Hanns Heinz Ewers Alraune (20 page)

Then one day the principal came out to
complain to the Privy Councilor about the pathetic performance of
his foster son. Wölfchen was especially weak in the sciences.

Alraune heard this and from then on played
school with him, controlled him, made him study till dark, listened
to him recite his lessons and made him learn. She would put him in
his room, close the door and not let him come out until he had
finished off his homework.

She acted as if she knew everything already
and would not tolerate any doubt of her superiority. She learned
very easily and quickly. She did not want to show any weakness in
front of the boy so she took up one book after another grasping its
contents and moving on to the next in a wild and chaotic manner
without tying them together. This went on until the youth would
come to her when he didn’t know something. He would ask her to
explain it to him because she must surely know it. Then she would
put him off, scold him and tell him to think it over.

That gave her some time to search in her
books. If she couldn’t find the answer she would run off to the
Privy Councilor and ask him.

Then she would come back to the boy and ask
if the answer had occurred to him yet. If it hadn’t she would
finally give him the answer. The professor noticed the game and it
amused him. He would have never even considered placing the girl
out of the home if the princess hadn’t kept pressuring him again
and again.

The princess had always been a good Catholic
and it seemed as if she became more devout with every Kilo of fat
that she put on. She was insistent that her Godchild must be
brought up in a convent. The Privy Councilor had been her financial
advisor for several years now and invested her millions almost as
if they were his own. He thought it prudent to go along with her on
this point. So Alraune went to the Sacré Couer convent in
Nancy.

There were several exceptionally short
entries in the Privy Councilor’s hand during this period and
several long reports from the Mother Superior. The professor
grinned as he filed them, especially the first ones that praised
the girl and the extraordinary progress she was making. He knew his
convents and knew very well that a person could not learn anything
of this world among these pious sisters.

He enjoyed how the first letters filled with
the praise that all the parents received very soon took a different
tone. The Mother Superior reported more and more urgently on
various cruelties and these complaints always had the same basis.
It was not the behavior of the girl herself, not her performance in
giving presentations. It was always about the influence she exerted
on her schoolmates.

“It is entirely true,” writes the Reverend
Mother, “that the child herself never tortures animals. At least
she has never been caught at it–But it is equally true that all the
little cruelties committed by the other girls originate in her
head.

First there was little Mary, a well-behaved
and obedient child that was caught in the convent garden blowing up
frogs with hollow grass stems. When she was called to account for
her actions she confessed that Alraune had given her the idea. We
didn’t want to believe it at first and thought it was much more
likely that she was trying to shift the blame away from
herself.

But very soon after that two different girls
were discovered sprinkling salt on some large slugs so that they
writhed in agony as they slowly dissolved into slime. Now slugs are
also God’s creatures and again these two children declared that
Alraune had pushed them into it. I then questioned her myself and
the child admitted everything and went on to explain that she had
once heard that about slugs and wanted to see if it was really
true. As for the blowing up of frogs, she said that it sounded so
beautiful when you smashed a blown up frog with a stone. Of course
she would never do it herself because some of the crushed frog
might squirt onto her hands.

When I asked whether she understood that she
had done wrong she declared No, she had not done anything wrong and
what the other children did had nothing at all to do with her.”

At this place in the report in parentheses
the Privy Councilor wrote, “She is absolutely correct!”

“Despite being punished,” the letter
continues, “a short time later we had several other deplorable
cases that we determined must have originated from Alraune.

For example, Clara Maasen of Düren, a girl
several years older than Alraune. She has been in our care for four
years now and never given the slightest cause for complaint. She
took a mole and poked its eyes out with a red-hot knitting needle.
She was so upset over what she had done that she spent the next few
days extremely agitated and bursting into tears for no reason at
all. She only calmed down again after she had received absolution
during her next confession.

Alraune explained that moles creep around in
the dark earth and it doesn’t matter if they can see or not.

Then we found very ingeniously constructed
bird traps in the garden. Thank God no little birds had been caught
in them yet. No one would tell us where she had gotten the idea.
Only under the threat of severe punishment did some girls finally
admit that Alraune had enticed them into doing it and at the same
time threatened to do something to them if they told on her.

Unfortunately this unholy influence of the
child on her schoolmates has now grown to the point where we can
scarcely find out the truth anymore.

Helene Petiot was caught at recess carefully
cutting the wings off of flies, ripping their legs off and throwing
them alive onto an anthill. The little girl said that she had come
up with the idea herself and stuck with her story in front of His
Reverence, swearing that Alraune had nothing to do with it.

Her cousin Ninon lied just as stubbornly
yesterday after she had tied a tin pot to the tail of our good old
cat and almost drove it insane. Nevertheless we are convinced that
Alraune had her hand in that game as well.”

The Mother Superior then wrote further that
she had called a conference together and everyone had concluded the
best thing was to respectfully beg his Excellency to take his
daughter away from the convent and come as soon as possible to get
her.

The Privy Councilor answered that he very
much regretted the incidents but must beg them to keep the child a
little while longer at the convent.

“The more difficult the work, the greater the
reward.”

He had no doubt that the patience and piety
of the sisters would be successful in clearing the weeds out of the
heart of his child and turn it into a beautiful garden of the Lord.
The reason he did this was to see if the influence of this
sensitive child was stronger than the discipline of the convent and
all the efforts of the pious sisters.

He knew very well that the cheap Sacré Couer
convent did not draw from the best families and that it was very
happy to count the daughter of his Excellency as one of its
students. He was not mistaken. The Reverend Mother replied that
with God’s help they would try once more. All the sisters had
declared themselves willing to include a special plea for Alraune
in their evening prayers. In generosity the Privy Councilor sent
them a hundred Marks for their charities.

During the next vacation the professor
carefully observed the little girl. He knew the Gontram family from
the Great-grandfather down and knew that they all took in a great
love for animals with their mother’s milk. He felt that her
influence on this much older boy would at last meet its match,
become powerless against this innermost feeling of unlimited
goodness.

Yet he caught Wölfchen Gontram one afternoon
down by the little pond under the trumpet tree. He was kneeling on
the ground. In front of him sat a large frog on a stone. The youth
had lit a cigarette and shoved it in the wide mouth and deep down
its throat. The frog smoked in deathly fear, swallowing the smoke,
pulling it down into its belly. It inhaled more and more but
couldn’t push it back out so it became larger and larger.

Wölfchen stared at it, fat tears running down
his cheeks. But he lit another cigarette when the first one burned
down, removed the stub from the frog’s throat and with shaking
fingers pushed the fresh one back into its mouth. The frog swelled
up monstrously, quivering in agony, its eyes popping out of their
sockets. It was a strong animal and endured two and a half
cigarettes before it exploded.

The youth screamed in misery as if his own
pain were much greater than that of the animal he had just tortured
to death. He sprang back as if he wanted to run away into the
bushes, looked around and then quickly ran back when he saw that
the torn body of the frog was still moving. Wild and despairing he
crushed it to death with his heel to free it from its misery.

The Privy Councilor took him by the ear and
searched his pockets. He found a few more cigarettes and the boy
confessed to taking them from the writing desk in the library. But
he could not be moved to tell how he had known that smoking frogs
would inflate themselves until they finally explode. No amount of
urging worked and the rich beating that the professor gave him
through the garden didn’t help either. He remained silent.

Alraune stubbornly denied everything as well
even after one of the maids declared she had seen the child taking
the cigarettes. Despite everything they both stuck to their
stories; the boy, that he had stolen the cigarettes and the girl,
that she had not done anything.

Alraune stayed at the convent for one more
year. Then in the middle of the school year she was sent home and
certainly this time unjustly. Only the superstitious sisters
believed that she was guilty and just maybe the Privy Councilor
suspected it a little as well. But no reasonable person would
have.

Once before illness had broken out at Sacré
Couer. That time it had been the measles and fifty-seven little
girls lay sick in their beds. Only a few like Alraune ran around
healthy. But this time it was much worse. It was a typhoid
epidemic. Eight children and one nun died. Almost all of the others
became sick.

But Alraune ten Brinken had never been so
healthy. During this time she put on weight, positively blossomed
and gaily ran around through all the sick rooms. No one troubled
themselves over her during these weeks as she ran up and down the
stairs, sat on all the beds and told the children that they were
going to die the next day and go to hell. While she, Alraune would
continue to live and go to heaven.

She gave away all of her pictures of the
saints telling the sick girls that they could diligently pray to
the Madonna and to the sacred heart of Jesus–but it wouldn’t do
them any good. They would still heartily burn and roast–It was
simply amazing how vividly she could describe these torments.
Sometimes when she was in a good mood she would be generous. Then
she would promise them only a hundred thousand years in purgatory.
That was bad enough for the minds of the pious sick little
girls.

The doctor finally unceremoniously threw
Alraune out of the rooms. The sisters were absolutely convinced
that she had brought the illness into the convent and sent her head
over heels back home.

The professor was tickled and laughed over
this report. He became a little more serious when shortly after the
child’s arrival two of his maids contracted typhus and both soon
died in the hospital.

He wrote an angry letter to the supervisor of
the convent and complained bitterly that under the existing
circumstances they should have never sent the little one back home.
He refused to pay the tuition payment for the last half of the year
and energetically insisted that he be reimbursed for the monies he
had put out for his two sick maids–From a sanitary point of view
the sisters should not have been permitted to act as they had
done.

His Excellency ten Brinken did not handle
things much differently. While he was not exactly afraid of
contagion, like all doctors he would much rather observe illness in
others than in his own body. He let Alraune stay in Lendenich only
until he found a good finishing school in the city. By the fourth
day he had already sent her to Spa, to the illustrious Institute of
Mlle. de Vynteelen.

Silent Aloys had to escort her. As far as the
child was concerned the trip went without incident but he did have
two little incidents to report. On the train trip there he had
found a pocket book with several pieces of silver and on the trip
back home he had slammed his finger in the compartment door of the
car he was riding in. The Privy Councilor nodded in satisfaction at
Aloy’s report.

The Head Mistress was Fräulein Becker who had
grown up in the University City on the Rhine and always went back
there on her vacations. She had much to relate to the Privy
Councilor over the years that Alraune stayed with her.

Right from the first day that Alraune arrived
in the ancient building on Marteau Avenue her dominion began and it
was not only imposed on her schoolmates. It was also imposed on the
instructors, most especially over the Miss, who after only a few
weeks had become a plaything for the absurd moods of the little
girl, without any will of her own.

At breakfast on that very first day Alraune
declared that she didn’t like honey and marmalade and much more
preferred butter. Naturally Mlle. de Vynteelen didn’t give her any.
It was only a few days until several of the other girls began to
crave butter as well. Finally a large cry for butter went up
throughout the entire Institute.

Even Miss Paterson, who had never in her life
enjoyed anything with her morning tea other than toast with jam
suddenly felt an uncontrollable desire for butter. So the principal
had been obliged to give in to the demand for butter but on that
very same day Alraune acquired a preference for orange
marmalade.