The Strong City by Taylor Caldwell

  “I don’t go to school,” answered the boy, with pride. “My grandmother taught me. She was not really my grandmother, though I called her Grossmutter. She was my mother’s aunt.” He quickened with surprise. “Was she your aunt, also, Mr. Stoessel?”

  Franz’s color deepened. He glanced aside, evasively. He saw Baldur’s cold, amused smile. He said: “No, Siegfried. She was my mother.”

  Siegfried was frankly amazed. “But how could that be? She had no sons!”

  “Perhaps,” said Baldur, in a slow, smiling voice, “she forgot.”

  Siegfried turned to Baldur, and regarded him with a long disdainful look.

  “That is not possible, Uncle Baldur. Unless,” he added, shrewdly, “she wished to forget.”

  And now he gazed at Franz with open speculation, implacable and frank. Thoughts raced across his blue eyes. Very quietly, thoughtfully, he began to smile.

  “She wished to forget,” he said.

  Franz smiled painfully. “My mother and I never agreed, Siegfried. That is all. Perhaps it is difficult for you to understand.”

  The boy shook his head. “No. I am not a child, Uncle Franz.”

  There was an intense and embarrassed silence. Franz, Baldur and Irmgard looked at the boy, with his smile, and his friendly amusement. He was studying Franz with sharper and sharper interest. Had his uncle just arrived from Germany? No, this was no “greenhorn.” Where did he live? What was his business? He said: “You live in Philadelphia, Uncle Franz?”

  “No, Siegfried. In Nazareth.”

  Again, there was a silence. Siegfried, then, remembering his mother, turned to her. He was concerned at her paleness, and her tears. He went to her, and took her arm. But he looked at Franz. There was something here he could not understand. But he was intrigued, and touched, by Franz’s regard of him, so yearning, so sad, so strange was it. Why didn’t his mother speak? He felt the coldness of her flesh through the blue calico sleeve. Why was she so stiff and silent, so bitter and antagonistic, to this new relative? Was she angered because this relative had not forgotten old enmities, and had not come to his mother’s funeral? Why had he waited to come, until Grossmutter was buried? He felt a vast contempt for petty adult antagonisms, which seemed childish and trivial to him.

  “Would you like to see Grossmutter’s grave, Uncle Franz?” he asked.

  Franz hesitated, and while he did so, Irmgard spoke in a loud angry voice: “If Mr. Stoessel wishes to see his mother’s grave, he will make that decision himself, Siegfried.” She released her arm from the boy’s hand, and said peremptorily: “Hermann is waiting for you. It is time, now, to milk the cows. Go at once.”

  Franz lifted his hand. “A moment, please. I wish to ask the boy some questions. Siegfried, would you like to go to school, some school in Philadelphia, or New York?”

  Irmgard gasped. She gripped her son’s shoulder, glared savagely at Franz.

  “No!” she exclaimed. “He is nothing to you. He is my son. He shall remain here with me. Your interest is belated, Franz. It is too late. It was always too late.” Terror sounded shrilly in her voice. She pushed the boy from her, and said again, louder, more harshly: “Go at once! You must obey me.”

  Siegfried hesitated. He turned pink with embarrassment at his mother’s tone, and his eyes flashed. But obedience was too long in him to be challenged now. He looked at Franz, put his bare heels together, bowed formally. He turned to Baldur, and bowed in the same manner. Then with immense dignity and calm, he left the room. Franz watched him go, saw the straight tall young back and the brown sturdy legs. My son, he thought again, with a peculiar twist of his heart.

  When the boy had gone, he thought rapidly, his yellow brows drawn and knotted together. His first sadness and shame were gone. He held a corner of his lip between his teeth, and stared intently at Irmgard. Baldur rose, cleared his throat, tapped Franz on the arm.

  “Shall we go, Franz? This has been an exciting day—for all of us. Let us leave Irmgard in peace—”

  Franz ignored him. A spark grew in his eyes.

  “He is my son,” he said to Irmgard. “I want him. I must have him.”

  She clenched her hands in her apron, and regarded him with white contempt, and a hard smile.

  “You have no claim on him. And, you would not dare tell him, Franz. No, you have no claim on him, either morally, or legally. You can do nothing.”

  “There is nothing that money cannot do,” he answered, inexorably. He met her eyes, coldly, impassively.

  He is acting, thought Baldur. He wants the boy, but he wants Irmgard more. Does he actually think he can frighten her?

  He said: “Stop pretending, and threatening, Franz. You see, I know what you are thinking. You know as well as I do what a legal suit to get Siegfried will mean. You wouldn’t care about the publicity, and the public laughter—no, you wouldn’t like it at all! You know what the newspapers could do to you. ‘Steel baron sues mother of his illegitimate son for custody.’ Do you think Irmgard is afraid of that? She lives here quietly, anonymously, and her neighbors never read the dirty sheets of the cities. When it was all over, the law would still leave the custody with her. And what about Siegfried? After the hue and cry had died down, he would hate you, for what you did to him and his mother.” He added, meaningly: “And any future association with him would be definitely ended. He would refuse to see you. ‘There is nothing that money cannot do,’ you say. But you wouldn’t like what you would finally get.”

  Franz, knowing the truth of this, knowing that Baldur knew what was really in his mind, turned upon the other with rage.

  “You filthy cripple, with your cleverness! Let me tell you this: money is potent in America. I wouldn’t lose. I never lose. In the end, I would win.”

  Baldur had turned ghastly with affront and anger. He looked Franz in the eye, and said slowly:

  “You forget. Yes, you forget. I would ruin you. Lift a hand against Irmgard, or her son, and I will ruin you. You understand this?”

  Franz glared at him, breathing loudly. He crouched slightly. Red light blazed in his eyes. He was like a great wild boar cornered in a dark forest.

  Baldur nodded his head, smiling grimly. “Yes, Franz.”

  Violence turned Franz’s face purple, and Irmgard, terrified, stepped to Baldur’s side as if to protect him. But Baldur was not afraid. He looked at Franz with profound contempt, not showing one glimmer of his real compassion for this man he had defeated. He took Irmgard’s hand.

  “Don’t be frightened, my dear. He is not so impulsive as he appears. He would like to kill me. But he won’t even lift his hand for a light tap. Do you think that even for you, or Siegfried, or his personal satisfaction, that he would jeopardize himself, and what he has made for himself? He may threaten you, Irmgard. But that is only to frighten you, to make you do what he wants. He won’t hurt himself, if by hurting you, he suffers personal injury.”

  But, for a moment, as he looked at Franz’s suffused eyes and swollen savage face, he had his perturbed doubts. Franz was really close to murder and physical violence. Never in his life had he been so stripped of self-control. He forgot himself, and his own care for himself. He wanted to kill with a primitive lust and hatred, self-forgetting. Baldur saw the evil mad emotions race like gleams of fire across those eyes and that unhuman face. He knew that Franz could kill him with one blow of his meaty fist, and he also knew that Franz was thinking this, in the depths of his primordial fury. But Baldur was not very alarmed. He regarded Franz calmly, holding firmly to Irmgard’s hand.

  Then Irmgard, with a choked sick cry, covered her face with her hands, and cried again, heartbroken. Franz started in the midst of his scarlet rage and abysmal hatred. He turned his large boar’s head in her direction. His face changed, the strangled color ebbed. He listened to her weeping, and he appeared to be horribly shaken. He forgot Baldur.

  “Irmgard—” he muttered. He sighed. There were great wet drops on his forehead, now. He took out his white kerchief and wiped t
hem away. He appeared distraught.

  Then, slowly, he turned and went to the door. He opened it. He walked like a stricken man. Without looking back, he left the room, closing the door silently behind him. He had gone.

  The silence in the room was intense, as though a storm had withdrawn. Baldur put his arm about Irmgard’s shoulders.

  “It is all right now, my dear,” he said, gently. “He has gone.”

  She dropped her hands. She looked about her, white and ravished. Swiftly, an anguished and grief-stricken expression widened her eyes. She wrung her hands together.

  “No!” she cried, in an agonized tone. “O no! Franz! Franz!”

  She ran to the door, flung it open, her dishevelled hair falling about her face. Baldur heard her running across the hall, into the bright autumn air. He heard her crying aloud, as a woman in desperate travail and torment cries:

  “Franz! Franz! Come back to me!”

  Baldur had never known that there was such speed in his maimed legs. He limped and flashed through the shining hall, caught Irmgard at the door. He held her arm tightly, in grim and panting silence. She strained away from him, like a doe from the grip of a dog, her face and neck stretched outward through the door she had opened. She was beside herself, and her cries broke wildly from her lips.

  “Irmgard,” he said, very quietly, and it was this quietness that caught her distracted attention at last. She turned her face to him, and his heart moved at the despairing desolation of her eyes. She had begun to tremble again, and she stared at him.

  “No, no, Irmgard,” he said, and his voice was even quieter. “Not yet. Not yet, for your sake, and Siegfried’s.”

  She listened, but the desolation in her eyes increased.

  “Not yet,” he repeated. “Perhaps, some day. But now, there will be only misery for you. For Siegfried. I know. I know what he is, even now.”

  She was still at last, only looking at him. He reached beyond her, and gently shut the door. She looked at it, as one looks at a grave. Then he led her back into the room. She came blindly, like a bemused child.

  He began to speak again, very softly, looking piercingly into her eyes so she would understand:

  “You must go again, far away, Irmgard. Because he will come back. He won’t let you alone. Then, Siegfried will begin to know. That can’t happen—yet. It can’t happen until Franz comes to full realization. And some day, perhaps, he will.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Many years before, on a certain night, Baldur knew that Franz would come to him. So, on this iron-gray November day, he knew that Franz would come again, as he had come over three years ago to Emmi’s house, for Irmgard.

  For these three years, now, Baldur had been living in this house, after Irmgard and her son had gone away, swiftly, secretly. And all this time Baldur had lived here in peace and silence, visited only by young Sigmund on the holidays, and in the summer, for even in his hatred and frustration Franz had not forgotten the power that Baldur held oyer him. But Baldur had known he could not live at “The Poplars” with Franz any longer.

  Baldur had been expecting him for months now, sometimes watching the long twisting road to Nazareth, sometimes glancing through the window at the sound of carriage wheels. What day he would come, he was not yet sure. But this day he was sure.

  How he knew, he did not know, himself. Perhaps there was something in the ash-grayness and emptiness of the silent day, which seemed suspended, motionless and hollow, in time. All his life, certain days had certain qualities for Baldur. This day was like a huge, smoke filled glass globe, hung between heaven and earth, not spinning, not trembling, but static and cold, and filled with faint gloomy echoes. The autumn gold and scarlet and bronze had gone in a last blaze of deep blue sky and golden sun, and now only the black twisted trees were left, the dull brown earth, the fog-filled windy sky, the dun hills and the dim pewter river. There was an acrid smell in the dry bitter air, a sterile smell like old ashes too long on the hearth. The far landscape had a chill and deathly beauty, in its gray and brown desolation.

  A few fowl, their feathers ruffled, picked listlessly in the barnyard. The flowers were dead, their stalks waving in the arid gusts of wind. The grass, bleached and high, trembled. The white picket fence glimmered through dead vines and dead hollyhocks. Where the sun should be shining through clouds, there was only a leaden diffused circle, and long, darker-gray, shadows roamed wildly over the earth and hills. Even the red roofs were dimmed in the shifting gloom. Smoke curled up from the brick chimneys, and Baldur sat before his fire, waiting.

  But there was a good warm smell of burning wood in the house, and baking apple cake, spiced with cinnamon. Hermann Schultz’s fat wife sang under her breath in the kitchen. A lamp sent a yellow glow through the book-lined room where Baldur sat. At his elbow, leaning against the arm of the chair, was his cane. In these last few years he had become more lame, and increasingly infirm. He was in almost constant dull pain, which he bore in silence and in his accustomed resignation. His face had become smaller, more gaunt and shrivelled in these last years, and it was the face of suffering, proud, patient and quiet. His eyes had enlarged as his face withered, and their blue steadfastness and sparkle had increased as his chronic fever mounted. His hair was almost entirely white. But his mouth still had its old sweetness and its old irony, which was without bitterness.

  He knew that he was not to live much longer. Last spring, he had felt rebellion, and sadness. But now it was autumn. Something of Emmi’s lofty resignation had come to him, but without its hope and mystic exaltation. He had no longings, no desires, no beliefs, in any future existence. He had lived his life, such as it had been. It was done. Perhaps there was a kind of immortality for those that desired it. He did not desire it. He had the curious notion that one, at the end, had the choice of immortality, or eternal extinction He preferred the extinction. It had more dignity, something of grandeur, something of nobility. Man, immortal, carried his indignity, his meagreness, his littleness, into eternity, and that was ignominious. What had God, the universe, time and eternity, to do with this small blind creature, endowed with shamefulness, nakedness and whimperings and petty evils? It was embarrassing to contemplate it.

  So, silently, in himself, Baldur made his curious decision not to live again. He would lie down beside Egon and Emmi Stoessel; he would shut his eyes, and give to eternity and the earth the dignity of his extinction, the last pride of his final breath. There was magnificence in knowing that one was to be part of the earth forever. Strong roots would grow through his dead flesh, and the trunk of a tree would rise from his heart. That was the only immortality which could not affront the vast splendor of time.

  He thought of Franz, hot, exigent, wretched and despairing, and he was filled with his ancient pity for this man who had sought everything, and found nothing but his own face staring at him, a frustrated tired face with dead eyes. He shivered a little. How terrible to be Franz! When the winter came, he (Baldur) would lie sleeping under whiteness. But Franz would go on, staring at his own face, for many years. It was a hideous thing to remember.

  He heard the crunching of carriage wheels on the gravel, and turned his head. Through the large, small-paned windows, he could see Franz’s glittering carriage at the gate. He smiled deeply and sadly. He watched Franz’s tall broad figure coming up the flagged walk, as it had come on that day he had found Irmgard. The sudden thought of Irmgard still had the power to twist Baldur with pain, but even the pain was numb now, like the memory of sorrow. He looked tentatively at his cane, made a motion to rise, sank back. He now had the excuse not to make even the smallest courteous effort. Pain and illness had their uses. They relieved one of polite hypocrisies.

  Dry yellow leaves ran before Franz’s heavy footsteps, like little animals fleeing. Baldur heard the hollow sound of the iron knocker, and he heard Hermann’s wife answering the door, and the sound of her German voice in respectful inquiry. Franz replied to her in German. His voice was somewhat hoarser than Baldur
remembered, and slower, and hideously tired.

  Then, though he did not turn his head, he knew that Franz was in the room. He could feel that urgent heavy presence, but all at once he felt that the urgency was mechanical and forced. He said, quietly:

  “Franz. Come in.”

  Now Franz stood at his right hand, near the door. Baldur looked up, and their eyes met. They smiled in silence, these two who had, at all times, been simultaneously the profoundest friends and the most ruthless enemies. Franz’s yellow hair had coarsened into grayed streaks, and the ruddy, purple-tinged complexion, which betrayed both high blood pressure and constant psychological pressure, gave his face a weary and bloated look. His blue eyes, always small, were smaller than ever, pointed, glazed, impervious as porcelain. But Baldur saw that the porcelain appeared cracked and faded. Thickened lips advertised sensuality, avarice and brutishness, and his nose had thickened also between the broad high planes of his Prussian cheeks. It was a powerful and implacable face, and still handsome, still affable. Yet the very power and implacability had the implication of disintegration in them, as though that which had inspired and sustained them had gone.

  Baldur saw all this, but he saw something more. He saw the wretchedness, uneasiness and unquenchable misery of the man, no longer hidden under the well-fed flesh as they had once been. Franz had built his “strong city,” and was now locked in it, behind the “high wall of his conceit.” Did he still look through the gates to see the land of far distances from which he had shut himself? Did a man ever escape from himself?

  Baldur was no sentimentalist. The pious and the envious said that wealth did not bring happiness. This was folly. Nothing brought happiness to men but understanding themselves and all things as one, and as a whole. The possession of riches brought no less unhappiness than did poverty. The poor man in his tenement was no happier than the powerful man in his strong city. Many times, indeed, the poor man was much more wretched, much more frustrated. He did not even have the consolation of the powerful, that at least in one thing they had attained success. It was much less blissful to sit by a cold fire than a warm, even if the warm fire brought no lasting happiness to the heart. Sadness in a great rich room, lit with candlelight, and fortified by the knowledge of good bank accounts, was more endurable than sadness on barren land and in lightless hovels. Nor was the powerful man less virtuous than the disinherited. He, at least, was free from the misery of envy, while the disinherited must consume his life in hatred for those whom nature had endowed more lavishly with the ability to attain.