The Silent Prophet by Joseph Roth Read Free Book Online Page A

serious worries and not the slightest interest in morality.'
    It grew quiet in the next room, a door opened, a key rattled. Grünhut detained Friedrich a few minutes longer.
    'Until they've gone downstairs,' he said. 'I don't want any indiscretions.'

10
    As, in accordance with the promise he had given his dying wife, he could not marry again, but could not live without a woman and did not want his child to become acquainted with the habits of a lusty widower, Herr Ludwig von Maerker, then still departmental head in a ministry, decided to send his daughter to a children's home and later to a girls' boarding school where she would be brought up together with orphans of the same social standing. Therefore, after he had disposed of Hilde, he engaged a housekeeper but took her only to the circus and music-halls. The theatres remained closed to her. She called this an injustice and so granted herself the right to embitter Herr von Maerker's life and make increasing demands in the house. She controlled his every step and every outlay. And whenever he complained about the restriction of his liberty, she replied with that bitter sarcasm which can herald a fainting-fit as well as an apoplexy: 'So I can't have this little entitlement? I, a woman whom you don't even take to the theatre?' Once a year Herr von Maerker escaped from the housekeeper. He travelled to Switzerland to visit his daughter. She grew too tall for him, was soon a teenager. He found her beautiful and regretted, in his most private moments, that he was her father and not her seducer. But she had been seduced long before by her own fantasies. Although Herr von Maerker had read a number of French novels about nunneries and girls' boarding schools, he believed — like most men—in the depravity of all women except his nearest and dearest. Lack of principle begins only with cousins. A good deal was said about the prospect of having Hilde back at home again soon. And, before he was aware of it, Herr von Maerker was going grey at the temples, his housekeeper grew old and wrinkled, her hopes of marriage to her friend and the prospect of a joint box at the theatre vanished, Hilde blossomed—as they say—into a young woman, returned to her father's house and began to lead her own life.
    The times were strongly in favour of freedom for the female sex; not so Herr von Maerker, who had meanwhile become permanent head of a ministerial department and was therefore well aware of the lack of masculine freedom. His daughter's opinions made him feel half embittered and half ashamed at belonging to the previous generation, for men feel shame at becoming old as if it were a secret vice. He retreated silently before his daughter's vigorous offensive. He suffered and even gradually became wise. He belonged to that breed of average men who acquire understanding only in later years because they have had to keep silent for so long, and for whom nothing remains but to become meditative. When Hilde, on behalf of all the daughters of the world, exclaimed: 'Our mothers were exploited and betrayed!' Herr von Maerker felt it as a calumny on his dead wife and an insult by his daughter. He wondered where Hilde had acquired so much robust callousness and shocking rhetoric. He still knew nothing about his daughter.
    She was no different from the young women of her time and station. She transformed the submissive romanticism of her mother into an Amazon martiality, demanded the recognition of civil rights, including, in passing as it were, free love. Under the slogan 'Equal rights for all!' the daughters of good homes at that period rushed into life, into the high schools, into railway trains, luxury liners, into the dissecting-room and the laboratory. For them there blew through the world that familiar fresh breeze that every new generation believes it has discovered. Hilde Weis determined not to surrender herself in marriage. Her 'closest friend' had committed the betrayal of marrying the enormously