Towards Morning | Page 7

morning's Tagblatt towards him and turned over the pages. How big was the notice to be? Schulrat Vosser had taken the half of two columns for his daughter. One couldn't do less. That would cost over ten marks. Ten marks from a weekly seventy. And there would be the doctor and the nurse and extra help and the chemist's bill--
Perhaps a smaller notice would do.
The music of a military band escorting a regiment home to its barracks came in a thrilling wave from the distance. It filled the drab conventional room with a fierce glow of colour. It blew fear away as a wind drives off a creeping mist.
The Herr Amtschreiber sat back and dreamed.
"Happier than we have been!"
Yes, that was it. Not a failure, struggling and ineffectual, not even a cog playing its little part faithfully in the great whole, but an eagle mounting in great flights, a new force driving the machine faster and more splendidly to its goal. A judge, a general, an admiral, a prince of commerce. These things happened. They would pinch and save. They would manage somehow so that he should spread his young wings freely. In him all that they had dreamed would come to flower. He would be their hope, their ambition, their life.
They would call him Helmut. It was German and heroic. It spread a light about it. Helmut bright courage.
He took a clean sheet of paper and began to draw up the announcement. He made it bigger and more splendid even than that of the Schulrat Vosser. His lips trembled as he wrote:
"Herr and Frau Felde joyfully announce to their friends that this day a beautiful boy has been born to them."
He framed it in thick black lines so that it looked like a shout of triumph. When it was done he dropped forward with his face between his hands.
"God grant it!" he whispered. "God grant it!" There was quiet and warmth within and without. The sweet exhaustion of tears crept up about him in a drowsy mist. And so the Herr Amtschreiber slept suddenly and peacefully. And in his sleep he heard an infant crying.
CHAPTER II
AT the bottom of all memories were Heini and Fritz Schnautzchen. There had never been a time when Heini was not. In a nebulous world of vague gigantic shapes, now dwindling into distance, Heini stood out clear and definite as a rock. His beaming, never changing smile, his stiff sawdust limbs stretched out in jolly welcome, had received the first word and the first conscious caress. He had taken part in the first perilous two-legged journey across the dinging-room. He had suffered in the disaster. His painted features were dimmed with the smear of many tears and the jammy kisses of a consoled partner. If he grew less sightly with the months that were then as eternities, and if there were times when the most ardent shrank from his proffered embrace, to Helmut he was still the perfect friend whose being had been linked to his by hands of almost mystic understanding.
Quite other was the history of Fritz Schnautzchen, who had come later in the glorious period of pram emancipation. He was a stray, the Feldes said, apologetically, and had been "picked up" because of Helmut's absurd infatuation, but Helmut knew better. He knew that they had chosen each other that they "belonged" according to an unwritten and secret law. One day in the forest they had met for the first time. Helmut had been playing at his mother's side with the fallen fir-cones a mysterious silent game which his mother never understood and suddenly Fritz Schnautzchen had appeared from among the trees. They had stood gazing at each other for a long time, not saying anything or moving, and then Fritz Schnautzchen had quietly come to a decision. He followed Helmut's heels to the big grey block of flats in the Louisenstrasse, and had waited patiently on the door step whilst Helmut howled within for his adoption. In the end their love had triumphed, and every week a twenty-five pfennig piece was set aside towards a dog-tax which was in theory to be Helmut's birthday present.
There was no very clear explanation for Schnautzchen's unusual and slightly grotesque nomenclature except perhaps in the fact that he himself was unusual and more than slightly grotesque. The "Schnautzchen" may have had its origin in the raceless snub nose which must have been derived from a pug ancestor the Fritz was unquestionably utilitarian. One could not shout "Schnautzchen" with any comfort and certainly not with dignity.
He was, in truth, not beautiful and not even young. He was a kind of dog all to himself, baulking description, and the years weighed heavily upon him. One saw that life had not been kind, and behind his dim brown eyes