Towards Morning | Page 9

a burden. A spectre stalked beside him, waiting for its moment to seize him and devour him.
It was tall and grim and pitiless. And it was called Duty.
III
He believed most in the things he could not see. In spite of the Geheimrat who explained the mechanism carefully to him, he believed in a little friendly spirit who, when you rang the bell outside the big door downstairs, lifted the latch and let you in. He believed in a brilliant dashing person who could fill a pitch dark room with a blaze of light, and every now and then turned crusty and wouldn't. He could almost see the crowds of tiny grey men pushing the trams along and clanging a bell. He did see them at night in the Stadtgarten when the band played and the lights twinkled, and the black-coated waiters ran hither and thither like worried moths. He saw them then under the shadow of the trees. They smoked their long pipes and drank out of their little mugs of beer, and nodded their heads to the music.
He believed in fairies not in the conventional fairies of the books, for he had never heard of them but in the fairies from Anna's village in the mountains. Anna was married now and had a ricketty, heavyheaded baby which she loved. She was softer and sadder-eyed than ever. On Fridays and Tuesdays she came in to help Frau Felde clean, and when she was eating her lunch of dry bread and coffee she told Helmut about her home and about the fairies. It appeared that they were a queer people, not friendly not unfriendly. They treated human beings like selfish intruders more stupid than wicked whom one teased, or helped, or punished according to their merit. To the really ill-intentioned they could be exceedingly nasty. For instance, there was old Hansel who had deliberately planted a potato patch on their favourite ball-room, his potatoes did not flourish you may be sure, and his pigs died one after another, and finally old Hansel himself. And every night they dance on his grave so that he can't sleep.
Helmut looked forward to Tuesdays and Fridays, and most of all to Saturday. On Saturday when it was fine they all five Heini and Schnautzchen included took the tram to the Durlacher Turm, which was a Roman watch-tower on a hill overlooking the Rhine, and climbing up by a minute funicular train wandered through the forests and over the fields to an inn where there was coffee and Apfelkuchen, and sometimes new wine tasting sweet and strong of the grape. An old stork, whose wing had been injured in babyhood, kept guard in the courtyard, standing on one miraculously thin leg and klappering with his beak to show his disapproval of little boys like Helmut.
One special Saturday in spring they went out into the woods to gather the lilies of the valley. The aif sparkled as though the sun had given it a special polishing after the long winter, and the fruit trees lay white as snow on the hills. But one tree bore no blossoms. It stood bleak and grey among its fellows holding out its gaunt arms pitifully.
"The poor tree is dead," said Helmut's mother.
He stood looking up into the branches, his arms full of the green-sheathed spoils.
"Do trees die?" he asked, "and flowers?"
The Herr Amtschreiber pointed with his stick.
"Someone has torn off the bark and injured the trunk. Look where the sap has run out."
"What is sap?"
"It is like our blood." He took a lily of the valley and showed the pale greenish moisture where the stem had been snapped. "You see, it's the same thing, its life is running away. It's been torn in half, as it were. Of course we can keep it fresh in water for a day or two, but it's dying one might say dead."
"I killed it," said Helmut slowly.
They were not looking at him.
"Think how pretty they will be in the big vase," said Frau Felde. "That is what they were made for."
They walked on, Helmut lingered behind. He was whiter than the apple tree and shivering as though with cold. He knelt down and dug in the soft earth, Schnautzchen, with dim memories of rabbit-hunts, helping feebly. In the hole Helmut laid his flowers and covered them with leaves.
"I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know you were alive like me. I won't hurt any of you again ever --"
He said his little evening hymn over them. It began: "I am very little but my heart is pure and belongs to Jesus and Jesus alone." He did not know quite what it meant but it was all he could think of. Fritz Schnautzchen sat by and blinked wisely and Heini lay on his back and smiled