The Walk (21 page)

Understandably, they lifted him up and carried him into the next-best cottage. Houses, in the present comfortable sense of the word, did not at that time exist in the country; there were only indigent dwellings, whose roofs of straw reached almost to the ground, as one may still observe, at one's leisure, in a few surviving examples.

When the young lady, a country belle with swaying hips and a taut, tall body, heard what had occurred on her account, she simply stood there, bolt upright, pondering deeply perhaps her peculiar nature.

Her mother besought her to speak, but all in vain; it seemed she had been changed into a statue.

A stork flew through the azure air high over the village drama, bearing in its beak a baby. Wafted by a slight wind, the leaves whispered. Like an etching it all looked, anything but natural.

1927

A person who wishes to voice a conviction in an appropriate fashion pronounces a vigorous, martial “Naturaleh!” “With martial greetings I remain your most obedient servant” – thus did I close a letter to someone who avowed to me that my martialism had taken him aback. “All of a sudden he heard somebody beside him exclaim: ‘That's impossible!'” Couldn't such an ordinary event as this occur in a novel that reflects its times and speaks of matters that are perhaps largely marginal issues? If I now exclaim in a booming voice “Naturaleh!” – I have in mind the artist of aviation who, with an energy to be wondered at, flew across the ocean; and of course I number myself among the innumerable people who revere this happy dominator of difficulties. A person who has no doubts at all about anything is prone to asseverate: “It's clear as day!” That the aviator mounting his vehicle seemed to himself tiny in proportion to the magnitude of his task is clear as day to me, and perhaps I might be permitted to believe that in this significant moment he was lulling himself into the conceivably very artful illusion of being, in comparison with the universe, a babe in arms, and his flying machine was his crib, where the most decisive thing for him to do was to lie low, quietly watching. In my opinion, during the truly fabulous unwinding of his journey he thought most animatedly of his mother. Of this I am convinced, and now I come face to face with the question: Should one view the oceanist, the hero of
the day, as a descendant of those mariners vanished long since from their sphere of influence, and furthermore did he, before he flew off, make it his precept to consider his enterprise as something that would, so to speak, be merely a schooling for him, an education? Especially a poet does well, among other things, to fly at a modest velocity on his winged steed, Pegasus by name, because ill chance may strike the most special person no less easily than the least consequential member of any human interest group or sphere. Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.

As regards this appellation, which disconcertingly took wing from my otherwise so choice vocabulary, it seems I should explain that it denotes a low-down sort of character. By lummox, one should understand a fusion of every conceivable ineptitude in the person of a particular social fellow being. With a splendid, because moderate, velocity I strode today, as it happens, into a shoe solery to ask what steps had been taken, what progress made, toward finishing work in which I knew I had an interest. Instead of saying “lummox,” in a country that delights in its reputation for hospitality and where, besides which, I too am permitted to live, some folks make use of the designation
dummer Cheib
, or fathead. Neither the latter nor the former manner of speaking sounds polite; both shed a certain uncultivated dimness upon persons who put them to use. Like a bird of paradise he flew across the far-flung and not by any means entirely bland and composed carpet of meadows historically called the sea, the fool or lummox, who may be called a lummox insofar as he was gambling, so audaciously as to be well-nigh presumptuous, with the indisputable treasure of his life, on which apparently, since he was thus exposing it to all vicissitudes, he placed little value, in a manner which was, well now, how should one put it, almost indiscreet; for surely one may be
right to think that a person who commits himself to the discharge of a duty, a general human concern, and thereby shows little or no regard for his own person, is in equal proportions a tall and broad, perhaps even towering, lummox or fathead? On the other hand, I can see in him someone who empowers himself to inhale and exhale the glory and delight of life, for when enjoyment, meaning the principle of healthy egoism, is set aside, then precisely does the richer and purer source of what is initially disdained begin. The careless or selfless person, it is my conviction, does persistently care for himself, although I am ready at any moment to admit the contradictoriness here apparent, which, in itself, is of great significance for me.

When, for instance, someone becomes self-important, it is popularly said that he has “a bee in his bonnet.” A person can be just as important as he pleases, in fact; but to appear so is not always pleasant for others.

In the finer sense, as in the one just indicated, I launch toward you, somewhat like a bee, the present essay.

1927

What an irreparable error it would be, if to the high pile of errors that during my lifetime have slipped from me, as if hatched from eggs of misconception, I were to add that of declaring this house somewhere on a hilltop to be a palace, seeming as it did more like a villa or pavilion, a neat little convalescent home, where, as a lackey, for I could not have figured there as anything loftier or better, I performed tasks that were in my opinion of preeminent quality, although I cannot but realize that my manner of speaking is rather long-winded.

Even if I saw that my employer – I do not know if I should be saying this – sometimes indulged her habit of pressing together her unspeakably thin lips, still she was for me the world's most beautiful woman, while it would never have occurred to me to extol her as a miracle of rare proportions, to which reality did give me every imaginable reason.

The mountain ridge upon which one looked across from one of the surely very numerous windows had a very pleasant face, by which I would like to have intimated that it was a joy to devote to it a proper measure of the attention it well deserved. Oh, the freedom, the finesse, of which it was, from afar, seeming to be at once both far and near, a perfect expression! I thought I could touch the mountain with my hands; in any event, its stoninesses had the effect of a face that responded, in content as in form, to each and every demand.

Days and days went by before I could somewhat orient myself as to what sort of business the delightfully located house, ringed around as it was, so to speak, with little dancings, might be based upon. What very remarkable purpose did it serve? More than once, this was my question.

Unbelievably diffuse festivities spreading out for as long as one could wish over fabulously beautiful gardens and lasting from first light, each time so graceful it was like a goddess awakening, far into the dusk and longer still, to the edge of night, were lavished in the countryside in which this estate stood, proud as a temple and yet modest in every way, on all who wished to have a share in a healthy and thus worthwhile experience, some of whom had been invited by word of mouth, some in writing.

That the meadows, enlivened here and there most charmingly by trees, were of a green to the intensity of which even the most intense grumblers, and to the gaiety of which even the most innate peeves, could raise little if any objection, is almost certain to be as good as obvious.

The house was thronged with well-disciplined girls, vying with one another as regards their proper tasks, which is probably the best and most civil thing to be said about human apparitions clad generally in aprons and equipped with feathered dust absorbers.

From time to time I heard my beautiful and doubtless much beleaguered employer exclaim in quite a loud voice: “Don't put me on edge!” To what species of earth dweller did she say this? Naturally for me it could only remain for a long time an inscrutable riddle, whose insolubility was like a sumptuous garment, of which I became, so to speak, enamoured.

One thing I may and must mention with due care. In the garden which, bordered to the south perhaps by a stream that propelled itself with extraordinary gentleness along its course, and extending
northward into a most motley hilliness, there was, like a bouquet of flowers, a multitude of delicious nooks, which really did appear like friendly little faces, and where, at one's pleasure, that is to say, most freely, one could lark about, take a rest, make a little love – saying which reminds me that kind fate, of which I have undertaken never to complain, since that would not, in my opinion, be appropriate, once led me into a theatre to share the spectacle of a play which simultaneously delighted me and left me somewhat dissatisfied. Might I confess to finding that it is exquisite to be of two minds regarding works of art? To find fault with something that I welcome on the whole, how nice I find this is!

As regards the blossoming trees in the garden, I allow myself the liberty of using the epithet “enchanting,” and of the owner, the person, that is to say, who was entitled to claim, with regard to all the beauty I have described, “You are mine,” it will be desirable to mention, with a sort of horrified dismay in the voice with which I say it, the fact that he was a pimp, whom the most substantial connections seemingly contrived to make undetectable.

How winning his appearance was, and how fetchingly he knew how to move about always in the most decorous society, standing out and striding around as one of the most artful seducers of the century, and who, one day, as the air was just beginning to shade into vesperal violet, was walking in my company on steep paths down the mountain, accordingly as an individual whose overcoat I obediently carried, and who suddenly, before my very eyes, in the middle of an old walkway, sank into an abyss that opened at his feet, sank with all his elegant sinuosities, confusing inexplicabilities, like a figure on a stage, simply vanishing.

A woman of the middle class who saw the drama, too, exclaimed in a shrill voice: “Serves him right!” Never shall I forget the curt, bolt-upright way in which this original, i.e., completely
singular member of human society, dropped into the downrightest sawn-offness.

Ready, set – and that was the end of him. Mantled in thought, I returned to the house. The estimable gentleman's overcoat was a showpiece of the garment industry.

“She was spellbound by him,” I believed myself entitled to whisper, thinking the light that had dawned on me not too bright, and first smoking a subtly fragrant cigarette.

It was one of his.

1927

There are not many things that I want to say on the subject of masters and workers. The problem cuts deeply into conditions at the present time, which appear positively to seethe with beings who are workers and who sometimes disregard this particular fact. Don't we sometimes dream with our eyes open, see blindly, feel without feeling, listen without hearing, and don't we often, when walking, stand still? What a succession of quiet, solid, honourable questions!

Approach, you real barons, that I may discern the lineaments of veritable master types! Masters, to me, are quite a priceless rarity, and a master is, in my view, a man who is touched now and again by the curious need to forget that he is a master. Whereas the workers are distinguished by the way they please to fancy themselves masters, the masters on occasion look down upon them, envying in an understandable sort of way the gaieties and frivolities of the workers; for it seems to me an indubitable fact that the masters are the lonely ones, insofar as they are perpetually in the right and therefore crave to learn what it tastes and smells like to be in the wrong, a thing they cannot know. The masters can behave as they please; not the workers, who consequently never cease longing for command, which they lack, though it could be said to the contrary that the masters are often fed to the teeth with their director-dom, would rather be serving and obeying than issuing decrees, the activity in which they see their lives most monotonously absorbed.

“How I'd love one day to get a really good ticking-off!” – it's a wish that could easily occur, in my opinion, to this or that master, whereas the workers know nothing of suchlike wishes, which are never fulfilled. It's not only wealth that makes a master; likewise, on the other hand, a worker doesn't need to be a poor downtrodden wretch. A master, I'm convinced, is what he is much more because it is he who answers requests, just as a worker is what he thinks he is because it is from his lips that requests ring out. The worker waits; the master keeps people waiting. Yet waiting can sometimes be just as pleasant, or even more so, than keeping waiting, which requires strength. A person waiting can afford the sweet luxury of being in no way responsible; while he waits, he can think of his wife, his children, his mistress, and so on; of course, the person who keeps people waiting can do this too, if it gives him any pleasure. But it can happen that the nondescript who is waiting absolutely refuses to get off his mind, and naturally that's a burden.

“This dependent of mine may now be smiling to himself with extraordinary placidity,” he thinks; and he'd gladly expire with a magisterial wrath which almost puts him out of countenance; and that such an incomprehensible kind of wrath should be possible at all belongs among the perils of the master's state. A master frequently ought to be something like a superman, yet still he remains a man, a fellow man, and “Damnation!” he shouts, fearing for himself, as it were. “Hasn't he been waiting long enough, this man, martyrizing me with his patience?” And he presses the bell button; that's to say, he gives the button a bash, and sees in an instant the fatuity of his explosion. He snubs an incoming zealot with a melodramatic brutality that should be seen, and he would happily devour, tiger-like, the sheep who's waiting for his masterednesses and self-composures, and instead of dropping destructively on an enervating nonentity he jumbles up papers that seem to be giving
him a professional look, in a daze, as if they were poor sinners, and the worker has no idea what's got into the master who is offended to be capable of a sentiment, who is insulted to be able now and again to be unhappy, who is emotionally almost demolished to be regarded as a demolisher, which he is not, doesn't want to be, cannot be.