Please, Pull Yourself Together

The garment the maid had brought fit the child terribly. Franz, swallowed up in my nightgown, tottered about half-buried in it.

“Ngh…”

He flailed his arms wildly, as though trying to work his hands free of the long, trailing sleeves, so I set him down out of my arms and rolled them up for him. Even that seemed to trouble him. He kept swinging his arms about, and in the end he lost his balance, wobbled, and plumped down flat on the floor.

“Franz.”

I drew him slowly back onto his feet and brushed off his backside.

“That won’t do. You must keep still.”

I rolled the sleeves up again, since they had come undone to their full length, and again he shook his arms this way and that until they worked loose. Only after we had been through the business several times over did I give up on his sleeves altogether.

“…Let’s just go.”

I took the sleepy child along and quickened my step. And it was then, on our way to the bedchamber, that I caught sight of a light spilling from the far end of the corridor.

So he is still in the study.

Herman was at his work still, it seemed, even at so late an hour.

It seems he has no intention of coming to my bedchamber.

Looking at that light, still burning, I understood, dimly, that from now on I would be sleeping apart from him. My hand tightened around Franz’s.

“Mmm.”

Whining, rubbing at his heavy eyes, he buried his face in my skirt and pressed his forehead there.

“Sorry. We’ll go quickly.”

Whatever it was Herman was feeling, I prayed only that it would not last long. But contrary to that wish, the light in the study burned on for a very long time indeed.

Empty liquor bottles lay strewn about the study.

Herman had been drinking Korn, a fierce distilled spirit, one draught after another, and yet he sat at his desk working through his papers without a hair out of place.

“…”

He took up the malt-scented liquor again, bottle and all, and tipped it into his mouth. The Korn went down smooth and scorching, but set against the misery he was suffering it was nothing at all.

His head swam, all at once. Only then did Herman notice the clock on the desk, and he sank back deep into his chair. Six in the morning already. He watched the blue dawn breaking beyond the window, then rose slowly and stretched. His eyes were dry and the back of his neck ached; every part of him was telling him that peering at any more fine print was beyond him.

He dragged his weary body over to the sofa at one side of the study, and lying there, gazing up at the ceiling, he felt the accumulated exhaustion crowd in on him all at once. Even so, the one thought that muddled his head clung on and would not come loose.

“Not a thought spared for me, to the very last.”

Hah. A deep sigh slipped out from between his teeth. The woman had neither come looking for him nor spared him a care. Herman lifted to his lips once more the only friend that kept him company: the bottle.

If only I could just get blind drunk and have done with it.

At times like this he resented his own body, which would not grow drunk though he hoisted an oak cask and drank straight from it. He was not much given to drink, either. But on a day like this there was no help for it; he simply poured the liquor down like water until it took hold.

“Whew.”

Sleep did not come easily all the same, and after tossing and turning a good while he made his way back to the desk. He looked at the stack of documents piled to one side, then quietly picked up his fountain pen and rolled it round and round between his fingers, as restless as his own heart.

The whole Empire awaited your miracle.

Then, abruptly, he caught sight of the words engraved on the fountain pen, and his hand went still.

The whole Empire, the whole world — none of it means a thing to me.

Only now did he think he understood it for certain.

“Then the Empire that awaited my miracle — are you counted among it too?”

That was why she had never troubled to answer him. Even in a thing so trifling as that, she had been drawing a line between herself and him.

“Hah.”

Not to the very end would she give him a place at her side.

“I’ll ask you one last time. Have you truly nothing to say to me?”
“…No. I have nothing.”

However things stood, how could she answer him so without batting an eye?

She has no intention of trusting me.

If he closed his eyes now, he felt, that woman would vanish clean away, like a midsummer mirage, like a daydream at noon.

What kept Herman Ernst from sleeping that long, long night was that woman, who was like a fistful of wind.

“What are we to do if he really does collapse, carrying on like that?”

Whenever she thought of the master, shut away in his study since yesterday without touching a bite of food, Tess would stop dead in the middle of her housework and dab at her eyes.

“While the sun’s up it’s nothing but work, and once it’s down it’s nothing but drink till all hours. And on top of that he won’t put a bite of food in his mouth…”

She beat at her chest again and again, as though a weight of anger sat upon her heart, and at last she sank down where she stood and wailed aloud. The more she thought on it, the more galling and unjust it was. That the house should suffer so, and all on account of one woman wrongly taken into it.

“Truly, I shan’t live out my natural span. I’m in dread the master will come to real harm, going on so. He asks for nothing but drink, and he isn’t even sleeping properly!”
“Tess. Enough.”
“Good heavens, Hoillun. What’s got into you as well? It isn’t as though I’ve said a word out of turn! Don’t just stand there gaping — go and try to stop the master, will you!”
“Hah. Well, now.”

Driven on by Tess’s badgering, Hoillun sank into a deep gloom. It was not as if he had not tried to stop the master himself. He had remonstrated gently, warning that at this rate the master would collapse; he had intercepted the liquor on its way into the study. But the master, as he was now, seemed in no state to take anybody’s counsel seriously.

He knew well enough, of course, that in this castle he was the only one who could stop the master at all.

“Very well. I’ll go to the master again.”
“Wait — now? Don’t, then. Just wait right there.”

Tess sprang to her feet as though she had never been weeping at all, hurried off to the kitchen, and came back with a warm potato soup, which she pressed into Hoillun’s hands. Even then she cast about for anything else she might send along, and gathering up the soft bread from the table besides, she handed him that too.

“You’re to see he eats every bit of it before you come back. Even if he says he won’t, you’re not to come back — do you hear me?”
“…Until he’s eaten all of this?”
“Yes. Until he’s eaten all of this.”

This, Tess said, would be his first meal in a full twenty-four hours. And so, if only for the master’s sake, he must be certain to come back with an empty dish. She pressed the point on him again and again.

Hoillun looked down at the food loaded into his hands and nodded, without much confidence.

Somehow I find I have little strength left in me either.

Going on sixty years now he had served House Ernst, and he had watched the master since the days when he was the young master still. Never once had he seen him so broken-hearted as this.

With heavy steps Hoillun made for the study, which Herman had taken for his place of seclusion. Arms full of food, he knocked feebly at the door. Tap, tap.

“Master.”

As he had expected, no answer came from within. He knocked once more. Tap, tap, tap.

“It’s Hoillun, Master. I’m coming in.”

Judging it pointless to wait any longer for an answer, Hoillun carefully opened the study door. The moment he stepped inside the reek of liquor stung his nose. He knit his brows quietly and closed the door behind him.

“Master.”
“…”
“Master, do please take some food.”

Herman ignored him and bent his attention to skimming the documents. The master seemed to have polished off the railway-enterprise papers he had brought from the capital already; he was working his way at random through all the business of the ducal lands he had put off until now. Papers and books lay piled on the desk and across the floor in such quantity that he looked less like a man who wished to finish his work than one who wished to bury himself in it.

“You must eat something. Go on like this and real harm will come of it.”

Hoillun said it as he cleared away the cold omelette that sat at one end of the table. Had Tess laid eyes on that omelette, not one bite taken out of it, she might well have sunk down on the spot, wept herself into hysterics, and fainted clean away. So Hoillun resolved that while the master ate he would sit beside him and dispose of the cold omelette himself. This much, at least, had to go back to Tess as an empty plate.

“Master, I know well how hard the situation that has befallen you is to bear. But if you drive your body like this, matters will only run further in the wrong direction.”
“…”
“It is you who must find your strength, Master. And for that you must eat properly and sleep your fill.”

At Hoillun’s heartfelt counsel the busily moving fountain pen came to a stop. Herman raised his dry eyes to him once, then jerked his chin perfunctorily toward the end of the desk.

“Leave it there.”

That flat command was the end of it, and the fountain pen began to move swiftly again.

“…”

Hoillun gripped the tray tight in his aged hands and thought that he could not simply stand by and watch this.

“Master, I beg you — pull yourself together!”

In the end the old butler, unable to bear it a moment longer, roared out with the veins standing out on his neck.