Hanns Heinz Ewers Alraune (22 page)

Details how Alraune became Mistress of the
House of Brinken.

W
HEN
Alraune once more returned to the house on
the Rhine that was sacred to St. Nepomuk the Privy Councilor ten
Brinken was seventy-six years old. But that was only calendar age.
There was no weakness or even the smallest amount of pain to remind
him of it. He felt warm and sunny in the old village that was now
threatened to be seized by the growing fingers of the city.

He hung like a fat spider in the strong web
of his power as it extended out in all directions and he felt a
light titillation at Alraune’s home coming. She would be a welcome
plaything for his whims and equally amusing bait that should entice
many more stupid flies and moths into his web.

When Alraune came she didn’t appear that much
different to the old man than she had been as a child. He studied
her for a long time as she sat in front of him in the library and
found nothing that reminded him of her father or her mother.

The young girl was petite, pretty, slender,
narrow-chested and not yet developed. Her figure was like that of a
boy’s as were her quick, somewhat awkward movements. He thought she
looked like a doll, only her head was not a doll’s head at all. Her
cheekbones protruded, her pale thin lips stretched over her little
teeth.

But her hair fell rich and full, not red like
her mother’s, but heavy and chestnut brown like that of Frau Josefe
Gontram, thought the Privy Councilor. Then it occurred to him that
it had been in that house where the idea of Alraune first
originated.

He squinted over across where she still sat,
observing her critically like a picture, watching her, searching
for memories–

Yes, her eyes, they opened wide under saucy
thin eyebrows that arched across her smooth narrow forehead. They
looked cool and derisive and yet at times soft and dreamy, grass
green, hard as steel– like the eyes of his nephew Frank Braun.

The professor shoved out his broad lower lip.
That particular discovery did not please him at all– Then he
shrugged his shoulders. Why shouldn’t the youth who had first
conceived of her not share this with her? It was little enough and
very dearly bought considering the round millions that this quiet
girl had taken from him–

“You have bright eyes,” he said.

She only nodded.

He continued, “And your hair is beautiful.
Wölfchen’s mother had hair like that.”

Then Alraune said, “I’m going to cut it
off.”

The Privy Councilor commanded, “You will not
do that, do you hear?”

But when she came to the evening meal her
hair was cut. She looked like a page, her locks falling in curls
around her boy’s head.

“Where is your hair?” he cried at her.

Calmly she said, “Here.”

She showed him a large cardboard box. In it
lay the shiny meter long bundles of hair.

He began, “Why did you cut it off?–Because I
forbid it?–Out of defiance then?”

Alraune smiled, “No, not at all. I would have
done it anyway.”

“Then why?” he enquired.

She picked up the box and took out the seven
long bundles. Each one was tied and wrapped with a golden cord and
there was a little card attached to it. There were seven names on
these seven cards, Emma, Marguèrite, Louison, Evelyn, Anna, Maud
and Andrea.

“Are those your school friends?” He asked.
“You cut your hair off to send them a keepsake? You foolish
child.”

He was angry at this unexpected teenage
sentimentalism. It didn’t appeal to him at all. He had imagined the
girl much more mature and cold-blooded.

She looked straight at him, “No,” she said.
“I don’t care about them at all–only”–she hesitated–

“Only what?” urged the professor.

“Only,” she began again. “Only they should
cut their hair off too!”

“Why should they?” cried the old man.

Then Alraune laughed, “–cut their hair
completely off! Much more than I have, right down to the scalp.
I’ll write them that I have cut my hair right to the scalp–and then
they must do it as well!”

“They wouldn’t be that stupid,” he threw
back.

“Oh yes they will,” she insisted. “I told
them that we should all cut our hair off and they promised they
would if I did it first. But I forgot all about it and only
remembered again when you spoke of my hair.”

The Privy Councilor laughed at her, “People
promise all kinds of things–but they won’t do them. You alone are
the fool.”

Then she raised herself up from her chair and
came up close to the old man.

“Yes they will,” she whispered hotly. “They
will do it. They know very well that I will rip their hair out
myself if they don’t–They are afraid of me, even when I’m not
there.”

Stirred up and trembling slightly with
emotion she stood there in front of him.

“Are you that certain they will do it?” he
asked.

She answered with conviction, “Yes,
absolutely certain.”

Then the same certainty grew in him as well
and he didn’t even wonder why.

“So why did you do it then?” he asked.

In an instant she was transformed. All her
strangeness had disappeared and she was once more just a moody and
capricious child.

“Well,” she laughed shortly and her little
hands stroked the full bundles of hair. “Well, you see–it’s like
this. It hurts me, this heavy hair, and I sometimes get headaches
from it. I also know that short hair looks good on me but it
doesn’t look good on them at all. The senior class of Mademoiselle
de Vynteelen will look like a monkey house! The other students will
scream at them and call them fools and Mademoiselle will scold
them. The new Miss and the Fräulein will scream at them and scold
them as well.”

She clapped her hands together laughing
brightly with glee.

“Will you help me?” she asked. “How should I
send them?”

The Privy Councilor said, “Individually, as
samples of no value and have them registered.”

She nodded, Alright, that’s what I will
do!”

During the evening meal she described to him
how the girls would look without their hair. The tall rangy Evelyn
Clifford, had thin straight light blonde hair and full-blooded
Louison always wore her brown hair pinned up turban style. Then
there were the two Rodenberg Countesses, Anna and Andrea. Their
long curly locks encircled their hard bony Westfalen skulls.

“With all their hair gone,” she laughed,
“they will look like Meerkats! Everyone will laugh when they see
them.”

They went back to the library. The Privy
Councilor helped her get the things she needed, got her cardboard
boxes, twine, sealing wax and postage stamps. Then he smoked his
cigar, chewing half of it while watching her write her letters,
seven little letters to seven girls in Spa.

The old family crest of the Brinkens was on
the top of each letter, John of Nepomuk, patron Saint and protector
against floods, was in the upper field, below was a silver heron
fighting with a serpent–The heron was the heraldic animal of the
Brinkens.

He looked at her and a faint itch crept over
his old skin. Old memories began to grow in him, lustful thoughts
of half-grown boys and girls–She, Alraune, was both a boy and a
girl. Moist spittle dribbled down from his fleshy lips, soaking
into the black Havana. He squinted over at her, eager and full of
trembling desire. In that minute he understood what it was that
attracted people to this slender petite creature like the little
fish that swim after the bait and don’t see the hook.

But he could see the sharp hook very well and
thought he knew a way to avoid the hook and still consume the sweet
morsel–

Wolf Gontram worked at the Privy Councilor’s
office in the city. His foster father had taken him out of school
after one year and stuck him in a bank as an apprentice. There he
had forgotten everything he had so laboriously learned at school.
He settled into his job and did just what was demanded of him. Then
when his apprenticeship came to an end he went to the Privy
Councilor’s office to work as a secretary.

It was a strange business, being a secretary
for his Excellency. Karl Mohnen, Ph.D. four times over, was office
manager and his old boss found him useful enough. He still went
through life looking for the right person to get married to.
Wherever he went he made new acquaintances and hung out with the
new set. But it never led to anything. His hair was long gone but
his nose was still as good as always–he was always sniffing around
for something, a woman for himself or a business opportunity for
the Privy Councilor–and he was good at it.

A couple of accountants kept the books in
order well enough to keep things going and there was a room that
bore the sign “Legal Business”. Legal Councilor Gontram and Herr
Manasse, who had not yet been promoted to Legal Councilor,
sometimes spent an hour in it. They took care of the Privy
Councilor’s ample lawsuits as they handsomely multiplied. Manasse
took the hopeful ones that would end in a victory and the old Legal
Councilor took the bad ones, prolonging them and postponing them
until finally bringing them to an acceptable compromise.

Dr. Mohnen had his own office as well. Wolf
Gontram sat in this office as his protégé and he sought to educate
the boy in his own way. This man of the world knew a lot, scarcely
less than little Manasse, but he never acted upon that knowledge or
did anything with it.

He had gathered his information just like as
a boy he had collected stamps, because his schoolmates were doing
it. Now his stamp collection lay in a desk drawer someplace. Only
when someone wanted to see a rare stamp did he take it out and flip
through it.

“There, Saxony, red!”

Something had attracted him to Wolf Gontram.
Perhaps it was the big black eyes that he had once loved when they
belonged to Wolf’s mother. He loved them as well as he could
considering how he loved five hundred other beautiful eyes as well.
Yet the farther back his relationship with a woman, the greater it
now appeared. Today he felt as if he had once had the most intimate
trust of this woman whose son now worked with him even though he
had not once even kissed her hand.

And so it came about that young Gontram took
in all his little love stories and believed them. Not for one
second did he doubt the doctor’s heroic deeds and solidly held him
up as the great seducer that he so terribly wanted to be
himself.

Dr. Mohnen selected his wardrobe, showed him
how to tie a bowtie and made him elegant–as much as he understood
elegant–

He gave him books, took him with to the
theater and to concerts in order to always have a grateful audience
for his stories. He held himself to be a man of the world and
wanted to make Wolf Gontram into one as well. And it was no lie
that the Gontram youth had him alone to thank for everything that
he became. Dr. Mohnen was the teacher that was needed, that
demanded nothing and always gave day after day. Minute by minute
without even knowing it he fashioned a new life for Wolf
Gontram.

Wolf Gontram was beautiful, everyone in the
city could see that except Karl Mohnen who thought beauty was only
possible in tight association with skirts and to whom everything
was beautiful that wore long hair and nothing else.

But the others saw it. Even when he was going
to school old Gentlemen turned as he went by and squinted after
him, officers glanced at him and turned pale whenever he was
around. Many a well-groomed head with jaded tastes sighed–and
quickly suppressed the hot desire and longing that screamed inside
them. But now the glances came from under veils or grand hats. The
beautiful eyes of women now followed the young man.

“That must be nice!” growled little Manasse
as he sat in the park with the Legal Councilor and his son
listening to a concert. “If she doesn’t turn back around soon her
neck will really hurt!”

“Who are you taking about?” asked the Legal
Councilor.

“Who? Her Royal Highness!” cried the
attorney. “Look over there Herr Colleague. She’s been staring at
your rascal for the last half hour, craning her neck around to look
at him.”

“God, just let her be,” answered the Legal
Councilor good-naturedly.

But little Manasse wouldn’t give up.

“Sit over here Wolf!” he commanded and the
young man obeyed sitting beside him and turning his back to the
princess.

Yes, this beauty frightened the little
attorney. He felt that it was a mask and he could hear death
laughing behind it just as he believed it had done for the boy’s
mother. And that pained him, tortured him until he almost hated the
young man, even as he had once loved his mother. This hatred was
strange enough, it was a nightmare, a burning desire that young
Gontram’s fate would soon be fulfilled, that it would happen
suddenly–much better today than tomorrow.

Still it was the attorney that tried to
liberate the boy from his fate if he could and did everything
possible to help, to smooth his life out as much as possible. When
his Excellency ten Brinken stole his foster son’s fortune he was
beside himself.

“You are a fool! An Idiot!”

He barked at the Legal Councilor. He dearly
wanted to nip at his heels like his poor dead hound, Cyclops, had
done and he set down to the father in smallest detail every way his
son had been swindled, one after the other.

The Privy Councilor had taken over the
vineyards and fields that Wolf had inherited from his aunt and
scarcely paid fair market price for them. Then he had discovered no
less than three mineral springs on those same grounds that he now
bottled and profited from.

“We would have never thought of that,”
responded the Legal Councilor quietly.

The little attorney spit in anger. “That
doesn’t matter! The properties are worth six times as much today
and the old swindler didn’t even pay that. He deducted over half of
the price for the boy’s upkeep. It is an obscenity–”