Whenever Lorm played, Judith Imhof was in the theatre. But she went neither with her husband nor with Crammon. They broke in upon her mood. She cared very little for Crammon at any time. Unless he was very jocular, he seemed to her insufferable.
She sat in the stalls, and in the entr’actes waved graciously and calmly to Felix and Crammon in their box. She was careless of the amazement of her acquaintances. If any one had the temerity to ask why she sat alone, she answered, “Imhof is annoyed when another is not pleased with something that arouses his enthusiasm. So we go on different paths.”
Inevitably the curious person would ask next: “Then you don’t care for Lorm?” Whereupon she would reply: “Not greatly. He forces me to take a certain interest; but I resent that. I think he’s terribly overrated.”
One day a lady of her acquaintance asked her whether she was happy in her marriage. “I don’t know,” she answered, and laughed. “I haven’t any exact conception of what people mean by happiness.” Her friend then asked her why she had married. “Very simply,” she replied, “because being a young girl got to be such an undelightful situation that I sought to escape from it as soon as possible.” The lady wanted to know whether she didn’t, then, love her husband. “My dear woman,” Judith said, “love! There’s nothing so mischievous as the loose way in which people use that word. Most people, I believe, pretend quite shamelessly when they talk about it, and defend it simply because they don’t want to admit that they’ve been taken in. It’s exactly like the king’s new clothes in the old fable. Every one acts mightily important and enthusiastic, and won’t admit that the poor king is naked to the winds.”
Another time she was asked whether she didn’t yearn to have a child. “A child!” she cried out. “Horrors! Shall I bring forth more food for the worms?”
Once, in company, the conversation turned to the question of one’s sensitiveness to pain. Judith asserted that she could bear any bodily torment without moving a muscle. She was not believed. She procured a long, golden needle, and bade one of the gentlemen pierce her whole arm with it. When he refused in horror, she asked another of stronger nerves who obeyed her. And really she did not twitch a muscle. The blood gathered in a little pool. She smiled.
Felix Imhof could weep at the least excuse. When he had a sick headache he wept. She despised this in him.
The actor took hold of her. She resisted in vain. The spell he cast over her grew ever firmer, more indissoluble. She brooded over it. Was it his transformations that attracted her so?
Although he was forty, his body was as elegant and flexible as polished steel. And like the ringing of steel was hisvoice. The words were sparks. Under his tread the wooden stage became a palæstra. Nothing clung or whined or crept. Everything was tension, progression, verve, the rhythm of storms. There was no inner weight or weariness. Bugles soared. She agreed with Felix when he said: “There is more of the true content of our age in this man than in all the papers, editorials, pamphlets, and plethoric three-deckers that the press has spewed forth within the past twenty years. He has crowned the living word and made it our king.”
She was impatient to make the personal acquaintance of Lorm. Crammon became the intermediary, and brought the actor to her house. She was amazed at the homeliness of the man’s face. She resented his insignificant, tilted nose and his mediocre forehead. But the spell was not broken. She desired to overlook these details and succeeded. They represented but another transformation of that self which she believed to be so infinitely varied.
He revealed himself as an epicure, with remnants of that greed which marks the man who has risen from humble things. The delights of the table induced in him outbursts of noisy merriment. Over the oysters and the champagne he discussed his worst enemies with benevolence.
He was so changeable of mood that it was exhausting to associate with him. No one opposed him, and this lack of opposition had produced an empty space about him that had almost the guise of loneliness. He himself took it for the solitariness of the soul, and cherished it with a proud pain.
He discoursed only in monologues. He listened only to himself. But he did all that with the innocence of a savage. When others spoke he disappeared in an inner absorption, his eyes assumed a stony look. The part of him that remained conscious was undeviatingly courteous, but this courtesy often had an automatic air. When he came to speak again, he delighted his hearers by his wit, his paradoxes, and his masterly rendition of anecdotes.
He avoided conversation with women. Beauty and coquetry made no impression on him. When women became enthusiastic over him, his expression was one of merely courteous attention, and his thoughts were contemptuous. He had no adventures, and his name occurred in no racy stories. Once out of the theatre, he lived the life of a private gentleman of simple habits.
With cool but delicate perceptivity Judith examined the conformation of his character. She who was utterly without swift aspiration, whose dry nature perceived only the utilitarian, only the expedient, who had been stifled in mere forms from her girlhood, and esteemed nothing in others but the external, garments, jewels, display, title, name—she was like one possessed and charged with an electric fluid within three days. She was fascinated primarily by external things: his eye, his voice, his fame. But there was one deeper thing: the illusion of his art.
She knew what she was doing. Her steps were scrupulously calculated.
One day Lorm complained of the disorganization in his life, the frightful waste of his substance. It was at table, and he was answered by empty phrases. But Judith, when she succeeded in having him to herself later, took up the subject again. She persuaded him to describe the persons whom he held responsible, and expressed doubts of their trustworthiness. She disapproved of arrangements that he had made, gave him advice that he found excellent, and reproached him with the neglect of which he confessed himself guilty. “I wade in money and suffocate in debt,” he sighed. “In twenty years I’ll be an old man and a poor devil.”
Her practical insight filled him with naïve admiration. He said to her: “I’ve been told once in a while that there are such women in the world as you, but I never believed in their existence. All I’ve ever seen were full of empty exactions and florid emotions.”
“You’re unjust,” she replied and smiled. “Every woman has some field in which she has character and firmness, but the world pays no attention. Then, too, our relation to the world is usually a false one.”
“That is a wise remark,” said Lorm in a satisfied voice. He was a miser of praise.
From now on he loved to have her draw him into talk concerning his little needs and worries. She examined him in detail, and he was glad to submit. He brought her the bills rendered him by his tradespeople. “They capitalize your inexperience, and cheat you,” was Judith’s judgment of the situation. It made him feel ashamed.
“Have you been lending money?” she asked. It appeared that he had. For years and years he had loaned considerable sums to numerous parasites. Judith shrugged her shoulders. “You might just as well have thrown the money away.”
Lorm answered: “It’s such a bother when they come and beg, and their faces are so unappetizing. I give them what they ask just to be rid of them.”
In this wise their conversations moved wholly within the circle of the prosaic things of daily life. But it was precisely this that Edgar Lorm had missed and needed. It was as new and as moving to him, as the discovery of a rapt and ecstatic soul to a bourgeois becoming aware of poetry and passion.
Judith had a dream. She lay quite naked beside a slippery, icy fish. And she lay with it from choice, and snuggled close to its cold body. But suddenly she began to beat it, for its cool, damp, slippery scales, which had a gleam of silver and were opaline along its back, suddenly inspired in her a witch-like fury. She beat and beat the creature, until she lost consciousness and awoke exhausted.
An excursion into the valley of the Isar was arranged. Crammon went, and Felix, a young friend of the latter, Lorm and Judith. They took their coffee in the garden of an inn, and on the way back, which led through woods, theywent in couples, Lorm and Judith being the last. “I’ve lost my gold cigarette case,” Lorm announced suddenly, examining his pocket, “I’ve got to go back the last part of the way. I know I had it when we were in the village.” It was an object precious in itself, and to which he attached a great value because it had been given him by a king who had been devoted to him in an enthusiastic friendship in his youth, and so it was irreplaceable.
Judith nodded. “I’ll wait here,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m too tired to cover the distance three times.”
He walked back and left Judith standing there, leaning her head against a tree and reflecting. Her forehead wrinkled and her eyes assumed a piercing look. It was silent in the wood; no breeze stirred, no bird cried, no animal rustled in the bushes. Time passed. Driven not at all by impatience, but by her thoughts, which were both violent and decisive, she finally left her place, and walked in the direction from which Lorm would have to come. When she had been walking for a while, she saw something golden gleaming in the moss. It was the cigarette case, which she picked up calmly.
Lorm came back sorely vexed. He was silent, and as he walked beside her, she quietly presented the case on her flat hand. He made a gesture of joyous surprise, and she had to tell him how she had found it.
For a while he seemed to be struggling with himself. Suddenly he said: “How much easier life would be with you.”
Judith answered with a smile: “You talk of it as of something unattainable.”
“I believe it to be so,” he murmured, with lowered head.
“If you’re thinking of my marriage,” Judith said, still smiling, “I consider your expression exaggerated. The way out would be simple.”
“I wasn’t thinking of your marriage, but of your wealth.”
“Will you tell me your meaning more clearly.”
“At once.” He looked about him, and went up to a tree.“Do you see that little beetle? Look how busily he works to climb the height before him. He has probably worked his way up a considerable distance to-day. No doubt he started before dawn. When he’s on top, he will have accomplished something. But if I take him between my fingers now and place him at the top, then the very path which his own labour has dug becomes a thing of no value to him. That’s the way it is with beetles and also with men.”
Judith considered. “Comparisons must halt. That’s their prerogative, you know.” She spoke with gentle mockery. “I don’t understand why one should reject another, simply because that other doesn’t come with empty hands. It’s a funny notion.”
“Between a hand that is empty, and one that commands immeasurable treasures, there is a fatal difference,” Lorm said with deep earnestness. “I have worked my way up from poverty. You have no faintest notion of the meaning of that word. All that I am and have, I owe to the immediate exertions of my body and my brains. By your birth you have been accustomed all your life to buy the bodies and the brains of others. And though you had a thousand times more instinct and vision for practical things and for the necessities of a sane life than you have, yet you do not and could not comprehend the profoundly moral and rightly revered relation of accomplishment to reward. Your adventitious advantages have constantly made it possible for you to ignore this relation, and to substitute for it an arbitrary will. To me your wealth would be paralysis, a mockery and a spectre.”
He looked at her with head thrown back.
“And so you think our case hopeless?” Judith asked, pale and defiant.
“Since I cannot and dare not expect you to abandon your millions and share the fate of a play-actor, it does indeed seem hopeless.”
Judith’s face was quite colourless. “Let us go,” she said;“the others will remark our absence, and I dislike being gossiped about.”
Swiftly and silently they walked on. They came to a clearing and saw beneath a black rampart of clouds the throbbing, crimson disc of the sun. Judith stared into it with raging fury. For the first time her will had encountered a still stronger will. It was rage that filled her eyes with tears, rage that wrung from her discordant laughter. When Lorm looked at her in pained surprise, she turned away and bit her lip.
“I’m capable of doing it,” she said to herself in her rage. And the impulse hardened into a stubborn determination: “I will! I will!”
When Christian arrived in Berlin with Amadeus Voss he found, quite as he had expected, many people and a great tumult about Eva. He could scarcely get to her. “I am tired, Eidolon,” she cried out, when she caught sight of him. “Take me away from everything.”
And again, when she had escaped the oppressive host of admirers, she said: “How good it is that you are here, Eidolon. I have waited for you with an ache in my heart. We’ll leave to-morrow.”
But the journey was postponed from day to day. They planned to live alone and in retirement at the Dutch watering place that was their immediate goal, but Christian had already met a dozen people who had ordered accommodations there, and so he doubted the seriousness of Eva’s intentions. People had become indispensable to her. When she was silent she wanted, at least, to hear the voices of others; when she was quiet she wanted movement about her.
When he stood before her the fragrance of her body penetrated him like a great fear. His blood flowed in such violent waves that his pulses lost the rhythm of their beating.
He had forgotten her face, the inimitable veracity of hergestures, her power of feeling and inspiring ecstasy, her whole powerful, delicate, flowerlike, radiant being. Everything seemed to yield to her, even the elements. When she appeared in the street, the sun shone more purely and the air was more temperate; and thus the wild turmoil about her was transformed into a steady and obedient tide.
Susan said to Christian: “We are to dance here, and have offers. But we don’t like the Prussians. They seem an arid folk, who save their money for soldiers and barracks. I haven’t seen a real face. All men and all women look alike. They may be worthy, no doubt they are; but they seem machine-made.”
“Eva herself is a German,” Christian rebuked the woman’s spiteful words.
“Bah, if a genius is cast forth from heaven and tumbles on the earth, it is blind and cannot choose its place. Where is Herr von Crammon?” she interrupted herself. “Why doesn’t he come to see us? And whom have you brought in his stead?” She poked out her chin toward Amadeus Voss, who stood timidly in a corner, and whose large spectacles made him look like an owl. “Who is that?”
Who is that? The same question appeared in the astonished faces of Wiguniewski and of the Marquis of Tavera. Amadeus was new to the world with a vengeance. The fixed expression on his features had something so silly at times, that Christian was ashamed of him and the others laughed.
Voss wandered about the streets, pushed himself into crowds, surveyed the exhibits behind the plate-glass windows of shops, stared into coffee-houses, bought newspapers and pamphlets, but found no way of calming his soul. All he could see was the face of the dancer, and the gestures with which she cut a fruit or greeted a friend or bowed or sat down in a chair or arose or smelled a flower, or the motions of her lids and lips and neck and shoulders and hips and legs. And he found all these things in her provocative and affected, and yet they had bitten into his brain as acid bites into metal.
One evening he entered Christian’s room, and his face was the colour of dust.
“Who really is Eva Sorel?” he asked, with a bitter rancour. “Where does she come from? To whom does she belong? What are we doing here with her? Tell me something about her. Enlighten me.” He threw himself into a chair, and stared at Christian.
When Christian, unprepared for this tempest of questions, made no answer, he went on: “You’ve put me into a new skin, but the old Adam writhes in it still. Is this a masquerade? If so, tell me at least what the masks represent. I seem to be disguised too, but badly. I expect you to improve my disguise.”
“You aren’t disguised any worse than the others,” Christian said, with a soothing smile.
Voss rested his head on his two hands. “So she’s a dancer, a dancer,” he murmured thoughtfully. “To my way of feeling there has always been something lewd about that word and what it means. How can it help arousing images that bring the blush to one’s cheek?” Suddenly he looked up, and asked with a piercing glance: “Is she your mistress?”
The blood left Christian’s face. “I think I understand what disturbs you so,” he said. “But now that you’ve gone with me, you must bear with me. I don’t know how long we shall stay with this crowd, and I can’t myself tell exactly why we are here. But you must not ask me about Eva Sorel. We must not discuss her either for praise or blame.”
Voss was silenced.
Christian, Amadeus, Bradshaw, Tavera, and Wiguniewski went by motor. Eva used the train.
But this way of travelling agreed with her as ill as any other. All night she lay sleepless in her crumpled silks, her head buried among pillows. Susan crouched by her, giving herperfume or a book or a glass of cold lemonade. There was a prickling in her limbs that would not let her rest, a weight on her bosom, an alternation of thought and fancy, of willing and the weariness of willing in her mind. The hum of the wheels on the rails cut into her nerves; the sable landscape, as it glided by, irritated her like a delusion that forever changed and melted. Malignity seemed to lurk in the fields; treacherous forests seemed to block the way; she saw haunted houses and terror-stricken men.
“What a torturer time is!” she whispered. “Oh, that it stood before me, and I could have it whipped.”
Susan bent nearer, and gazed at her attentively.
Suddenly she whispered tenderly: “What do you expect of him? What is the purpose of this new game? He’s the most banal of them all. I never heard him make a polished or a witty remark. Does he realize what you are? Not in his wildest dreams. His head is empty. Your art means about as much to him as the acrobatics of a circus dancer to some dreary shop-keeper. Nations are at your feet, and he grants you a supercilious smile. You have given the world a new kind of delight, and this German know-it-all is untouched and unchanged by it.”
Eva said: “If the North Sea is too sinister, we must seek a coast in the South.”
Susan grew excited: “One would like to yell into his ears: ‘Get on your knees! Pray!’ But he wouldn’t be shaken any more than the pillar of Vendôme. Is he ever shaken by anything? I described to him how we were adored in Russia, the ecstasy, the festivities, the outbursts of enthusiasm. He acted as if he were hearing a moderately interesting bit of daily news. I told him about the Grand Duke. No, don’t frown. I had to, or I would have choked. I described that chained barbarian, that iron soul dissolved! It’s certainly uncommon; it would make any heart beat faster. I tried to make him visualize the situation: fifty millions of tremblingslaves and all, through his power, at your bidding. No poet could have been more impressive than I was. If you had heard me trying to penetrate his mind, you would have been astonished at my talent for sewing golden threads on sack cloth. It was all in vain. His breath came as regularly as the ticking of a clock. Once or twice he seemed to be startled. But it was due to a breeze or a mosquito.”
“I wonder whether the gowns from Paris have arrived at Heyst,” Eva said. The long oval of her face seemed to grow a trifle longer; her lips curled a little, and her teeth showed like pallid, freshly peeled almonds.
“Why did you refuse yourself to him?” Susan went on. “What we possess is part of our past, but a joy put off is a burden. Men are to be the rungs of your ladder—no more. Let them give you magical nights, but send them packing when the cock crows. How has he deserved a higher office? You’ve yielded to a whim, and made a grinning idol of him. Why did you summon him? I’m afraid you’re going to commit a folly.”
Eva did not answer. The tip of her tongue appeared between her lips, and she closed her eyes cunningly. Susan thought she understood those gestures, and said: “It’s true, he has the marvellous diamond for which you cried. But you have but to command, and they’ll trim your very shoes with such baubles.”
“When did you ever see me cry for a diamond?” Eva, asked indifferently. She raised herself up, and in her transparent, wavering, blossomy wrappings seemed like a spirit emerging from the dimness. “When did you ever see me cry for a diamond?” she asked again, and touched Susan’s shoulder.
“You told me so yourself.”
“Have you no better proof?” Eva laughed, and her laughter was her most sensuous form of expression, as her smile was her most spiritual.
Susan folded her hands and said resignedly: “Volvedme delotro lado, que de esto ya estoy tostado!” It is a Spanish ejaculation, and means: Lay me on the other side, for I have been toasted enough on this.
The house that Eva had taken was not very far from the beach. It was an old manor, which William of Orange had built, and which had belonged to the late Duchess of Leuchtenberg until a few years ago.
The rooms, built of mighty blocks of stone, soothed Eva. By day and night she heard the long-drawn thunder of the waves. Whenever she picked up a book, she dropped it again soon and listened.
She walked through those rooms, full of ancient furniture and dark portraits, glad to possess herself, and to await without torment him who came to her. She greeted him with half-closed eyes, and with the smile of one who has yielded herself wholly.
Susan practised on a piano with muted strings. When she had finished her task, she slunk away and remained hidden.
Christian and Amadeus Voss had taken lodgings in a neighbouring villa—Voss on the ground floor, Christian above. Since Christian neither asked questions nor detained him, Voss went out in the morning and returned in the evening or even late at night. He did not say where he had been, or what he had seen or experienced.
At breakfast on the third morning, he said to Christian: “It’s a thankless task to unchain a fellow like me. I breathe a different breath and sleep a different sleep. Somewhere my soul is ranging about, and I’m chasing it. I’ve got to catch it first, before I know how things are with me.”
Christian did not look up. “We’re invited to dine with Eva Sorel to-night,” he said.
Voss bowed ironically. “That invitation looks damnably like charity,” he said harshly. “I feel the resistance of thosepeople to me, and their strangeness, in my very bones. What a superfluous comedy! What shall I do there? Nearly all of them talk French. I’m a provincial, a villager, and ridiculous. And that’s worse than being a murderer or thief. I may make up my mind to commit arson or murder, so as not to be ridiculous any more.” He opened his mouth as though to laugh, but uttered no sound.
“I’m surprised, Amadeus, that your thoughts always cling to that one point,” Christian said. “Do you really believe it to be of such decisive importance? No one cares whether you’re poor or rich. Since you appear in my company, no one questions your equality, or would be so vulgar as to question it. The feelings that you express originate in yourself, and you seem to take a kind of perverse joy in them. You like to torment yourself, and then revenge yourself on others. I hope you won’t take my frankness amiss.”
Amadeus Voss grinned. “Sometimes, Christian Wahnschaffe, I’d like to pat your head, as though I were your teacher, and say: You did that very well. Yes, it was wonderfully well done. And yet your little arrow went astray. To hit me, you must take better aim. It is true that the morbidness is deep in my soul, far too deep to be eradicated by a few inexpensive aphorisms. When this Russian prince or this Spanish legate shake hands with me, I feel as though I had forged cheques and would be discovered in a minute. When this lady passes by me, with her indescribable fragrance and the rustling of her garments, I grow dizzy, as though I dangled high over an abyss, and my whole soul writhes in its own humiliation and slavishness. It writhes and writhes, and I can’t help it. I was born that way. This is not my world, and cannot become mine. The under dogs must bleed to death, for the upper dogs consider that the order of the world. I belong to that lower kind. My place is with those who have the odour of decayed flesh, whom all avoid, who go about with an eternally festering wound. The law of my being ranges me with them. I haveno power to change that, nor has any pleasant agreement. This is not my world, Wahnschaffe; and if you don’t want me to lose my reason and do some mischief, you had better take me out of it so soon as possible, or else send me away.”
Christian passed the tips of his fingers over his forehead. “Have patience, Amadeus. I believe it is not my world any longer. Give me but a little more time in which to straighten out my own thoughts.”
Voss’s eyes clung to Christian’s hands and lips. The words had been quietly, almost coolly uttered, yet there was a deep conflict in them and an expression that had power over Voss. “I cannot imagine a man leaving this woman, if once he has her favour,” he said, with a hovering malice on his lips, “unless she withdraws her favour.”
Christian could not restrain a gesture of aversion. “We’ll meet to-night then,” he said, and arose.
An hour later Amadeus Voss saw him and Eva on the beach. He was coming down the dunes, and saw them on the flat sands by the foam of the waves. He stopped, shaded his eyes with his hands, and gazed out over the ocean as though watching for a sail. The other two did not see him. They walked along in a rhythmic unity, as of bodies that have tested the harmony of their vibrations. After a while they, too, stopped and stood close together, and were defined like two dark, slender shafts against the iron grey of air and water.
Voss threw himself into the sparse, stiff grass, and buried his forehead in the moist sand. Thus he lay many hours.
Evening came. Its great event was to be the appearance of Eva with the diamond Ignifer in her hair. She wore it in an exquisitely wrought setting of platinum, and it shone above her head, radiant and solitary, like a ghostly flame.
She felt its presence in every throb of her heart. It was a part of her, at once her justification and her crown. It was no longer an adornment but a blazing and convincing symbol of herself.
For a while there was an almost awestruck silence. The lovely Beatrix Vanleer, a Belgian sculptress, cried out in her astonishment and admiration.
The smile of gentle intoxication faded from Eva’s face, and her eyes turned far in their sockets, and she saw Amadeus Voss, whose face was of a bluish pallor.
His mouth was half open like an imbecile’s, his head thrust brutally forward, his hanging arms twitched. He approached slowly, with eyes staring at the ineffable glow of the jewel. Those who stood on either side of him were frightened and made way. Eva turned her face aside, and stepped back two paces. Susan emerged beside her, and laid protective arms about her. At the same moment Christian went up to Voss, grasped his hand, and drew the quite obedient man aside.
Christian’s attitude and expression had something that calmed every one. As though nothing had happened, a vivid and twittering conversation arose.
Voss and Christian stood on the balcony of stone. Voss drank the salt sea air deep into his lungs. He asked hoarsely: “Was that Ignifer?”
Christian nodded. He listened to the sea. The waves thundered like falling fragments of rock.
“I have grasped the whole secret of your race,” Amadeus murmured, and the convulsion in his face melted under the influence of Christian’s presence. “I have understood both man and woman. In this diamond are frozen your tears and your shudderings, your voluptuousness and your darkness too. It is a bribe and an accursed delusion, a terrible fetish! How keenly aware am I now of your days and nights, Wahnschaffe, of all that is between you and her, since I have seen the gleam of this mineral which the Lord created out of the slime, even as He created me and you and her. That stone is without pain—earthly, and utterly without pain, burned pure and merciless. My God, my God, and think of me, of me!”
Christian did not understand this outburst, but it shookhim to the soul. Its power swept aside the vexation which Voss’s shameless eloquence had aroused. He listened to the sea.
Voss pulled himself together. He went up to the balustrade, and said with unnatural self-control, “You counselled patience to-day. What was your purpose? It sounded as equivocal and as general as all you say to me. It is convenient to talk of patience. It is a luxury like any other luxury at your command, only less costly. There is no word, however, worthier of hatred or contempt. It is always false. Closely looked upon, it means cowardice and sloth. What have you in mind?”
Christian did not answer. Or, rather, he assumed having answered; and after a long while, and out of deep meditation, he asked: “Do you believe that it is of any use?”
“I don’t understand,” said Voss, and looked at him helplessly. “Use? To what end or how?”
Christian, however, did not enlighten him further.
Voss wanted to go home, but Christian begged him to stay, and so they went in and joined the others at dinner.
When the dinner was over, the company returned to the drawing-room. The conversation began in French, but in deference to Mr. Bradshaw, who did not understand that language, changed to German.
The American directed the conversation toward the dying races of the New World, and the tragedy of their disappearance. Eva encouraged him, and he told of an experience he had had among the Navaho Indians.
The Navaho tribe had offered the longest resistance to Christianity and to its civilization. To subdue them the United States Government forbade the practice of the immemorial Yabe Chi dance, the most solemn ritual of their cult. The commissioner who was to convey this order, and on whosestaff Mr. Bradshaw had been, yielded to the passionate entreaty of the tribal chief, and gave permission for a final celebration of the dance. At midnight, by the light of campfires and of pine torches, the brilliantly feathered and tattooed dancers and singers appeared. The singers sang songs which told of the fates of three heroes, who had been captured by a hostile tribe and freed by the god Ya. He taught them to ride the lightning; they fled into the cave of the Grizzly Bear, and thence into the realm of butterflies. The dances gave a plastic representation of these adventures. While the craggy mountains re-echoed the songs, and the contorted dances in the tawny glow rose to an ecstasy of despair, a terrific storm broke. Cascades of water poured from the sky and filled the dried river-beds with roaring torrents; the fires were extinguished; the medicine men prayed with uplifted arms; the dancers and singers, certain now that they had incurred the anger of their god, whose sacred ceremony they had consented to betray, hurled themselves in their wild pain into the turbulent waters, which carried their bodies far down into the plain.
When Mr. Bradshaw had ended, Eva said: “The gods are vengeful; even the gentlest will defend their seats.”
“That is a heathen view,” said Amadeus, in a sharp and challenging voice. “There are no gods. There are idols, to be sure, and these must be broken.” He looked defiantly about him, and added in a dragging tone: “For the Lord saith, no man can look upon me and live.”
Smiles met his outburst. Tavera had not understood, and turned to Wiguniewski, who whispered an explanation in French. Then the Spaniard smiled too, compassionately and maliciously.
Voss arose with a tormented look on his face. The merriment in those faces was like a bodily chastisement to him. From behind his glittering eye-glasses he directed a venomous glance toward Eva, and said in troubled tones: “In the same context of Scripture the Lord bids Israel hurl aside its adornments that He may see what He will do with them. The meaning is clear.”
“He cannot expiate the lust of the eye,” Christian thought, and avoided Eva’s glance.
Amadeus Voss left the company and the house. On the street he ran as though pursued, clasping his hands to his temples. He had pushed his derby hat far back. When he reached his room, he opened his box and drew out a package of letters. They were the stolen letters of the unknown woman F. He sat down by his lamp, and read with tense absorption and a burning forehead. It was not the first night that he had passed thus.
When Eva was alone with Christian, she asked: “Why did you bring that man with you?”
He laughed, and lifted her up in his arms, and carried her through many flights of rooms and out of light into darkness.
“The sea cries!” her lips said at his ear.
He prayed that all sounds might die out of the world except the thunder of the sea and that young voice at his ear. He prayed that those two might silence the disquiet that overcame him in her very embraces and made him, at the end of every ecstasy, yearn for its renewal.
That slender, passionate body throbbed toward him. Yet he heard the lamentation of an alien voice: What shall we do?
“Why did you bring this man?” Eva asked him far in the night, between sleep and sleep. “I cannot bear him. There is always sweat on his forehead. He comes from a sinister world.”
There was a bluish twilight in the room that came from the blue flame of a blue lamp, and a bluish darkness lay beyond the windows.
“Why don’t you answer me?” she urged, and raised herself, showing the pale face amid its wilderness of brown hair.
He had no answer for her. He feared the insufficiency of any explanation, as well as the replies that she would find.
“What is the meaning of it all? What ails you, dearest?” Eva drew him toward her, and clung to him, and kissed his eyes thirstily.
“I’ll ask him to avoid your presence,” said Christian. And suddenly he saw himself and Voss in the farm yard of Nettersheim, saw the kneeling men and maid servants, the old rusty lantern, the dead woman, and the carpenter who was measuring her for her coffin.
“Tell me what he means to you,” whispered Eva. “It seems to me suddenly as though you were gone. Where are you really? Tell me, dear friend.”
“You should have let me love you in those old days in Paris,” said Christian gently, and softly rested his cheek against her bosom, “in those days when Crammon and I came to you.”
“Speak, only speak,” Eva breathed, seeking to hide the fright in her heart.
Her eyes gleamed, and her skin was like luminous white satin. In the darkness her face had a spiritualized thinness; the restrained charm of her gestures mastered the hour, and her smile was deep and intricate of meaning, and everything about her was play and mirroring and raptness and unexpected magic. Christian looked upon her.
“Do you remember words that you once spoke to me?” he asked. “You said: ‘Love is an art like poetry or music, and he who does not understand that, finds no grace in love’s sight.’ Were not those your words?”
“Yes, they were. Speak to me, my darling!”
He held her in his arms, and the life of her body, its warmth, its blood that was conscious of him, and its vibration that was toward him, made speech a little easier. “You see,” he said thoughtfully, and caressed her hand, “I have only enjoyed women. Nothing more. I have been ignorant of that love which is an art. It was so easy. They adored me, and I took no pains. They put no hindrances on my path, and so myfoot passed over them. Not one demanded a fulfilment of me. They were happy enough if I was but contented. But you, Eva, you’re not satisfied with me. You look at me searchingly and watch me; and your vigil continues even at those moments when one floats beyond thought and knowledge. And it is because you are not satisfied with me. Or is that an error, a deception?”
“It is so very late,” said Eva, and, leaning her head back upon the pillows, she closed her eyes. She listened to the perished echo of her own voice, and the oppression of her heart almost robbed her of breath.
It was in another night. They had been jesting and telling each other amusing stories, and at last they had grown weary.
Suddenly in the darkness outside of the window Christian had a vision of his father and of the dog Freia; and his father had the tread of a lonely man. Never had Christian seen loneliness so visibly embodied. The dog was his only companion. He had sought for another friend, but there had been none to go with him.
“How is that possible?” Christian thought.
His senses were lost in a strange drowsiness, even while he held Eva’s beautiful body, which was as smooth and cool as ivory. And in this drowsiness visions emerged of his brother, his sister, his mother, and about each of them was that great loneliness and desolation.
“How is that possible?” Christian thought. “Their lives are thronged with people.”
But he answered himself, and said: “Is not your own life likewise thronged with people to suffocation, and do you not also feel that same loneliness and desolateness?”
Now a dark object seemed to descend upon him. It was a coat—a wet, dripping coat. And at the same moment someone called out to him: “Arise, Christian, arise!” But he could not arise, for those ivory arms held him fast.
Suddenly he became aware of Letitia. She uttered but one word: “Why?” It seemed to him, while he slept, if indeed he slept, that he should have chosen Letitia, who lived but for her dreams, her yearnings and imaginings, and who had been sacrificed with her dreams to the vulgar world of reality. It seemed to him as though Letitia, pointing to Eva, were saying: “What do you seek of her? She knows nothing of you, but weaves at the web of her own life. She is ambitious, and can give you no help in your suffering; and it is only to forget and deaden the pain of your soul that you are wasting yourself upon her.”
Christian was astonished to find Letitia so wise. He was almost inclined to smile at her wisdom. But he knew now clearly that he was suffering. It was a suffering of an unfathomable nature, which grew from hour to hour and from day to day, like the spreading of a gangrened wound.
His head rested on the shoulder of his beloved; her little breasts rose from the violet shadows and had trembling contours. He felt her beauty with every nerve, and her strangeness and exquisite lightness. He felt that he loved her with all his thoughts and with every fibre of his flesh, and that, despite it all, he could find no help in her.
And again a voice cried: “Arise, Christian, arise!” But he could not arise. For he loved this woman, and feared life without her.
The dawn was breaking when Eva turned her face to him again: “Where are you?” she asked. “What are you gazing at?”
He answered: “I am with you.”
“To the last stirrings of your thought?”
“I don’t know. Who knows the last recesses of his mind?”
“I want you wholly. With every breath. And something of you escapes.”
“And you,” Christian asked evasively, “are you utterly with me?”
She answered passionately, and with an imperious smile, as she drew closer to him: “You are more mine than I am yours.”
“Why?”
“Does it frighten you? Are you miserly in your love? Yes, you are more mine. I have broken the spell that held you and melted your soul of stone.”
“Melted my soul...?” Christian asked in amazement.
“I have, my darling. Don’t you know that I’m a sorceress? I have power over the fish in the sea, the horse on the sod, the vulture in the air, and the invisible deities that are spoken of in the books of the Persians. I can make of you what I would, and you must yield.”
“That is true,” Christian admitted.
“But your soul does not look at me,” Eva cried, and flung her arms about him, “it is an alien soul, dark, hostile, unknown.”
“Perhaps you’re misusing the power you have over me, and my soul resists.”
“It is to obey—that is all.”
“Perhaps it is not wholly sure of you.”
“I can give your soul only the assurance of the hour that is.”
“What are you planning?”
“Don’t ask me! Hold me fast with your thoughts. Don’t let me go for a moment, or we are lost to each other. Cling to me with all your might.”
Christian answered: “It seems to me as though I ought to know what you mean. But I don’t want to know it. Because you see, you ... I ... all this ... it’s too insignificant.” He shook his head in a troubled way. “Too insignificant.”
“What, what do you mean by that?” Eva cried in fright,and clung to his right hand with both hers. Tensely she looked into his face.
“Too insignificant,” Christian repeated stubbornly, as though he could find no other words.
Then he reflected on all he had said and heard with his accustomed scepticism and toughmindedness, and arose and bade his friend good-night.
Edgar Lorm was playing in Karlsruhe. On a certain evening he had increased the tempo of his playing, and given vent to his disgust with his rôle, the piece, his colleagues, and his audience so obviously that there had been hissing after the last act.
“I’m a poor imbecile,” he said to his colleagues at their supper in a restaurant. “Every play actor is a poor imbecile.” He looked at them all contemptuously, and smacked his lips.
“We must have had more inner harmony in the days when we were suspected of stealing shirts from the housewife’s line and children were frightened at our name. Don’t you think so? Or maybe you’re quite comfortable in your stables.”
His companions observed a respectful silence. Wasn’t he the famous man who filled the houses, and whom both managers and critics flattered?
Dust was whirling in the streets, the dust of summer, as he returned to his hotel. How desolate I feel, he thought, and shook himself. Yet his step was free and firm as a young huntsman’s.
When he had received his key and turned toward the lift, Judith Imhof suddenly stood before him. He started, and then drew back.
“I am ready to be poor,” she said, almost without moving her lips.
“Are you here on business, dear lady?” Lorm asked in aclear, cold voice. “Undoubtedly you are expecting your husband——?”
“I am expecting no one but you, and I am alone,” answered Judith, and her eyes blazed.
He considered the situation with a wrinkled face that made him look old and homely. Then with a gesture he invited her to follow him, and they entered the empty reading room. A single electric lamp burned above the table covered with newspapers. They sat down in two leather armchairs. Judith toyed nervously with her gold mesh-bag. She wore a travelling frock, and her face was tired.
Lorm began the conversation. “First of all: Is there any folly in your mind that can still be prevented?”
“None,” Judith answered in a frosty tone. “If the condition you made was only a trick to scare me off, and you are cowardly enough to repudiate it at the moment of its fulfilment, then, of course, I have been self-deceived, and my business here is at an end. Don’t soothe me with well-meant speeches. The matter was too serious to me for that.”
“That is sharply and bitterly said, Judith, but terribly impetuous,” Lorm said, with quiet irony. “I’m an old hand at living, and far from young, and a good bit too experienced to fly into the passion of a Romeo at even the most precious offers and surprises of a woman. Suppose we discuss what you’ve done like two friends, and you postpone for a bit any final judgment of my behaviour.”
Judith told him that she had written her father, and requested him to make some other disposition of the annual income which he had settled on her at the time of her marriage, since she had determined to get a divorce from Felix Imhof, and to marry a man who had made this step a definite condition of their union. At the same time she had made a legal declaration of her renunciation before a notary, which she had brought to show Lorm, and intended thereupon to send on to her father. All this she told him very calmly. Felix hadknown nothing of her intentions at the time of her departure. She had left a note for him in the care of his valet. “Explanations are vain under such circumstances,” she said. “To tell a man whom one is leaving why one is leaving him is as foolish as turning back the hands of the clock in the hope of really bringing back hours that are dead. He knows where I am and what I want. That’s enough. Anyhow, it’s not the sort of thing he comprehends, and there are so many affairs in his busy life that one more or less will make little difference.”
Lorm sat quietly, his head bent forward, his chin resting on the mother-of-pearl handle of his stick. His carefully combed hair, which was brown and still rather thick, gleamed in the light. His brows were knit. In the lines about his nose, and his wearied actor’s mouth, there was a deep joylessness.
A waiter appeared at the door and vanished again.
“You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for, Judith,” Lorm said, and tapped the floor lightly with his feet.
“Then tell me about it, so that I can adjust myself.”
“I’m an actor,” he said almost threateningly.
“I know it.”
He laid his stick on the table, and folded his hands. “I’m an actor,” he repeated, and his face assumed the appearance of a mask. “My profession involves my representing human nature at its moments of extreme expressiveness. The fascination of the process consists in the artificial concentration of passion, its immediate projection, and the assigning to it of consequences that reality rarely or never affords. And so it naturally happens—and this deception is the fatal law of the actor’s life—that my person, this Edgar Lorm who faces you here, is surrounded by a frame that suits him about as well as a Gothic cathedral window would suit a miniature. A further consequence is that I lack all power of adjustment to any ordered social life, and all my attempts to bring myself in harmony with such a life have been pitiable failures. I struggle and dance in a social vacuum. My art is beaten foam.
“I’ve been told of people who have a divided personality. Well, mine is doubled, quadrupled. The real me is extinct. I detest the whole business; I practise my profession because I haven’t any other. I’d like to be a librarian in the service of a king or a rich man who didn’t bother me, or own a farm in some Swiss valley. I’m not talking about the accidental miseries of the theatre, disgusting and repulsive as they are—the masquerading, the lies and vanities. And I don’t want you to believe either that I’m uttering the average lament of the spoiled mime, which is made up of inordinate self-esteem and of coquettish fishing for flattering contradiction.
“My suffering lies a little deeper. Its cause is, if you will try to understand me, the spoken word. It has caused a process within me that has poisoned my being and destroyed my soul. What word, you may ask? The words that pass between man and man, husband and wife, friend and friend, myself and others. Language, which you utter quite naturally, has in my case passed through all the gamuts of expression and all the temperatures of the mind. You use it as a peasant uses his scythe, the tailor his needle, the soldier his weapon. To me it is a property and a ghost, a mollusk and an echo, a thing of a thousand transformations, but lacking outline and kernel. I cry out words, whisper them, stammer them, moan, flute, distend them, and fill the meaningless with meaning, and am depressed to the earth by the sublime. And I’ve been doing that for five and twenty years. It has worn me thin; it has split my gums and hollowed out my chest.
“Hence all words, sincere as they may be on others’ lips, are untrue on mine, untrue to me. They tyrannise over me and torment me, flicker through the walls, recall to me my powerlessness and unrewarded sacrifices, and change me into a helpless puppet. Can I ever, without being ashamed to the very marrow, say: I love? How manymeanings have not those words! How many have I been forced to give them! If I utter them I practise merely the old trick of my trade, and make the pasteboard device upon my head look like a golden crown. Consider me closely and you will see the meaning of literal despair. Words have been my undoing. It sounds queer, I know; but it is true. It may be that the actor is the absolute example of hopeless despair.”
Judith looked at him rather emptily. “I don’t suppose that we’ll torture each other much with words,” she said, merely to say something.
But Edgar Lorm gave to this saying a subtle interpretation, and nodded gratefully. “What an infinitely desirable condition that would be,” he answered, in his stateliest manner; “because, you see, words and emotions are like brothers and sisters. The thing that I detest saying is mouldy and flat to me in the realm of feeling too. One should be silent as fate. It may be that I am spoiled for any real experience—drained dry. I have damned little confidence in myself, and nothing but pity for any hand stretched out to save me. However that may be,” he ended, and arose with elastic swiftness, “I am willing to try.”
He held out his hand as to a comrade. Charmed by the vividness and knightly grace of his gesture, Judith took his hand and smiled.
“Where are you stopping?” he asked.
“In this hotel.”
Chatting quite naturally he accompanied her to the door of her room.
On the next afternoon Felix Imhof suddenly appeared at the hotel. He sent up his card to Judith, and waited in the hall. He walked up and down, swinging his little cane, carelessly whistling through his thick lips, his brain burdened with affairs, speculations, stock quotations, a hundred obligationsand appointments. But whenever he passed the tall windows, he threw a curious and merry glance out into the street, where two boys were having a fight.
But now and then his face grew dark, and a quiver passed over it.
The page returned, and bade him come up.
Judith was surprised to see him. He began to talk eagerly at once. “I have business in Liverpool, and wanted to see you once more before leaving. A crowd of people came, who all had some business with you. Invitations came for you, and telephone calls; your dressmaker turned up, and letters, and I was, of course, quite helpless. I can’t very well receive people with the agreeable information that my wife has just taken French leave of me. There are a thousand things; you have to disentangle them, or the confusion will be endless.”
They talked for a while of the indifferent things which, according to him, had brought him here. Then he added: “I had an audience with the Prince Regent this forenoon. He bestowed a knighthood on me yesterday.”
Judith’s face flushed, and she had the expression of one who, in a state of hypnosis, recalls his waking consciousness.
Felix tapped against his faultlessly creased trousers with his stick. “I beg your pardon for venturing any criticism,” he said, “but I can’t help observing that the whole matter might have been better managed. To run off with that degree of suddenness—well, it wasn’t quite the proper thing, a little beneath us, not quite fair.”
Judith shrugged her shoulders. “Things that are inevitable might as well be done quickly. And I don’t see that your equanimity is at all impaired.”
“Equanimity! Nonsense! Doesn’t enter the question.” He stood, as was his habit, with legs stretched far apart, rocking to and fro a little, and regarding his gleaming boots. “What has equanimity to do with it? We’re cultivated people. I’m neither a tiger nor a Philistine.Nihil humanum a mealienum, et cetera. You simply don’t know me. And it doesn’t astonish me, for what chance have we ever had to cultivate each other’s acquaintance? Marriage gave us no opportunity. We should retrieve our lost occasions. It is this wish that I should like to take with me into my renewed bachelorhood. You must promise not to avoid me as rigorously in the future as you did during the eight months of our married life.”
“If it will give you any pleasure, I promise gladly,” Judith answered good-humouredly.
With that they parted.
An hour later Felix Imhof sat in the train. With protruding eyes he stared at the passing landscape until darkness fell. He desired conversation, argument, the relief of some projection of his inner self. With wrinkled brow he watched the strangers about him who knew nothing of him or his inner wealth, of his great, rolling ideas, or his far-reaching plans.
At Düsseldorf he left the train. He had made up his mind to do so at the last possible moment. He checked his luggage, and huddled in his coat, walked, a tall, lean figure, through the midnight of the dark and ancient streets.
He stopped in front of one of the oldest houses. In this house he had passed his youth. All the windows were dark. “Hello, boy!” he shouted toward the window behind which he had once slept. The walls echoed his voice. “O nameless boy,” he said, “where do you come from?” He was accustomed to say of himself often: “I am of obscure origin like Caspar Hauser.”
But no secret weighed upon him, not even that of his own unknown descent. He was a man of his decade—stripped of mystery, open to all the winds.
He entered a house, which he remembered from his student days. In a large room, lined with greasy mirrors, there were fifteen or twenty half-dressed girls. In his hat and coat he satdown at the piano and played with the false energy of the dilettante.
“Girls,” he said, “I’ve got a mad rage in me!” The girls played tricks on him as he sat there. They hung a crimson shawl over his shoulders and danced.
“I’m in a rage, girls,” he repeated. “It’s got to be drowned out.” He ordered champagne by the pailful.
The doors were locked. The girls screeched with delight.
“Do something to relieve my misery, girls,” he commanded, bade half a dozen stand in a row and open their mouths. Then he rolled up hundred mark notes like cigarettes, and stuck them between the girls’ teeth. They almost smothered him with their caresses.
And he drank and drank until he lost consciousness.
Christian could not be without Eva. If he left her for the shortest period, the world about him grew dark.
Yet all their relations had the pathos of farewells. If he walked beside her, it seemed to be for the last time. Every touch of their hands, every meeting of their eyes had the dark glow and pain of the irrevocable.
His love for her was in harmony with this condition. It was clinging, giving, patient, at times even obedient.
It showed its nature in the way he held her cloak for her, gave her a glass that her lips were to touch, supported her when she was weary, waited for her if she was later than he at some appointed spot.
She felt that often and questioned him; but he had no answer. He might have conveyed his sensation of an eternal farewell, but he could not have told her what was to follow it. And it became very clear to him, that not a farewell from her alone was involved, but a farewell from everything in the world that had hitherto been clear and pleasant and indispensable tohim. Beyond that fact he understood nothing; he had no plans and did not make any.
He was so void of any desire or demand that Eva yielded recklessly to a hundred wishes, and was angry when none remained unfulfilled. She wanted to see the real ocean. He rented a yacht, and they cruised on the Atlantic for two weeks. She had a longing for Paris, and he took her there in his car. They had dinner at Foyot in the Rue de Tournon, where they had invited friends—writers, painters, musicians. On the following day they returned. They heard of a castle in Normandy which was said to be like a dream of the early Middle Age. She desired to see it by moonlight; so they set out while the moon was full and cloudless nights were expected. Then the cathedral at Rouen lured her; next the famous roses of a certain Baron Zerkaulen near Ghent; then an excursion into the forest of Ardennes, or a sunset over the Zuyder Zee, or a ride in the park at Richmond, or a Rembrandt at The Hague, or a festive procession in Antwerp.
“Do you never get tired?” Christian asked one day, with that unquiet smile of his that seemed a trifle insincere.
Eva answered: “The world is big and youth is brief. Beauty yearns toward me, exists for me, and droops when I am gone. Since Ignifer is mine, my hunger seems insatiable. It is radiant over my earth, and makes all my paths easy. You see, dear, what you have done.”
“Beware of Ignifer,” said Christian, with that same, apparently secretive smile.
Eva’s lids drooped heavily. “Fyodor Szilaghin has arrived,” she said.
“There are so many,” Christian answered, “I can’t possibly know them all.”
“You see none, but they all see you,” said Eva. “They all wonder at you and ask: Who is that slender, distinguished man with very white teeth and blue eyes? Do you not hear their whispering? They make me vain of you.”
“What do they know of me? Let them be.”
“Women grow pale when you approach. Yesterday on the promenade there was a flower-seller, a Flemish girl. She looked after you, and then she began to sing. Did you not hear?”
“No. What was the song she sang?”
Eva covered her eyes with her hands, and sang softly and with an expression on her lips that was half pain and half archness: