11
THE CHILD
nations had been flung against each other and when the death cries of the victims were fading away in the loud triumph of the victors. On being taken
into the lap of a Christian community he had received the name Ernst
Foerster — a simple and good name for the simple human being who was to
bear it. —
Incompatible and very dissimilar parents: the father a chief magistrate in a medium-sized town of Southern Germany, a civil servant in good-standing, ambitious in small things and small in his ambition, outwardly the correct gentleman, inwardly a petty bureaucrat who never thought for himself and would never have dared to have an opinion other than one imposed and approved from above — a type; the mother was the only daughter of a distinguished doctor who, through his scientific works, was known in much wider circles than that of his practice but who, in daily matters, was impractical and happy-go-lucky; and it was from him, after the early death of her mother, that she received that liberal and unprejudiced education which made her into the fresh and uninhibited human being that she was — an individual. The magistrate, in his late fourties, a widower and the father of grown-up children, got to know the young girl during a summer holiday, fell in love, proposed — and was refused out of hand. For perhaps the first time in his life his pride was deeply hurt and he was goaded, like all brutal men, into insisting on having his own way. He returned again, first as a patient who could not be turned away and later as an acquaintance who had to be tolerated. Chance played into his hands. Suddenly and unexpectedly the doctor died. He proposed again. Alone, with hardly any means of support, robbed of the love and protection of her father, the young girl accepted this time, hardly knowing what she did. It was, on her part, an ill-considered act, full of consequence; on his part, he took a mean advantage of the situation. Later, she referred to the marriage as the tragedy of her life; he, but only to himself, as the one great folly of his. The marriage became, inevitably, what it had to become in such circles, where words are the only weapons. The man was filled with resentment in the belief that his authority was being undermined by her following of her own interests in places where he could neither follow nor even touch with ridicule. He tried, in vain, to bend this fine straight human being to his own ways but, though he never admitted it even to himself, he secretly envied her her interests. To the woman it was a nerve-wracking and exhausting battle to rescue for herself, out of the |