Chapter 31

Gustav von Lohm found Manske’s telegram on his table when he came in with his wife from his afternoon ride in the Thiergarten.

“What is it?” she inquired, seeing him turn pale; and she took it out of his hand and read it. “Disgraceful,” she murmured.

“I must go at once,” he said, looking round helplessly.

“Go?”

When a wife says “Go?” in that voice, if she is a person of determination and her husband is a person of peace, he does not go; he stays. Gustav stayed. It is true that at first he decided to leave Berlin by the early train next morning; but his wife employed the hours of darkness addressing him, as he lay sleepless, in the language of wisdom; and the wisdom being of that robust type known as worldly, it inevitably produced its effect on a mind naturally receptive.

“Relations,” she said, “are at all times bad enough. They do less for you and expect more from you than anyone else. They are the last to congratulate if you succeed, and the first to abandon if you fail. They are at one and the same time abnormally truthful, and abnormally sensitive. They regard it as infinitely more blessed to administer home-truths than to receive them back again. But, so long as they do not actually break the laws, prejudice demands that they shall be borne with. In my family, no one ever broke the laws. It has been reserved for my married life, this connection with criminals.”

She was a woman of ready and frequent speech, and she continued in this strain for some time. Towards morning, nature refusing to endure more, Gustav fell asleep; and when he woke the early train was gone.

In the same manner did his wife prevent his writing to his unhappy brother. “It is sad that such things should be,” she said, “sad that a man of birth should commit so vulgar a crime; but he has done it, he has disgraced us, he has struck a blow at our social position which may easily, if we are not careful, prove fatal. Take my advice—have nothing to do with him. Leave him to be dealt with as the law shall demand. We who abide by the laws are surely justified in shunning, in abhorring, those who deliberately break them. Leave him alone.”

And Gustav left him alone.

Trudi was at a picnic when the telegram reached her flat. With several of her female friends and a great many lieutenants she was playing at being frisky among the haycocks beyond the town. Her two little boys, Billy and Tommy, who would really have enjoyed haycocks, were left sternly at home. She invited the whole party to supper at her flat, and drove home in the dog-cart of the richest of the young men, making immense efforts to please him, and feeling that she must be looking very picturesque and sweet in her flower-trimmed straw hat and muslin dress, silhouetted against the pale gold of the evening sky.

Her eye fell on the telegram as the picnic party came crowding in.

“Bill coming home?” inquired somebody.

“I’m afraid he is,” she said, opening it.

She read it, and could not prevent a change of expression. There was a burst of laughter. The young men declared they would never marry. The young women, prone at all times to pity other women’s husbands, criticised Trudi’s pale face, and secretly pitied Bill. She lit a cigarette, flung herself into a chair, and became very cheerful. She had never been so amusing. She kept them in a state of uproarious mirth till the small hours. The richest lieutenant, who had found her distinctly a bore during the drive home, went away feeling quite affectionate. When they had all gone, she dropped on to her bed, and cried, and cried.

It was in the papers next morning, and at breakfast Trudi and her family were in every mouth. Bibi came running round, genuinely distressed. She had not been invited to the picnic, but she forgot that in her sympathy. “I wanted to catch you before you start,” she said, vigorously embracing her poor friend.

“Where should I start for?” asked Trudi, offering a cold cheek to Bibi’s kisses.

“Are you not going to Herr von Lohm?” exclaimed Bibi, open-mouthed.

“What, when he tries to cheat insurance companies?”

“But he never, never set fire to those buildings himself.”

“Didn’t he, though?” Trudi turned her head, and looked straight into Bibi’s eyes. “I know him better than you do,” she said slowly.

She had decided that that was the only way—to cast him off altogether; and it must be done at once and thoroughly. Indeed, how was it possible not to hate him? It was the most dreadful thing to happen to her. She would suffer by it in every way. If he were guilty or not guilty, he was anyhow a fool to let himself get into such a position, and how she hated such fools! She registered a solemn vow that she had done with Axel for ever.

At Kleinwalde the effect of the news was to make Frau Dellwig slay a pig and send out invitations for an unusually large Sunday party. She and her husband could hardly veil their beaming satisfaction with a decent appearance of dismay. “What would his poor father, our gracious master’s oldest friend, have said!” ejaculated Dellwig at dinner, when the servant was in the room.

“It is truly merciful that he did not live to see it,” said his wife, with pious head-shakings.

What Anna was doing at Stralsund, no one knew. She said she was having some bother with her bank. Miss Leech related how they had been to the bank on the Monday. “I must go again,” Anna said on the evening of the fruitless Tuesday, when she had been the whole day again with Manske, vainly trying to obtain permission to visit Axel; and she added, her head drooping, her voice faint, that it was a great bore. Certainly she looked profoundly unhappy.

“One cannot be too careful in money matters,” remarked Frau von Treumann, alarmed by Anna’s white looks, and afraid lest by some foolish neglect on her part supplies should cease. She enthusiastically encouraged these visits to the bank. “Take care of your bank,” she said, “and your bank will take care of you. That is what we say in Germany.”

But Anna did not hear. There was but one thought in her mind, one cry in her heart—how could she reach, how could she help, Axel?

He was in a cell about five yards long by three wide. There was just room to pass between the camp bedstead and the small deal table standing against the opposite wall. Besides this furniture, there was one chair, an empty wooden box turned up on end, with a tin basin on it—that was his washstand—a little shelf fixed on the wall, and on the little shelf a tin mug, a tin plate, a pot of salt, a small loaf of black bread, and a Bible. The walls were painted brown, and the window, fitted with ground glass, was high up near the ceiling; it was barred on the outside, and could only be opened a few inches at the top. On the door a neat printed card was fastened, giving, besides information for the guidance of the habitually dirty as to the cleansing properties of water, the quantity of oakum the occupant of the cell would be expected to pick every day. The cell was used sometimes for condemned criminals, hence the mention of the oakum; but the card caught Axel’s eye whenever he reached that end of the room in his pacings up and down, and without knowing it he learnt its rules by heart.

At first he had been completely dazed, absolutely unable to understand the meaning and extent of the misfortune that had overtaken him; but there was a grim, uncompromising reality about the prison, about the heavy doors he passed through, each one barred and locked behind him, each one cutting him off more utterly from the common free life outside, about the look of the miserable beings he met being taken to or from their work by armed warders, about the warders themselves with their great keys, polished by frequent use—there was about these things an inexorable reality that shook him out of the blind apathy into which he had fallen after his arrest. Some extraordinary mistake had been made; and, knowing that he had done nothing, when first he began to think connectedly he was certain that it could only be a matter of hours before he was released. But the horror of his position was there. Released or not released, who would make good to him what he was suffering and what he would have lost? He had been searched on his arrival—his money, watch, and a ring he wore of his mother’s taken from him. The young official who arrested him—he was the Junior Public Prosecutor—presided at these operations with immense zeal. Being young and obscure, he thirsted to make a name for himself, and opportunities were few in that little town. To be put in charge, therefore, of this sensational case, was to behold opening out before him the rosiest prospects for the future. His name, which was Meyer, would flare up in flames of glory from the ashes of Axel’s honour. Stralsund, ringing with the ancient name of Lohm, would be forced to ring simultaneously with the less ancient and not in itself interesting name of Meyer. He had arrested Lohm, he had special charge of the case, he could not but be talked about at last. His zeal and satisfaction accordingly were great, carrying him far beyond the limits usual on such occasions. Axel stood amazed at the trick of fortune that had so suddenly flung him into the power of a young man called Meyer.