must be regarded as highly dubious), we are left with the superficial analysis of the photograph of the honeymoon taken on the lakeside promenade at Lucerne, and expressed in negative terms: erotic, let alone sexual, harmony does not appear to exist between these two. Emphatically not. Moreover, even this early photo clearly indicates something that is confirmed by many later ones: Leni takes more after her father, Heinrich took more after his mother, although, apropos spices and even rolls, Leni takes more after her mother, and there is even evidence that in her poetic and musical sensibility she also takes more after her mother. The hypothetical question as to what kind of children would have resulted from a possible marriage between Marja and Gruyten can be answered more easily in the negative than in the positive: most certainly not the kind whom parchment-skinned nuns and Jesuit fathers would have remembered, even decades later, at the very mention of their names.
Whatever went wrong or whatever misunderstandings arose between the two spouses, it has been testified by the persons with the most intimate knowledge of the Gruytens’ family life, even by the jealous van Doorn woman, that: never at any time did he show lack of courtesy, chivalry, or even affection toward her, and that she always “idolized” him seems to be a matter of record.
Mrs. Schweigert, née Barkel, an old lady who has nothing whatever of Yeats or Chesterton about her, frankly admitted that she had “not been particularly keen” to associate with her brother-in-law or even her sister after their marriage: she would have much preferred to see her sister married to a poet, painter, sculptor, or at least an architect; she did not say outright that she had found Gruyten too low-class, she expressed it negatively: “not refined enough”; when asked about Leni she would utter no more than two little words: “Oh well,” and on being urged to say more about Leni she stuck to her “Oh well,” whereas she made no bones about claiming Heinrich for the Barkels; not even the fact that her son Erhard was “to all intents and purposes on Heinrich’s conscience, he would never have done such a thing on his own,” could lessen her liking for Heinrich; she declared him to have been “extreme, very extreme, but gifted, almost a genius,” and the Au. gained the ambiguous impression that she did not particularly bemoan her son’s premature death, tending rather to resort to such phrases as “hour of Destiny,” especially since she went so far as to make a statement which, applied to her son and even to Heinrich, was exceedingly odd and would require much checking and historical correction. “They both looked”—these were her very words—“as if they had fallen at the Battle of Langemarck.” When we consider the ambiguities surrounding not only Langemarck but the very myth of Langemarck, the discrepancy between 1914 and 1940, and finally roughly four dozen complicated misunderstandings (which do not all have to be gone into here), we are hardly surprised that the Au. took leave of Mrs. Schweigert courteously but coolly, although not finally: and since he later learned from the witness Hoyser that Mrs. Schweigert’s husband, a hitherto shadowy figure, had been severely wounded at Langemarck, had spent three years in an army hospital—“he was simply shot to pieces” (Hoyser)—and in 1919 had married Irene Barkel,his volunteer nurse; that this marriage had produced the son Erhard but that Mr. Schweigert—“so morphine-addicted and emaciated that he could hardly find another spot to stick a needle in” (Hoyser)—had died in 1923 at the age of twenty-seven, official occupation student, it may occur to some that this uncommonly ladylike Mrs. Schweigert might have secretly harbored the wish that her husband had fallen at Langemarck. She had earned her living as a real-estate agent.
From 1933 on, the Gruyten business began to take an upward
Whatever went wrong or whatever misunderstandings arose between the two spouses, it has been testified by the persons with the most intimate knowledge of the Gruytens’ family life, even by the jealous van Doorn woman, that: never at any time did he show lack of courtesy, chivalry, or even affection toward her, and that she always “idolized” him seems to be a matter of record.
Mrs. Schweigert, née Barkel, an old lady who has nothing whatever of Yeats or Chesterton about her, frankly admitted that she had “not been particularly keen” to associate with her brother-in-law or even her sister after their marriage: she would have much preferred to see her sister married to a poet, painter, sculptor, or at least an architect; she did not say outright that she had found Gruyten too low-class, she expressed it negatively: “not refined enough”; when asked about Leni she would utter no more than two little words: “Oh well,” and on being urged to say more about Leni she stuck to her “Oh well,” whereas she made no bones about claiming Heinrich for the Barkels; not even the fact that her son Erhard was “to all intents and purposes on Heinrich’s conscience, he would never have done such a thing on his own,” could lessen her liking for Heinrich; she declared him to have been “extreme, very extreme, but gifted, almost a genius,” and the Au. gained the ambiguous impression that she did not particularly bemoan her son’s premature death, tending rather to resort to such phrases as “hour of Destiny,” especially since she went so far as to make a statement which, applied to her son and even to Heinrich, was exceedingly odd and would require much checking and historical correction. “They both looked”—these were her very words—“as if they had fallen at the Battle of Langemarck.” When we consider the ambiguities surrounding not only Langemarck but the very myth of Langemarck, the discrepancy between 1914 and 1940, and finally roughly four dozen complicated misunderstandings (which do not all have to be gone into here), we are hardly surprised that the Au. took leave of Mrs. Schweigert courteously but coolly, although not finally: and since he later learned from the witness Hoyser that Mrs. Schweigert’s husband, a hitherto shadowy figure, had been severely wounded at Langemarck, had spent three years in an army hospital—“he was simply shot to pieces” (Hoyser)—and in 1919 had married Irene Barkel,his volunteer nurse; that this marriage had produced the son Erhard but that Mr. Schweigert—“so morphine-addicted and emaciated that he could hardly find another spot to stick a needle in” (Hoyser)—had died in 1923 at the age of twenty-seven, official occupation student, it may occur to some that this uncommonly ladylike Mrs. Schweigert might have secretly harbored the wish that her husband had fallen at Langemarck. She had earned her living as a real-estate agent.
From 1933 on, the Gruyten business began to take an upward
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