Towards Morning | Page 7

was a god.
His joy lifted him out of the grey crowd where he belonged. For a
moment romance touched him with her golden finger and illuminated
him. Once before it had come to him on his wedding night when the
love that had been so cramped with little sordid cares had burst its
bonds and shown herself royal and reckless even in them. It would
come again perhaps surely once again at least with the last romance of
all.
He went slowly to the table and sat down. A lifeold instinct held
steadfast in him. There were things to be done a note to the Geheimrat
an order to the printer a notice to be inserted in the daily paper. He
drew that 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