of money.”

“I tell you what, Marguerite, we’ll hire some boys, they’ll collect the advertisements … in the villages … all over the place. For a commission.”

The child nodded gravely.

“I’ve thought it all out already, marriage announcements, sales, and so forth and so forth … just fetch the lay-outs from Herr Lindner,” and he shouted across to the case-room: “Lindner, the advertisement lay-outs.”

The child ran over and brought them back.

“Look here, we’ll give our agents a copy of these … you’ll see what a draw that’ll be.” He had taken her on his knee again and they studied the lay-outs together. Then Huguenau said:

“So, you want the money so as to run away from them … where do you want to go?”

Marguerite shrugged her shoulders:

“Anywhere.”

Huguenau considered:

“If you go through the Eifel country you’ll come to Belgium. There’s good people there.”

Marguerite asked:

“Will you come too?”

“Perhaps … yes, perhaps later.”

“When later?”

She snuggled against him, but Huguenau said suddenly and brusquely: “That’s enough,” lifted her up and set her on the press. Strangely clear
there rose up again the picture of that murderer, that violator of children chained to his pallet, and it disturbed him. “Everything in its time,” he said, contemplating the girl, who sat, slender and animated, on the solid inanimate machine, and yet in some way belonged to it. If the machine were set in motion it would swallow up Marguerite just as it did the paper, and he made quite certain that the belt was not on. Almost fearfully he repeated: “Everything in its time, the time will come all right … he doesn’t disturb us here at any rate.”

And while he was wondering what it was that the time would come for, he remembered Esch with his big teeth, that lean insufferable pedagogue who would never leave him in peace and was always insisting on the terms of the contract and trying to push editorial duties upon him,—insisting on the terms of the contract and demanding that he should sit there all day and work, probably expecting him, too, to put on a blue overall. Stand on his rights, the fellow could do that, but as for ideas, he hadn’t a single one! And now Huguenau was filled with extraordinary satisfaction at the thought that his schoolmaster had not once yet succeeded in forcing him to work.

As he folded up the advertisement lay-outs he said:

“We’ll pay out the schoolmaster yet, Marguerite—what do you say?”

“Lift me down,” said the child.

Huguenau went up to the printing-press, but when the little girl put her arm round his neck he remained standing for a moment in silent reverie, for now he had found what he had been looking for: in secret he was actually set above the schoolmaster! for he had himself offered to exercise a surveillance over the dangerous fellow, and the Major had approved of it! It dawned on Huguenau that he had been led here simply in order to find his real goal in life, and that his life would be completely fulfilled if he could succeed in completely unmasking Herr Esch’s secret machinations. Yes, that was it, and Huguenau gave Marguerite a hearty kiss on her cheek that was smeared with printing-ink.

But Herr Esch sat upstairs in the editorial office, relieved that he could continue his labours and not give them up to Huguenau. For among other things he was convinced that Huguenau would never be capable of running the paper on the lines laid down by the Major, and he was bent on doing so himself, for in that way he might serve the Major and the good cause.

Dr Flurschütz was examining Jaretzki’s arm stump in the operating-theatre:

“Looks splendid … the chief will be sending you off one of these days … if you agree to it … to a convalescent home.”

“Of course I agree to it; high time one was out of this.”

“I think so too, or we’ll have you on our hands next with delirium tremens.”

“Well, what is there to do but drink? … it’s here that I really learned to do it.”

“Didn’t you ever drink before?”

“No … well, a little, just like everybody else.… I was in the polytechnic in Brunswick, you know … where did you get your degree?”

“Erlangen.”

“Oh well, you must have drunk a bit in your time too … one always does in small towns … and what with sitting about as one has to here, it comes back of itself …” Flurschütz was still probing and fingering the arm stump “… look there, that one bad spot simply won’t heal … how about my artificial arm?”

“Been ordered … we shan’t send you off without the arm.”

“Right, but see that it comes soon … if you hadn’t your work to do here, you would start drinking again too.”

“Couldn’t say … I might find something else to do … really, I’ve never seen you with a book yet, Jaretzki.”

“Look here, tell me honestly: do you actually read all those piles of books that you keep lying about in your room?”

“Yes.”

“Extraordinary … and has that any meaning or object?”

“Not the slightest.”

“That’s a relief … look here, Dr Flurschütz … all right, I’ll keep still … you’ve dispatched a good few people in your time, that’s part of your job of course, but when one has deliberately done in a few … well it seems to me one hasn’t any need to look into a book for all the rest of one’s life … it’s a sort of feeling I’ve got … one has achieved everything … and that’s the reason too why the war will never end.…”

“A daring speculation, Jaretzki; what have you been drinking to-day?”

“I’m as sober as a new-born babe.…”

“Well, that’s finished … we’ll give the artificial arm a trial in a fortnight at latest … then you must really go into one of those schools where they teach you to use it … you want to draw, don’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose so, only I simply can’t imagine it to myself.”

“And what about the General Electric?”

“Oh, very well, let it be the artificial-arm school … sometimes it seems to me that you snicked off the thing quite unnecessarily … simply out of a sense of justice, so to speak, because I once flung a hand-grenade between a Frenchman’s legs.…”

Flurschütz looked at him attentively:

“I say, Jaretzki, pull yourself together. You’re quite alarming … how many have you really had to-day?”

“Nothing worth speaking of … besides I’m really grateful to you for your sense of justice, and the operation was very well done … I feel on much better terms with the world now … on bloody good terms, everything settled … and the General Electric’s simply pining for my arrival.”

“Seriously, Jaretzki, you should go there.”

“But I just want to tell you … it was the wrong arm you took … this one here,” Jaretzki tapped with two fingers on the plate-glass cover of the instrument-case, “this one here was the one I flung the hand-grenade with … probably that’s why I feel it hanging from my shoulder like a dead weight.”