Dame Care Part 2

"Where, then?" continued his mother.

"There, at the door," he replied, raising himself and clutching her round the neck, for he was dreadfully frightened.

"Oh, you silly little one," said his mother; "that is papa's long travelling-cloak." And she fetched it, and made him feel the lining and the stuff, so that he should be thoroughly convinced; and he gave in.

But inwardly he was all the more firmly persuaded that he had seen the gray woman face to face. And now he also knew what she was called.

"Dame Care," she was called.

But his mother had grown thoughtful, and was not to be moved to tell the end of the fairy tale. Neither would she in later times, however urgently he might plead.

He had only a vague remembrance of his father in those days: a man with high Wellington boots, who scolded his mother and whipped his brothers, while he overlooked him altogether. Only at rare times he got a look askance, which did not seem to bode any good. Sometimes, especially when his father had been in the town, his face was dark red in color, like an overheated kettle, and his steps swayed from side to side when he crossed the room. Then the same thing was always enacted over again.

First he fondled the twins, whom he seemed to be particularly fond of, and rocked them in his arms, while his mother stood close beside him, following each of his movements with anxious looks. Then he sat down to eat, turned over what was in the dishes, pushed them aside, calling them poor and unsavory food, only fit for beasts. Occasionally he would hit Max or Gottfried with the rod, was angry with their mother, and finally went out to pick a quarrel with the servants. His bullying voice resounded in the yard, so that even Caro, chained up, hid his tail between his legs, and retired to the farthest corner of the kennel. If after a while he returned to the room, his humor had generally changed from anger to despair. He wrung his hands, lamented the misery in which he had to live there, talked to himself of all sorts of great things which he would have undertaken if one thing or another had not prevented him, and if heaven and earth had not conspired together to ruin him.

Then he would often go to the window, and shake his fist at the White House yonder, which looked so attractive in the distance.

"Ah, the White House!"

His father abused it and knitted his brow if he only glanced in that direction; and he himself--he loved it, as if part of his soul lingered there. Why? He did not know. Perhaps only because his mother loved it.

She, too, stood often at the window, gazing at it; but she did not knit her brow, not she; her face grew soft and melancholy, and from her eyes there shone a longing so ardent that he, standing near her, often felt a sensation of awe steal over him.

Was not his little heart filled with the same longing? Did not that home, ever since he could think at all, appear to him as the embodiment of everything beautiful and magnificent? Did it not always stand before him when he shut his eyes and even creep into his dreams?

"Have you ever been in the White House?" he asked his mother one day, when he could restrain his curiosity no longer.

"Oh yes, my son," she answered, and her voice sounded sad and unsteady.

"Often, mamma?"

"Very often, my boy. Your parents once lived there, and you were born there."

Ever since then the "White House" was to him what "Paradise Lost" is to mankind.

"Who lives in the White House now?" he asked another time.

"A beautiful kind woman, who loves everybody, and you especially, because you are her G.o.dchild."

He felt as if an endless fountain of happiness streamed upon his head.

He was so excited that he trembled.

"Why do you not drive, then, to the beautiful kind woman?" he asked, after a while.

"Papa won't let us," she answered, and her voice had a strangely sharp tone which struck him.

He did not ask any more, for his father's wish was regarded as a law of which n.o.body had a right to ask the reason, but from that day the secret of the White House formed a new tie between mother and son. They could not speak about it openly.

His father was furious if one only hinted at its existence, and his brothers also did not like to talk about it with him, the younger one; very likely they feared that he would repeat it in his foolishness. But his mother--his mother trusted him.

When they were alone together--and they were nearly always alone during school-time--she would open her mouth and her heart, too, and the White House arose higher and brighter before his eyes from her description of it. Soon he knew each room, each arbor in the garden, the pond, surrounded by green bushes and shrubs, before it the s.h.i.+ning gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s, and the sundial on the terrace: only fancy, a clock on which the sun itself had to mark the hours.

What a marvel!

He could have walked about in Helenenthal with his eyes closed, and not have lost his way.

And when he played with his bricks, he built a White House for himself with terraces and sundials--two dozen at a time. He dug ponds in the sand and fastened pebbles on little posts to represent the gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s.

But, of course, they did not reflect anything.

CHAPTER III.

At this time he made the plan to pay a visit to the White House quite on his own account. He put it off till spring, but when spring came he did not find the necessary courage; he put it off till summer, but even then all sorts of hindrance came between plan and execution. Once he had seen a big dog roving alone in the meadow--who could know whether it might not be a mad one? and at another time a bull had made straight for him with his horns lowered.

"Yes; when I am big like my brothers," he consoled himself by thinking, "and when I go to school, then I'll take a stick and kill the mad dog, and the bull I'll seize by the horns so that he cannot harm me any more." He put it off until next year, for then he was to begin going to school, just like his big brothers.

These brothers were the objects of his veneration. To be like them seemed to him the brightest aim of all earthly wishes--to ride on horses, on big real ones, to skate, to swim quite without the help of either floats or bladders, and to wear s.h.i.+rt-fronts, white starched ones, which were fastened with ribbons round the waist--oh, if he could do all that! But for that one must first grow big, he comforted himself by thinking. He kept these thoughts quite to himself; he did not like to tell his mother, and, as to his brothers, they occupied themselves with him very little.

He was a little manikin in their eyes, and when their mother told them to take him with them anywhere they were angry, because then they had to take care of him, and on account of his silliness could not play so many tricks. Paul felt that very well, and in order to escape their angry faces and still more angry blows, he generally said he wanted to stay at home, however sore his heart might feel. Then he seated himself on the pump-handle, and, rocking himself to and fro, dreamed of the time when he could do as his brothers did.

In learning, too, and that was no small matter; for both of them, Max as well as Gottfried, were always the highest in their school, and always brought home for the holidays excellent testimonials of good conduct; how excellent they were was quite evident, for their father always gave them a silver groschen and their mother a honey-cake in consequence.

On such joyful days he used to hear his father say:

"Yes; if only the two eldest could go to a good school, something might be made of them, for they have clear heads; but beggars as we are, I suppose we shall have to bring them up like beggars."

Paul reflected a good deal about this, for he already knew that Max was born to be a Field-marshal, and Gottfried to be Chief Master of the Ordnance.

The fact was that once a Rapine picture-book, with pictures of the Austrian army, had found its way into the Howdahs, and on that day the brothers had agreed to divide the two highest dignities in the army between themselves, while to him, the younger, the place of a non-commissioned officer was a.s.signed. Since then, indeed, there had been periods when one of them had inclined to the vocation of a trapper, and the other to that of an Indian chief, but Paul's thoughts clung to those gold-braided uniforms, with which the wooden spears, and the patched rag sandals, which the brothers wore in their games--the latter they called moccasins--could by no means bear comparison; also, why they afterwards wanted to be naturalist and superintendent was incomprehensible to him; the new Rapine pictures always remained the best.

At this time the twins began to walk; Katie, the elder one--she was born three-quarters of an hour before her sister--made the beginning, and Greta followed her three days after.

That was an important event in Paul's life.

He suddenly found himself in a round of duties from which he could not easily get free. n.o.body had ordered him to watch his little sisters'

first steps, but just as it had always been natural to him to clean his boots in the evening, and his brothers' into the bargain, to fold his little frock in a square, and to put it at the head of his bed, with his stockings across it, never to make a spot on the tablecloth, and to receive the punishment from his father when the self-same accidents happened to his brothers--so it became just as natural that he should henceforth look after his little sisters, and, with premature care, watch over their most rash attempts to stand and walk.

He appeared to himself so full of importance in this office that even the longing to go to school became less, and if by a lucky chance he had only been able to whistle, there would have been no wish left him.

Ah! to be able to whistle, like Jones, the farm-servant, or like his elder brothers; that was now the goal of all his wishes, the object of incessant practice. But however much he might point his lips, however much he might moisten them to make them flexible, no sound came forth.

If he drew in the air, then accidentally he would do it. Once he had even succeeded in producing the first notes of "IST in J.D. im Washer gefallen" (A Jew Tumbled into the Water); but each professional whistler knows that the air must be blown from the mouth, and this was just what he could not learn.

Here also the thought comforted him: "When I am big."

Christmas this year brought glad tidings. There arrived a big box from his "good aunt" out of the town, a sister of his mother's, with all sorts of beautiful and useful things: books, linen for his brothers'

s.h.i.+rts, little frocks for his sisters, and for himself a velvet coat--a real velvet coat, with military braidings and big s.h.i.+ning b.u.t.tons. That was a delight. But the most beautiful Christmas-box was contained in the letter, which his mother read aloud with tears of emotion. The good aunt wrote that she had seen from Elsbeth's last letters that it was her husband's dearest wish to be able to give a better education to his two eldest boys, and that in consequence she had decided to receive them in her own house, and to let them go to college at her expense. His brothers shouted with joy, his mother cried, his father walked up and down the room, pa.s.sed his hand through his hair, and muttered excited words.

He meanwhile sat quietly at his sisters' little bed, rejoicing inwardly.