Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 9

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Natalie Monroe had telephoned immediately after dinner that she would drop in to see Eric later in the evening—probably not before ten-thirty. Eric had taken advantage of the interval to visit Barney Olson, a patient he had come to know during his last week of convalescence at the hospital. He had invited Mueller to go along.

It was quite significant, Eric reflected as he entered Mueller’s bachelor home, that the professor had not spoken a word concerning Olson since they had left the hospital. It was perhaps the first time that gentle soul’s clouded innocence had been pierced by any direct contact with human violence. The case of Olson was downright pitiful. He had undertaken to drive a truck during a strike and had been overpowered by a band of strikers who had beaten him without mercy and left him lying in a ditch at the side of the road a mile or so north of town. He had been out of work for months and had accepted the hazard of a night’s trip from a neighboring town for a paltry ten dollars—ten dollars, he explained to Mueller, that he had not yet received and probably never would receive. And the professor had promptly written a check for five times the amount and left it on the small table beside Olson’s bed.

Deep in his red leather chair, however, before his own fireplace where the logs were crumbling to a downy ash of pink and silver, Sibert Mueller had talked at greater length and with more gusto than he had ever talked before, in Eric’s presence at least. For the moment, his never-too-sure English had slipped back across the banks of the Rhine.

“So you think I was rash, yah, to giff him the money?” he demanded, wagging a thick finger, and holding his glass of mulled wine before him where he could see the light upon it. “Yah—four small children he hass—”

“Damn it, Sibert, is that your responsibility?” Eric interrupted.

Mueller blinked through his glasses in dismal bewilderment. “When you zwear, Eric, you scare me.” He drained his glass and set it aside. “I think it begins to feel cold here, no?” He got up patiently and tossed a couple of logs on the fire, then poured more wine into the two glasses.

“I don’t mean to scare you, Sibert,” Eric apologized. “I’m just trying to tell you that the whole scheme of things is cock-eyed. Our friend Olson—busy for a decade, propagating the race—takes a job that might have cost him his life—for the sake of ten dollars to feed his four kids!”

He flipped his cigarette into the fire. He had not intended to sound quite so sententious; the whole insane business wasn’t worth it.

“You forget somesing,” said Mueller, agitated and oddly shy. “You ask me if it was my responsibility. Maybe not. But the good Olson—neither iss he responsible. It iss the—” He hesitated, blushed, nursed his glass unhappily in his two hands. “Iss it not somesing else, maybe? Somesing primordial—some impulse in Nature that drives us without our own choosing. It resides in the female—it was in the first woman—as it will be in the last. She it is who carries on the work that Nature has planned. Und zo—”

Eric glanced at him skeptically. “I didn’t know there was so much kick in this grog, Sibert.”

Mueller laughed. “No, no—I am very serious. It iss for that impulse that we have what we call beauty in the world. It is for that we have pride and strength—the arts of peace and the glories of war.”

There was something so bashful, so apologetic in Mueller’s vehemence, that Eric ironed out his involuntary smile and chuckled softly instead.

“It is for that we have girls with red hair, I suppose?”

“Ya, ya! Why not? Such things are at the heart of life. You will find out for yourself, my young friend.”

“Don’t make too much of my innocence, Sibert. I’m a little sensitive on that point. After all, I’m no longer an adolescent. A man of thirty-one, even an English professor at Anders, might be expected to know some of the answers. But let me put you straight on one point. The Stene line in America comes to an end with me. Blood of my blood—bone of my bone—not on your life, Sibert! Not to be used as fertilizer for the bean-rows of some smiling and hypothetical Utopia of the future. If Nature insists on carrying out her fell design to keep the world populated, she can count me out. Not that she won’t get along very handsomely without any help from me, but—”

The hall clock chimed, and at the same moment a sharp summons came from the front doorbell.

“It is eleven,” said Mueller superfluously. “That can be no one but Natalie Monroe.”

Eric got up. “The living denial of your theory, Sibert. I’ll let her in.”

Mueller rose quickly from his chair. “You will tender my regrets? It is already too late for me.”