An Old Heart Goes A-Journeying (2 page)

In spite of many appeals from his colleagues and pupils, he applied for his pension, which was finally granted. And he buried himself wholly in his calculations and researches.

There was only one friend of former days, a clergyman in the Mecklenburg country, called Thürke, whom he had informed of the deeper reasons for his altered life, and to him he wrote as follows:

“I have some news that I feel I must positively tell you, though I would ask you not to mention it for the present. . . . With the Lord’s aid I have discovered the Number of the Beast. This apocalyptic key is of great importance, for those born now will enter upon strange times. You must prepare yourself for these things, for wisdom will be sorely needed. . . .”

This was written in December, and it was March before Professor Kittguss received an answer from his friend Thürke:

A little daughter had been born to him and his wife and christened Rosemarie, and Gotthold Kittguss had been recorded in the register as her godfather. Might they hope that the Professor would have no objection?—They were all delighted to hear of the wonderful times that awaited the little girl. In the meantime, could
not he, Kittguss, hasten his researches and pay an early visit to the parsonage, so as to make his godchild’s acquaintance? In the country, too, there were signs of good times at hand; spring had come earlier than ever before, and swallows had darted and twittered over the baby as she had been carried to church. . . .

Professor Kittguss had sat pondering over this letter for a while; a sudden radiance had lit up his dark abode. He had meant to answer the letter, but it had slipped between other papers, and the Professor was again quite absorbed in his calculations as to the nature of a half time, a
and a measured eternity, an
. Thus the letter remained unanswered and forgotten, for sixteen years, just as the whole world about him was forgotten and ignored.

We are to conceive of the Professor through all those years which he spent almost entirely at his writing table, as a tall, still handsome man, with a broad white face, a firm chin, thick dark eyebrows, brown, kindly, but rather abstracted eyes, and white curling hair, always very carefully brushed. He took great pains with his appearance, he was always irreproachably shaved, his collars were always immaculately starched and ironed, and his white, small plump hands, now faintly freckled by the years, never—though he passed his days among books and papers—showed the slightest trace of dust or ink.

The Professor was attended by a widow lady, Frau Müller, who went silently about her business in the kitchen regions, silently set his meals before him, laid out his clean underclothes every Saturday, and never uttered a superfluous word.

The pair had grown so accustomed to each other that
they often did not speak for weeks. On the morning of the last day in every month Professor Kittguss found his overcoat, hat, and stick set out on his study chair. He then took his savings bankbook out of a drawer, walked slowly through the streets to the nearest savings bank, waited, absorbed in thought, at the counter until someone addressed him, drew out the housekeeping money, a sum that never varied, left the rest of his pension on deposit, and walked slowly home, once more lost in meditation.

The Widow Müller was waiting for him in the hall, took coat, hat, stick, and housekeeping money without a word, and Professor Kittguss sat down for another month over his patient and abstruse calculations.

When he started his researches the Professor had thought, in the first flush of inspiration, that his goal was near at hand, but the longer he worked, the more it seemed to recede into the distance. So he sat, and pondered over every word, and the years went by. Sixteen years, though that was a figure which the Professor did not notice, and they were to him no more than a day. Nor had it ever occurred to him that he was now nearly seventy, as he sat brooding over the following verse: “And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, ‘A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny, and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.’ ”

He sat and read and pored and pondered, and finally he wrote: “This refers to a time that was better for oil and wine than for wheat and barley. Taken as a whole the passage suggests a slight rise in prices. Wheat and barley, oil and wine are the commonest and most essential
foodstuffs. The command here given is therefore very significant. In Trajan’s reign a remarkable rise in prices occurred, especially in the southern provinces and Egypt, which was usually a fertile land and a granary for many nations. If the Nile did not rise high enough, if in fact the discharge was under fourteen feet, there was always a rise in prices, as is proved by Pliny, Book 5, Chapter 9. In the year 110, the thirteenth of Trajan’s reign, the Nile rose only seven feet, as Harduinus proves from a contemporary coin. . . .” Professor Kittguss had reached this point in his labor on that dim October afternoon of the year 1912, when he became aware of a knock at the door, and a presence by his writing table. Slowly, and a little irritably, he looked up, and saw the face of the Widow Müller. That face expressed such varied feelings, from vexation at having to disturb him, to a certain plain disgust, that he found himself saying: “Well, Frau Müller, and what is the matter?” “A boy,” whispered the Widow Müller indignantly. “Ah—a boy?” replied the Professor genially, and a memory of his teaching days flashed back into his mind. He looked at the door and could almost see his head boy, Porzig, enter the room, with his little red and white school cap in his hand. Time and again Porzig—or one of the others—had come to see him at just such a twilight hour, and asked one question or another that always culminated in the query: “If I believe, must I believe
everything?”

The recollection of those dear familiar days stirred the old Professor to expectancy—he looked at the door, and at his housekeeper. . . .

He forgot that Porzig would be now well over thirty, that a great many years had slipped over the paper since
then, and that not one boy of today would even know his name.

Never had the Professor seen such a creature
.

The old man smiled, and asked: “Well, where is the young man, Frau Müller?” Frau Müller knew her master and was familiar with his ways. “I couldn’t let in the likes of him,” she muttered indignantly. “Indeed, and what is the matter with him?” asked the Professor amiably. He got up, a very tall and imposing figure behind his writing table. “Let him in, Frau Müller. Our door is closed to no one.” He nodded to her reassuringly and crossed the room to turn on the center light. Then he stopped and looked at the door.

The door opened slightly, and through it sidled a truly melancholy object, filthy and disreputable. He stood on the matting by the door, twisting his hat in his hand, and staring dumbly at the floor.

Never in the whole of his cloistered life had the Professor seen such a creature: but there he stood, with lanky, slouching limbs, his red and shapeless hands swollen and chapped; his face deathly pale, with a great gloomy nose, thick gaping lips and yellow horse-fang teeth, a low protuberant forehead, almost engulfing the little vacant eyes. And it struck at the Professor’s heart to think that this poor oafish half-wit was also God’s creature, less equipped for life than most, and therefore with a harder road to travel. . . .

Kittguss glanced toward the door, which Frau Müller had not quite shut; she was certainly on guard outside it. The Professor stretched a hand out past the youth and softly closed it. Then he went to his writing table, but not to his chair. With his back to his table and his work Kittguss surveyed his visitor.

The lad still stared dumbly at the floor as though he did not know why he had come.

“What is your name, my boy?” asked the Professor gently.

The answer came with startling promptitude, and in a startlingly deep, rasping tone: “Won’t tell!”

Kittguss reflected; perhaps the youth had come to the wrong place. “My name is Kittguss,” he explained.

“I knaws that,” said the visitor in the same quick, harsh tone.

“Where do you come from?”

“Won’t tell!” rasped the visitor once more.

For a while there was silence; the Professor glanced round his study in bewilderment. The ceiling light threw a cheerful glow on the bookshelves, bulging under their load of books; on the pile of written sheets, some of them already yellow and faded, that lay ready to hand in a cabinet; and on the green writing table where the day’s work seemed to be reproachfully waiting until this interruption should come to an end.

“I must also,” thought the Professor, “quote that passage in the younger Pliny where he mentions, as something quite uncommon, that in the year 98 Trajan had to help the Egyptians by sending them flour. . . .”

An idea then came into his mind. He went round the writing table to a cupboard where he kept some brown barley sugar to relieve his cough. He picked out a large piece, and after a moment’s hesitation took out a smaller piece as well. The large piece he gave to his visitor, the small one he kept for himself. “Eat that, my boy,” he said. “It’s sugar. I eat it too.”

The youth made as though to refuse, but with an obvious
effort. Over the poor vacant face came a flicker of life and into the blank eyes a glint of intelligence.

“You eat it,” said the Professor gently. “I’m not trying to bribe you into telling me anything.”

The youth ate greedily. Before he had finished he jerked his head in the direction of the writing table, and mumbled something that sounded like: “Write, do yer?”

The Professor guessed rather than understood. “Yes, I write,” he replied, “most of the time.”

“Sit you down then,” said the youth, “an’ write.”

“What shall I write?”

“What you usually do. I wanna see . . . wanna see. . . .”

“What do you want to see?”

But the boy was silent. He had finished his barley sugar, and now stood rigid and staring vacantly at the coconut matting.

The Professor looked at him genially, and waited. There might be something behind all this lunacy. He turned and walked away, hesitated, looked round—there stood the boy just as before. Then he sat down at his writing table.

He read the last words he had written: “As Harduinus proves from a contemporary coin.”

Very well, now for the quotation from the younger Pliny. And he said: “Take that chair, my boy; you look tired.” Was the creature really still there? It was almost like a dream. If the Widow Müller hadn’t brought him in. . . . Well, now for the younger Pliny. He must have said in his eulogy on Trajan in the year 100. . . .

The red and swollen hand thrust itself between his eyes and his manuscript. It vanished and there before
him on his manuscript lay a letter, a dirty, crumpled little sheet, obviously torn out of a school exercise book, but doubtless in its right place, for it was inscribed: “For Herr Professor Gotthold Kittguss.” The Professor looked up; the youth had silently slipped back to his place by the door. He did not sit down, but stood with an expression that suggested he was pondering some dark problem such as the difference between a sheep and a cow.