Towards Morning | Page 9

must obey obey always," she said. "Unless you obey you
will never command, you will never be strong, you will never be a
great man. You will never be of any use. We have all got to obey."
"Why?" he asked truculently.
"It is our duty."
"What is duty?"
"The greatest thing in the world." It was strange what hardness, what

sternness came into her face. And yet behind it all he felt the pain.
"Duty is what we owe our country. A sense of duty is the greatest
German virtue. Promise me, Helmut promise me--"
He did not know what she asked but he took a deep breath.
"I'll try," he said solemnly. "I'll try hard."
She caressed him with hard, eager hands.
"We love you, Helmut you must always remember that we love you."
And hereafter his games were never quite the same, and their love
weighed upon him like 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