Stephen Gunderam had to go to Montevideo. In that city there was a German physician who had considerable skill in the treatment of nervous disorders; and the bull-necked giant suffered from insomnia and nocturnal hallucinations. Furthermore, there was to be a yacht race at Montevideo, on the results of which Stephen had bet heavily.
He appointed Demetrios and Esmeralda as Letitia’s guardians. He said to them: “If anything happens to my wife or she does anything unseemly, I’ll break every bone in your bodies.” Demetrios grinned. Esmeralda demanded that he bring her a box of sweets on his return.
Their leave-taking was touching. Stephen bit Letitia’s ear, and said: “Be true to me.”
Letitia immediately began to play upon the mood of her guardians. She gave Demetrios a hundred pesos and Esmeralda a gold bracelet. She corresponded secretly with the naval lieutenant, Friedrich Pestel. An Indian lad, of whose secrecy and reliability she was sure, served as messenger. Within a week Pestel’s ship was to proceed to Cape Town, so there was little time to be lost. He did not think he would be able to return to the Argentine until the following winter. And Letitia loved him dearly.
Two miles from the estate there was an observatory in the lonely pampas. A wealthy German cattle-man had built it, and now a German professor with his two assistants lived there and watched the firmament. Letitia had often asked to see the observatory, but Stephen had always refused to let her visitit. Now she intended to make it the scene of her meeting with Friedrich Pestel. She yearned for a long talk with him.
To use an observatory as a refuge for forlorn lovers—it was a notion that delighted Letitia and made her ready to run any risk. The day and the hour were set, and all circumstances were favourable. Riccardo and Paolo had gone hunting; Demetrios had been sent by his father to a farm far to the north; the old people slept. Esmeralda alone had to be deceived. Fortunately the girl had a headache, and Letitia persuaded her to go to bed. When twilight approached, Letitia put on a bright, airy frock in which she could ride. She did not hesitate in spite of her pregnancy. Then, as though taking a harmless walk, she left the house and proceeded to the avenue of palms, where the Indian boy awaited her with two ponies.
It was beautiful to ride out freely into the endless plain. In the west there still shone a reddish glow, into which projected in lacy outline the chain of mountains. The earth suffered from drought; it had not rained for long, and crooked fissures split the ground. Hundreds of grasshopper traps were set up in the fields, and the pits behind them, which were from two to three metres deep, were filled with the insects.
When she reached the observatory, it was dark. The building was like an oriental house of prayer. From a low structure of brick arose the mighty iron dome, the upper part of which rotated on a movable axis. The shutters of the windows were closed, and there was no light to be seen. Friedrich Pestel waited at the gate; he had tethered his horse to a post. He told her that the professor and his two assistants had been absent for a week. She and he, he added, could enter the building nevertheless. The caretaker, an old, fever-stricken mulatto, had given him the key.
The Indian boy lit the lantern that he had carried tied to his saddle. Pestel took it, and preceded Letitia through a desolate brick hallway, then up a wooden and finally up a spiral iron stairway. “Fortune is kind to us,” he said. “Next weekthere’s going to be an eclipse of the sun, and astronomers are arriving in Buenos Ayres from Europe. The professor and his assistants have gone to receive them.”
Letitia’s heart beat very fast. In the high vault of the observatory, the little light of the lantern made only the faintest impression. The great telescope was a terrifying shadow; the drawing instruments and the photographic apparatus on its stand looked like the skeletons of animals; the charts on the wall, with their strange dots and lines, reminded her of black magic. The whole room seemed to her like the cave of a wizard.
Yet there was a smile of childlike curiosity and satisfaction on Letitia’s lips. Her famished imagination needed such an hour as this. She forgot Stephen and his jealousy, the eternally quarrelling brothers, the wicked old man, the shrewish Doña Barbara, the treacherous Esmeralda, the house in which she lived like a prisoner—she forgot all that completely in this room with its magic implements, in this darkness lit only by the dim flicker of the lantern, beside this charming young man who would soon kiss her. At least, she hoped he would.
But Pestel was timid. He went up to the telescope, unscrewed the gleaming brass cover, and said: “Let us take a look at the stars.” He looked in. Then he asked Letitia to do the same. Letitia saw a milky mist and flashing, leaping fires. “Are those the stars?” she asked, with a coquettish melancholy in her voice.
Then Pestel told her about the stars. She listened with radiant eyes, although it didn’t in the least interest her to know how many millions of miles distant from the earth either Sirius or Aldebaran happened to be, and what precisely was the mystery which puzzled scientists in regard to the southern heavens.
“Ah,” she breathed, and there was indulgence and a dreamy scepticism in that sound.
The lieutenant, abandoning the cosmos and its infinities,talked about himself and his life, of Letitia and of the impression she had made on him, and of the fact that he thought only of her by day and by night.
Letitia remained very, very still in order not to turn his thoughts in another direction and thus disturb the sweet suspense of her mood.
As befitted a man with a highly developed conscience, Pestel had definitely laid his plans for the future. When he returned at the end of six months, ways and means were to be found for Letitia’s divorce from Stephen and her remarriage to him. He thought of flight only as an extreme measure.
He told her that he was poor. Only a very small capital was deposited in his name in Stuttgart. He was a Suabian—simple-hearted, sober, and accurate.
“Ah,” Letitia sighed again, half-astonished and half-saddened. “It doesn’t matter,” she said with determination. “I’m rich. I own a great tract of forest land. My aunt, the Countess Brainitz, gave it to me as a wedding present.”
“A forest? Where?” Pestel asked, and smiled.
“In Germany. Near Heiligenkreuz in the Rhön region. It’s as big as a city, and when it’s sold it will bring a lot of money. I’ve never been there, but I’ve been told that it contains large deposits of some ore. That would have to be found and exploited. Then I’d be even richer than if I sold the forest.” These facts had grown in Letitia’s imagination; they were the children of the dreams and wishes she had harboured since her slavery in this strange land. She was not lying; she had quite forgotten that she had invented it all. She wished this thing to be so, and it had taken on reality in her mind.
“It’s too good, altogether too good to be true,” Pestel commented thoughtfully.
His words moved Letitia. She began to sob and threw herself on his breast. Her young life seemed hard to her and ugly and surrounded by dangers. Nothing she had hoped for had become reality. All her pretty soap-bubbles had burst in thewind. Her tears sprang from her deep realization of this fact and out of her fear of men and of her fate. She yearned for a pair of strong arms to give her protection and security.
Pestel was also moved. He put his arms about her and ventured to kiss her forehead. She sobbed more pitifully, and so he kissed her mouth. Then she smiled. He said that he would love her until he died, that no woman had ever inspired such feelings in him.
She confessed to him that she was with child by the unloved husband to whom she was chained. Pestel pressed her to his bosom, and said: “The child is blood of your blood, and I shall regard it as my own.”
The time was speeding dangerously. Holding each other’s hands they went down the stairs. They parted with the promise to write each other daily.
“When he returns from Africa I’ll flee with him on his ship,” Letitia determined, as she rode home slowly across the dark plain. Everything else seemed ugly and a bore to her. “Oh, if only it were to be soon,” she thought in her anxiety and heart-ache. And curiosity stirred in her to know how Pestel would behave and master the dangers and the difficulties involved. She believed in him, and gave herself up to tender and tempting dreams of the future.
In the house her absence had finally been noticed, and servants had been sent out to look for her. She slipped into the house by obscure paths, and then emerged from her room with an air of innocence.
Stettner had returned to Hamburg. His ship was to sail on that very evening. He had several errands in the city, and Christian and Crammon waited for him in order to accompany him to the pier.
Crammon said: “A captain of Hussars who suddenly turns up in mufti—I can’t help it, there’s something desperate aboutit to me. I feel as though I were on a perpetual visit of condolence. After all, he’s déclassé, and I don’t like people in that situation. Social classes are a divine institution; a man who interferes with them wounds his own character. One doesn’t throw up one’s profession the way one tosses aside a rotten apple. These are delicate and difficult matters. Common sense may disregard them; the higher intelligence reverences them. What is he going to do among the Yankees? What good can come of it?”
“He’s a chemist by inclination, and scholarly in his line,” Christian answered. “That will help.”
“What do the Yankees care about that? He’s more likely to catch consumption and be trodden under. He’ll be stripped of pride and dignity. It’s a country for thieves, waiters, and renegades. Did he have to go as far as all this?”
“Yes,” Christian answered, “I believe he did.”
An hour later they and Stettner arrived at the harbour. Cargoes and luggage were still being stowed, and they strolled, Stettner between Crammon and Christian, up and down a narrow alley lined with cotton-bales, boxes, barrels, and baskets. The arc lamps cast radiant light from the tall masts, and a tumult of carts and cranes, motors and bells, criers and whistles rolled through the fog. The asphalt was wet; there was no sky to be seen.
“Don’t forget me wholly here in the old land,” said Stettner. A silence followed.
“I don’t know whether we shall be as well off in the old country in the future as we have been in the past,” said Crammon, who occasionally had pessimistic attacks and forebodings. “Hitherto we haven’t suffered. Our larders and cellars have been well-stocked, nor have the higher needs been neglected. But times are getting worse, and, unless I mistake, clouds are gathering on the political horizon. So I can’t call it a bad idea, my dear Stettner, to slip away quietly and amiably. I only hope that you’ll find some secure position over therefrom which you may calmly watch the spectacle of our débâcle. And when the waves rise very high, you might think of us and have a mass said for us, that is for me, because Christian has been expelled from the bosom of Holy Church.”
Stettner smiled at this speech. But he became serious again at once. “It seems to me too that, in a sense, we’re all trapped here. Yet I have never felt myself so deeply and devotedly a German as at this moment when I am probably leaving my fatherland forever. But in that feeling there is a stab of pain. It seems to me as though I should hurry from one to another and sound a warning. But what to warn them of, or why warn them at all—I don’t know.”
Crammon answered weightily. “My dear old Aglaia wrote me the other day that she had dreamed of black cats all night long. She is deep, she has a prophetic soul, and dreams like that are of evil presage. I may enter a monastery. It is actually within the realm of the possible. Don’t laugh, Christian; don’t laugh, my dearest boy! You don’t know all my possibilities.”
It had not occurred to Christian to laugh.
Stettner stopped and gave his hands to his friends. “Good-bye, Crammon,” he said cordially. “I’m grateful that you accompanied me. Good-bye, dear Christian, good-bye.” He pressed Christian’s hand long and firmly. Then he tore himself away, hastened toward the gang-plank, and was lost in the crowd.
“A nice fellow,” Crammon murmured. “A very nice fellow. What a pity!”
When the car met them Christian said: “I’d like to walk a bit, either back to the hotel or somewhere else. Will you come, Bernard?”
“If you want me, yes. Toddling along is my portion.”
Christian dismissed his car. He had a strange foreboding, as though something fateful were lying in wait for him.
“Ariel’s days here are numbered,” said Crammon. “Duty calls me away. I must look after my two old ladies. Then I must join Franz Lothar in Styria. We’ll hunt heath-cocks. After that I’ve agreed to meet young Sinsheim in St. Moritz. What are your plans, my dear boy?”
“I leave for Berlin to-morrow or the day after.”
“And what in God’s name are you going to do there?”
“I’m going to work.”
Crammon stopped, and opened his mouth very wide. “Work?” he gasped, quite beside himself. “What at? What for, O misguided one?”
“I’m going to take courses at the university, under the faculty of medicine.”
Horrified, Crammon shook his head. “Work ... courses ... medicine.... Merciful Providence, what does this mean? Is there not enough sweat in the world, not enough bungling and half-wisdom and ugly ambition and useless turmoil? You’re not serious.”
“You exaggerate as usual, Bernard,” Christian answered, with a smile. “Don’t always be a Jeremiah. What I’m going to do is something quite simple and conventional. And I’m only going to try. I may not even succeed; but I must try it. So much is sure.”
Crammon raised his hand, lifted a warning index finger, and said with great solemnity: “You are upon an evil path, Christian, upon a path of destruction. For many, many days I have had a presentiment of terrible things. The sleep of my nights has been embittered; a sorrow gnaws at me and my peace has flown. How am I to hunt in the mountains when I know you to be among the Pharisees? How shall I cast my line into clear streams when my inner eye sees you bending over greasy volumes or handling diseased bodies? No wine will glitter beautifully in my glass, no girl’s eyes seem friendly any more, no pear yield me its delicate flavour!”
“Oh, yes, they will,” Christian said, laughing. “More thanthat: I hope you’ll come to see me from time to time, to convince yourself that you needn’t cast me off entirely.”
Crammon sighed. “Indeed I shall come. I must come and soon, else the spirit of evil will get entire control of you. Which may God forbid!”
Johanna told Eva, whom she adored, about her life. Eva thus received an unexpected insight into the grey depths of middle-class existence. The account sounded repulsive. But it was stimulating to offer a spiritual refuge to so much thirst and flight.
She herself often seemed to her own soul like one in flight. But she had her bulwarks. The wind of time seemed cold to her, and when she felt a horror of the busy marionettes whose strings were in her hands, she felt herself growing harder. The friendship which she gave to this devoted girl seemed to her a rest in the mad race of her fate.
They were so intimate that Susan Rappard complained. The latter opened her eyes wide and her jealousy led her to become a spy. She became aware of the relations that had developed between Johanna and Christian.
At dinner there had been much merriment. Johanna had bought a number of peaked, woollen caps. She had wrapped them carefully in white paper, written some witty verses on each bundle, and distributed them as favours to Eva’s guests. No one had been vexed. For despite her mockery and gentle eccentricity, there was a charm about her that disarmed every one.
“How gay you are to-day, Rumpelstilzkin,” Eva said. She, too, used that nickname. The word, which she pronounced with some difficulty, had a peculiar charm upon her lips.
“It is the gaiety that precedes tears,” Johanna answered, and yielded as entirely to her superstitious terror as she had to her jesting mood.
A wealthy ship-owner had invited Eva to view his private picture gallery. His house was in the suburbs. She drove there with Johanna.
Arm in arm they stood before the paintings. And in that absorbed union there was something purifying. Johanna loved it as she loved their common reading of poetry, when they would sit with their cheeks almost touching. Extinguished in her selfless adoration, she forgot what lay behind her—the anxious, sticky, unworthily ambitious life of her family of brokers; she forgot what lay before her—oppression and force, an inevitable and appointed way.
Her gestures revealed a gentle glow of tenderness.
On their way back she seemed pale. “You are cold,” Eva said, and wrapped the robe more firmly about her friend.
Johanna squeezed Eva’s hand gratefully. “How dear of you! I shall always need some one to tell me when I’m hot or cold.”
This melancholy jest moved Eva deeply. “Why do you act so humble?” she cried. “Why do you shrink and hide and turn your vision away from yourself? Why do you not dare to be happy?”
Johanna answered: “Do you not know that I am a Jewess?”
“Well?” Eva asked in her turn. “I know some very extraordinary people who are Jews—some of the proudest, wisest, most impassioned in the world.”
Johanna shook her head. “In the Middle Ages the Jews were forced to wear yellow badges on their garments,” she said. “I wear the yellow badge upon my soul.”
Eva was putting on a tea gown. Susan Rappard was helping her. “What’s new with us, Susan?” Eva asked, and took the clasps out of her hair.
Susan answered: “What is good is not new, and what is new is not good. Your ugly little court fool is having an affair with M. Wahnschaffe. They are very secretive, but there are whispers. I don’t understand him. He is easily andquickly consoled. I have always said that he has neither a mind nor a heart. Now it is plain that he has no eyes either.”
Eva had flushed very dark. Now she became very pale. “It is a lie,” she said.
Susan’s voice was quite dry. “It is the truth. Ask her. I don’t think she’ll deny it.”
Shortly thereafter Johanna slipped into the room. She had on a dress of simple, black velvet which set off her figure charmingly. Eva sat before the mirror. Susan was arranging her hair. She had a book in her hand and read without looking up.
On a chair near the dressing-table lay an open jewel case. Johanna stood before it, smiled timidly, and took out of it a beautifully cut cameo, which she playfully fastened to her bosom; she looked admiringly at a diadem and put it in her hair; she slipped on a few rings and a pearl bracelet over her sleeve. Thus adorned she went, half hesitatingly, half with an air of self-mockery, up to Eva.
Slowly Eva lifted her eyes from the book, looked at Johanna, and asked: “Is it true?” She let a few seconds pass, and then with wider open eyes she asked once more: “Is it true?”
Johanna drew back, and the colour left her cheeks. She suspected and knew and began to tremble.
Then Eva arose and went close up to her and stripped the cameo from the girl’s bosom, the diadem from her hair, the rings from her fingers, the bracelet from her arm, and threw the things back into the case. Then she sat down again, took up her book, and said: “Hurry, Susan! I want to rest a little.”
Johanna’s breath failed her. She looked like one who has been struck. A tender blossom in her heart was crushed forever, and from its sudden withering arose a subtle miasma. Almost on the point of fainting she left the room.
As though to seal the end of a period in her life and warn her of evil things to come, she received within two hours a telegram from her mother which informed her of a catastrophe and urgently summoned her home. Fräulein Grabmeier began packing at once. They were to catch the train at five o’clock in the morning.
From midnight on Johanna sat waiting in Christian’s room. She lit no light. In the darkness she sat beside a table, resting her head in her hands. She did not move, and her eyes were fixed on vacancy.
In the course of their talk Christian and Crammon had wandered farther and farther into the tangled alleys around the harbour. “Let us turn back and seek a way out,” Crammon suggested. “It isn’t very nice here. A damnable neighbourhood, in fact.”
He peered about, and Christian too looked around. When they had gone a few steps farther, they came upon a man lying flat on his belly on the pavement. He struggled convulsively, croaked obscene curses, and shook his fist threateningly toward a red-curtained, brightly lit door.
Suddenly the door opened, and a second man flew out. A paper box, an umbrella, and a derby hat were pitched out after him. He stumbled down the steps with outstretched arms, fell beside the first man, and remained sitting there with heavy eyes.
Christian and Crammon looked in through the open door. In the smoky light twenty or thirty people were crouching. The monotonous crying of a woman became audible. At times it became shriller.
The glass door was flung shut.
“I shall see what goes on in there,” said Christian, and mounted the steps to the door. Crammon had only time to utter a horrified warning. But he followed. The reek ofcheap whiskey struck him as he entered the room behind Christian.
Beside tables and on the floor crouched men and women. In every corner lay people, sleeping or drunk. The eyes which were turned toward the newcomers were glassy. The faces here looked like lumps of earth. The room, with its dirty tables, glasses, and bottles had a colour-scheme of scarlet and yellow. Two sturdy fellows stood behind the bar.
The woman whose crying had penetrated to the street sat on a bench beside the wall. Blood was streaming down her face, and she continued to utter her monotonous and almost bestial whine. In front of her, trying hard to keep erect on legs stretched far apart, stood the huge fellow whom Christian had observed at the public funeral of the murdered harlot. In a hoarse voice, in the extreme jargon of the Berlin populace, he was shouting: “Yuh gonna git what’s comin’ to yuh! I’ll show yuh what’s what! I’ll blow off yer dam’ head-piece’n yuh cin go fetch it in the moon!”
On the threshold of an open door in the rear stood a stout man with innumerable watch-charms dangling across his checked waistcoat. A fat cigar was held between his yellow teeth. He regarded the scene with a superior calm. It was the proprietor of the place. When he saw the two strangers his brows went up. He first took them to be detectives, and hastened to meet them. Then he saw his mistake and was the more amazed. “Come into my office, gentlemen,” he said in a greasy voice, and without removing the cigar. “Come back there, and I’ll give you a drink of something good.” He drew Christian along by the arm. A woman with a yellow head-kerchief arose from the floor, stretched out her arms toward Christian, and begged for ten pfennigs. Christian drew back as from a worm.
An old man tried to prevent the gigantic lout from maltreating the bleeding woman any more. He called him Mesecke and fawned upon him. But Mesecke gave him a blow under thechin that sent him spinning and moaning. Murmurs of protest sounded, but no one dared to offend the giant. The proprietor whispered to Christian: “What he wants is brass; wants her to go on the street again and earn a little. Nothing to be done right now.”
He grasped Crammon by the sleeve too, and drew them both through the door into a dark hall. “I suppose you gentlemen are interested in my establishment?” he asked anxiously. He opened a door and forced them to enter. The room into which they came showed a tasteless attempt at such luxury as is represented by red plush and gilt frames. The place was small, and the furniture stood huddled together. Crossed swords hung above a bunch of peacock feathers, and above the swords the gay cap of a student fraternity. Between two windows stood a slanting desk covered with ledgers. An emaciated man with a yellowish face sat at the desk and made entries in a book. He quivered when the proprietor entered the room, and bent more zealously over his work.
The proprietor said: “I’ve got to take care of you gents or something might happen. When that son of a gun is quiet you can go back and look the place over. I guess you’re strangers here, eh?” From a shelf he took down a bottle. “Brandy,” he whispered. “Prime stuff. You must try it. I sell it by the bottle and by the case. A number one! Here you are!” Crammon regarded Christian, whose face was without any sign of disquiet. With a sombre expression he went to the table and, as though unseeing, touched his lips to the glass which the proprietor had filled. It was a momentary refuge, at all events.
In the meantime a frightful noise penetrated from the outer room. “Fighting again,” said the proprietor, listened for a moment, and then disappeared. The noise increased furiously for a moment. Then silence fell. The book-keeper, without raising his waxy face, said: “Nobody can stand that. It’s that way every night. And the books here show the profits.That man Hillebohm is a millionaire, and he rakes in more and more money without mercy, without compassion. Nobody can stand that.”
The words sounded like those of a madman.
“Are we going to permit ourselves to be locked up here?” Crammon asked indignantly. “It’s rank impudence.”
Christian opened the door, and Crammon drew from his back pocket the Browning revolver that was his constant companion. They passed through the hall and stopped on the threshold of the outer room. Mesecke had vanished. Many arms had finally expelled him. The woman from whom he had been trying to get money was washing the blood from her face. The old man who had been beaten when he had pleaded for her said consolingly: “Don’t yuh howl, Karen. Things’ll get better. Keep up, says I!” The woman hardly listened. She looked treacherous and angry.
A tangle of yellow hair flamed on her head, high as a helmet and unkempt. While she was bleeding she had wiped the blood with her naked hand, and then stained her hair with it.
“You go home now,” the proprietor commanded. “Wash your paws and give our regards to God if you see him. Hurry up, or your sweetheart’ll be back and give you a little more.”
She did not move. “Well, how about it, Karen,” a woman shrilled. “Hurry. D’yuh want some more beating?”
But the woman did not stir. She breathed heavily, and suddenly looked at Christian.
“Come with us,” Christian said unexpectedly. The bar-tenders roared with laughter. Crammon laid a hand of desperate warning on Christian’s shoulder.
“Come with us,” Christian repeated calmly. “We will take you home.”
A dozen glassy eyes stared their mockery. A voice brayed: “Hell, hell, but you’re gettin’ somethin’ elegant.” Another hummed as though scanning verses: “If that don’t kill thebedbugs dead, I dunno what’ll do instead! Don’t yuh be scared, Karen. Hurry! Use your legs!”
Karen got up. She had not taken her shy and sombre eyes from Christian. His beauty overwhelmed her. A crooked, frightened, cynical smile glided over her full lips.
She was rather tall. She had fine shoulders and a well-developed bosom. She was with child—perhaps five months; it was obvious when she stood. She wore a dark green dress with iridescent buttons, and at her neck a flaming red riband fastened by a brooch that represented in silver, set with garnets, a Venetian gondola, and bore the inscription:Ricordo di Venezia. Her shoes were clumsy and muddy. Her hat—made of imitation kid and trimmed with cherries of rubber—lay beside her on the bench. She grasped it with a strange ferocity.
Christian looked at the riband and at the silver brooch with its inscription:Ricordo di Venezia.
Crammon sought to protect their backs. For new guests were coming in—fellows with dangerous faces. He had simply yielded to the inevitable and incomprehensible, and determined to give a good account of himself. He gritted his teeth over the absence of proper police protection, and said to himself: “We won’t get out of this hole alive, old boy.” And he thought of his comfortable hotel-bed, his delicious, fragrant bath, his excellent breakfast, and of the box of chocolates on his table. He thought of young girls who exhaled the fresh sweetness of linen, of all pleasant fragrances, of Ariel’s smile and Rumpelstilzkin’s gaiety, and of the express train that was to have taken him to Vienna. He thought of all these things as though his last hour had come.
Two sailors came in dragging between them a girl who was pale and stiff with drunkenness. Roughly they threw her on the floor. The creature moaned, and had an expression of ghastly voluptuousness, of strange lasciviousness on her face. She lay there stiff as a board. The sailors, with a challenge in their voices, asked after Mesecke. He had evidently met themand complained to them. They wanted to get even with the proprietor. One of them had a scarlet scratch across his forehead; the other’s arms were naked up to his shoulders and tattooed until they were blue all over. The tattooing represented a snake, a winged wheel, an anchor, a skull, a phallus, a scale, a fish, and many other objects.
Both sailors measured Christian and Crammon with impudent glances. The one with the tattooed arms pointed to the revolver in Crammon’s hand, and said: “If you don’t put up that there pistol I’ll make you, by God!”
The other went up to Christian and stood so close to him that he turned pale. Vulgarity had never yet touched him, nor had the obscene things of the gutter splashed his garments. Contempt and disgust arose hotly in him. These might force him to abandon his new road; for they were more terrible than the vision of evil he had had in the house of Szilaghin.
But when he looked into the man’s eyes, he became aware of the fact that the latter could not endure his glance. Those eyes twitched and flickered and fled. And this perception gave Christian courage and a feeling of inner power, the full effectiveness of which was still uncertain.
“Quiet there!” the proprietor roared at the two sailors. “I want order. You want to get the police here, do you? That’d be fine for us all, eh? You’re a bit crazy, eh? The girl can go with the gentlemen, if they’ll pay her score. Two glasses champagne—that’s one mark fifty. And that ends it.”
Crammon laid a two-mark piece on the table. Karen Engelschall had put on her hat, and turned toward the door. Christian and Crammon followed her, and the proprietor followed them with sarcastic courtesy, while the two sturdy bar-tenders formed an additional bodyguard. A few half-drunken men sent the strains of a jeering song behind them.
The street was empty. Karen gazed up and down it, and seemed uncertain in which direction she should go. Crammon asked her where she lived. She answered harshly that shedidn’t want to go home. “Then where shall we take you?” Crammon asked, forcing himself to be patient and considerate. She shrugged her shoulders. “It don’t matter,” she said. Then, after a while, she added defiantly. “I don’t need you.”
They went toward the harbour, Karen between the two men. For a moment she stopped and murmured with a shudder of fear: “But I mustn’t run into him. No, I mustn’t.”
“Will you suggest something then?” Crammon said to her. His impulse was simply to decamp, but for Christian’s sake, and in the hope of saving him uninjured from this mesh of adventures, he played the part of interest and compassion.
Karen Engelschall did not answer, but hurried more swiftly as she caught sight of a figure in the light of a street lamp. Until she was beyond its vision she gasped with terror.
“Shall we give you money?” Crammon asked again.
She answered furiously: “I don’t need your money. I want no money.” Surreptitiously she gazed at Christian, and her face grew malicious and stubborn.
Crammon went over beside Christian, and spoke to him in French. “The best thing would be to take her to an inn where she can get a room and a bed. We can deposit a sum of money there, so that she is sheltered for a while. Then she can help herself.”
“Quite right. That will be best,” Christian replied. And, as though he could not bear to address her, he added: “Tell her that.”
Karen stopped. She lifted her shoulders as though she were cold, and said in a hoarse voice: “Leave me alone. What are you two talking about? I won’t walk another step. I’m tired. Don’t pay no attention to me!” She leaned against the wall of a house, and her hat was pushed forward over her forehead. She was as sorry and dissipated a looking object as one could possibly imagine.
“Isn’t that the sign of an inn?” Crammon asked and pointed to an illuminated sign at the far end of the street.
Christian, who had very keen eyes, looked and answered: “Yes. It says ‘King of Greece.’ Do go and inquire.”
“A lovely neighbourhood and a lovely errand,” Crammon said plaintively. “I am paying for my sins.” But he went.
Christian remained with the woman, who looked down silently and angrily. Her fingers scratched at her riband. Christian listened to the beating of the tower-clock. It struck two. At last Crammon reappeared. He beckoned from a distance and cried: “Ready.”
Christian addressed the girl for the first time. “We’ve found a shelter for you,” he said, a little throatily, and, quite contrary to his wont, blinked his eyes. His own voice sounded disagreeably in his ears. “You can stay there for some days.”
She looked at him with eyes that glowed with hatred. An indescribable but evil curiosity burned in her glance. Then she lowered her eyes again. Christian was forced to speak again: “I think you will be safe from that man there. Try to rest. Perhaps you are ill. We could summon a physician.”
She laughed a soft, sarcastic laugh. Her breath smelt of whiskey.
Crammon called out again.
“Come on then,” Christian said, mastering his aversion with difficulty.
His voice and his words made the same overwhelming impression on her that his appearance had done. She started to go as though she were being propelled from behind.
A sleepy porter in slippers stood at the door of the inn. His servile courtesy proved that Crammon had known how to treat him. “Number 14 on the second floor is vacant,” he said.
“Send some one to your lodgings to-morrow for your things,” Crammon advised the girl.
She did not seem to hear him. Without a word of thanks or greeting she followed the porter up the soiled red carpet of the stairs. The rubber cherries tapped audibly against thebrim of her hat. Her clumsy form disappeared in the blackness.
Crammon breathed a sigh of relief. “My kingdom for a four-wheeler,” he moaned. At a nearby corner they found a cab.
When Christian entered his room and switched on the electric light, he was surprised to find Johanna sitting at the table. She shaded her eyes from the sudden glare. He remained at the door. His frown disappeared when he saw the deadly pallor of the girl’s face.
“I must leave,” Johanna breathed. “I’ve received a telegram and I must start for Vienna at once.”
“I am about to leave, too,” Christian answered.
For a while there was silence. Then Johanna said: “Shall I see you again? Will you want me to? Dare I?” Her timid questions showed the old division of her soul. She smiled a smile of patience and renunciation.
“I shall be in Berlin,” Christian answered. “I don’t know yet where I shall live. But whenever you want to know, ask Crammon. He is easily reached. His two old ladies send him all letters.”
“If you desire it, I can come to Berlin,” Johanna said with the same patient and resigned smile. “I have relatives there. But I don’t think that you do desire it.” Then, after a pause, during which her gentle eyes wandered aimlessly, she said: “Then is this to be the end?” She held her breath; she was taut as a bow-string.
Christian went up to the table and rested the index finger of one hand on its top. With lowered head he said slowly: “Don’t demand a decision of me. I cannot make one. I should hate to hurt you. I don’t want something to happen again that has happened so often before in my life. If you feel impelled to come—come! Don’t consider me. Don’t think,above all, that I would then leave you in the lurch. But just now is a critical time in my life. More I cannot say.”
Johanna could gather nothing but what was hopeless for herself from these words. Yet through them there sounded a note that softened their merely selfish regretfulness. With a characteristically pliant gesture, she stretched out her arm to Christian. Her pose was formal and her smile faint, as she said: “Then, au revoir—perhaps!”
When the girl had gone, Christian lay down on the sofa and folded his hands beneath his head. Thus he lay until dawn. He neither switched off the light nor did he close his eyes.
He saw the paintless stairs that led to the den where he had been and the red carpet of the inn soiled by many feet; he saw the lamp in the desolate street and the watch charms on the proprietor’s waistcoat; he saw the brandy bottle on the shelf, and the green shawl of one of the drunken women, and the tattooed symbols on the sailor’s naked arm: the anchor, the winged wheel, the phallus, the fish, the snake; he saw the rubber cherries on the prostitute’s hat and the silver brooch with the garnets and the foolish motto:Ricordo di Venezia.
And more and more as he thought of these things they awakened in him an ever surer feeling of freedom and of liberation, and seemed to release him from other things that he had hitherto loved, the rare and precious things that he had loved so exclusively and fruitlessly. And they seemed to release him likewise from men and women whose friendship or love had been sterile in the end.
As he lay there and gazed into space, he lived in these poor and mean things, and all fruitless occupations and human relationships lost their importance; and even the thought of Eva ceased to torment him and betray him into fruitless humiliation.
That radiant and regal creature allured him no more, when he thought of the blood-stained face of the harlot. For thelatter aroused in him a feeling akin to curiosity that gradually filled his soul so entirely that it left room for nothing else.
Toward dawn he slumbered for an hour. Then he arose, and bathed his face in cold water, left the hotel, hired a cab, and drove to the inn called “The King of Greece.”
The nightwatchman was still at his post. He recognized this early guest and guided him with disagreeable eagerness up two flights of stairs to the room of Karen Engelschall.
Christian knocked. There was no answer. “You just go in, sir,” said the porter. “There ain’t no key and the latch don’t work. All kinds of things will happen, and it’s better for us to have the doors unlocked.”
Christian entered. It was a room with ugly brown furnishings, a dark-red plush sofa, a round mirror with a crack across its middle, an electric bulb at the end of a naked wire, and a chromo-lithograph of the emperor. Everything was dusty, worn, shabby, used-up, poor and mean.
Karen Engelschall lay in the bed asleep. She was on her back, and her dishevelled hair looked like a bundle of straw; her face was pale and a little puffy. Recent scars showed on her forehead and right cheek. Her full but flaccid breasts protruded above the coverings.
His old and violent dislike of sleeping people stirred in Christian, but he mastered it and regarded her face. He wondered from what social class she had come, whether she was a sailor’s or a fisherman’s daughter, a girl of the lower middle-classes, of the proletariat or the peasantry. Thus his curiosity employed his mind for a while until he became fully aware of the indescribable perturbation of that face. It was as void of evil as of good; but as it lay there it seemed distraught by the unheard of torment of its dreams. Then Christian thought of the carnelian on Mesecke’s hand, and the repulsively red stone which was like a beetle or a piece of raw flesh became extraordinarily vivid to him.
He made a movement and knocked against a chair; the noiseawakened Karen Engelschall. She opened her lids, and fear and horror burned in her eyes when she observed a figure in her room; her features became distorted with fury, and her mouth rounded itself for a cry. Then she saw who the intruder was, and with a sigh of relief slid back among the pillows. Her face reassumed its expression of stubbornness and of enforced yielding. She watched, not knowing what to make of this visit, and seemed to wonder and reflect. She drew the covers up under her chin, and smiled a shallow, flattered smile.
Involuntarily Christian’s eyes looked for the red riband and the silver brooch. The girl’s garments had been flung pell-mell on a chair. The hat with the rubber cherries lay on the table.
“Why do you stand?” Karen Engelschall asked in a cheerful voice. “Sit down.” Again, as in the night, his splendour and distinction overwhelmed her. Smiling her empty smile, she wondered whether he was a baron or a count. She had slept soundly and felt refreshed.
“You cannot stay in this house very long,” Christian said courteously. “I have considered what had better be done for you. Your condition requires care. You must not expose yourself to the brutality of that man. It would be best if you left the city.”
Karen Engelschall laughed a harsh laugh. “Leave the city? How’s that going to be done? Girls like me have to stay where they are.”
“Has any one a special claim on you?” Christian asked.
“Claim? Why? How do you mean? Oh, I see. No, no. It’s the way things are in our business. The feller to whom you give your money, he protects you, and the others mind him. If he’s strong and has many friends you’re safe. They’re all rotten, but you got no choice. You get no rest day or night, and your flesh gets tired, I can tell you.”
“I can imagine that,” Christian replied, and for a second looked into Karen’s round and lightless eyes, “and for that reason I wanted to put myself at your disposal. I shall leaveHamburg either to-day or to-morrow, and probably stay in Berlin for some months. I am ready to take you with me. But you must not delay your decision, because I have not yet any address in Berlin, I don’t know yet where I shall live, and if a plan like this is delayed it is usually not carried out at all. At the moment you have eluded your pursuer, and so the opportunity to escape is good. You don’t need to send for your things. I can get you whatever you need when we arrive.”
Those words, spoken with real friendliness, did not have the effect which Christian expected. Karen Engelschall could not realize the simplicity and frankness of their intention. A mocking suspicion arose in her mind. She knew of Vice Crusaders and Preachers of Salvation; and these men her world as a rule fears as much as it does the emissaries of the police. But she looked at Christian more sharply, and an instinct told her that she was on the wrong track. Clumsily considering, she drifted to other suppositions that had a tinge of cheap romance. She thought of plots and kidnapping and a possible fate more terrible than that under the heel of her old tormentor. She brooded over these thoughts in haste and rage, with convulsed features and clenched fist, passing from fear to hope and from hope to distrust, and yet, even as on the day before, compelled by something irresistible, a force from which she could not withdraw and which made her struggles futile.
“What do you want to do with me?” she asked, and gave him a penetrating glance.
Christian considered in order to weigh his answer carefully. “Nothing but what I have told you.”
She became silent and stared at her hands. “My mother lives in Berlin,” she murmured. “Maybe you’d want me to go back to her. I don’t want to.”
“You are to go with me.” Christian’s tone was firm and almost hard. His chest filled with breath and exhaled the air painfully. The final word had been spoken.
Karen looked at him again. But now her eyes were seriousand awake to reality. “And what shall I do when I’m with you?”
Christian answered hesitatingly: “I’ve come to no decision about that. I must think it over.”
Karen folded her hands. “But I’ve got to know who you are.”
He spoke his name.
“I am a pregnant woman,” she said with a sombre look, and for the first time her voice trembled, “a street-walker who’s pregnant. Do you know that? I’m the lowest and vilest thing in the whole world! Do you know that?”
“I know it,” said Christian, and cast down his eyes.
“Well, what does a fine gentleman like you want to do with me? Why do you take such an interest in me?”
“I can’t explain that to you at the moment,” Christian answered diffidently.
“What am I to do? Go with you? Right away?”
“If you are willing, I shall call for you at two, and we can drive to the station.”
“And you won’t be ashamed of me?”
“No, I shall not be ashamed.”
“You know how I look? Suppose people point their fingers at the whore travelling with such an elegant gentleman?”
“It does not matter what people do.”
“All right. I’ll wait for you.” She crossed her arms over her breast and stared at the ceiling and did not stir. Christian arose and nodded and went out. Nor did Karen move when he was gone. A deep furrow appeared on her forehead, the fresh scars gleamed like burns upon her earthy skin, a dull and primitive amazement turned her eyes to stone.
When Christian crossed the reception room of the hotel he saw Crammon sitting sadly in a chair. Christian stopped andsmiled and held out his hand. “Did you sleep well, Bernard?” he asked.
“If that were my only difficulty I should not complain,” Crammon answered. “I always sleep well. The troubles begin when I’m awake. Age with his stealing steps! The old pleasures no longer sting, the old delights are worn out. One counts on gratitude and affection, and gets care and disappointment. I think a monastery would be the best place for me. I must look into that plan more closely.”
Christian laughed. “Come now, Bernard, you would be a very unsuitable person in a monastery. Drive the black thoughts away and let us have breakfast.”
“All right, let us have breakfast.” Crammon arose. “Have you any idea why poor Rumpelstilzkin suddenly fled by night? She had bad news from home, I am told, but that’s no reason why she should have gone without a word. It was not nice or considerate. And in a few hours Ariel too will be lost to us. Her rooms are filled with cases and boxes, and M. Chinard is bursting with self-importance. Black clouds are over us, and all our lovely rainbows fade. This caviare, by the way, is excellent. I shall withdraw into an utterly private life. Perhaps I shall hire a secretary, either a man or a fat, appetizing, and discreet woman, and begin to dictate my memoirs. You, my dear fellow, seem in more excellent spirits than for a long time.”
“Yes, excellent,” Christian said, and his smile revealed his beautiful teeth. “Excellent!” he repeated, and held out his hand to his astonished friend.
“So you have finally become reconciled to your loss?” he winked, and pointed upward with a significant gesture.
Christian guessed his meaning. “Entirely,” he said cheerily. “I’m completely recovered.”
“Bravo!” said Crammon, and, comfortably eating, he philosophized: “It would be saddening were it otherwise. I repeat what I have often said: Ariel was born for the stars. There are blessed stars and fateful stars. Some are inhabited by good spirits, others by demons. We have known that from times immemorial. Let them wage their battles among themselves. If it comes to collisions and catastrophes, it is a cosmic matter in which we mortals have no share. When all is said and done, you are but a mortal too, though one so blessed that you were even granted a stay in the happy hunting grounds of the gods. But excesses are evil. You cannot compete with Muscovite autocrats. Siegfried can conquer the dragons in the end; were Lucifer to attack him with fire-breathing steeds, the hero would but risk his skin in vain. Your renunciation is as wise as it is delightful. I drink to your pleasant future, dearest boy!”
Christian went to a buffet where magnificent fruit was exposed for sale. He knew Crammon’s passionate delight in rare and lovely fruit. He selected a woven basket and placed in the middle a pine-apple cut open so that its golden inside showed. He surrounded it with a wreath of flawless apples and of great, amber-coloured peaches from the South of France. They were elastic and yet firm. He added seven enormous clusters of California grapes. He arranged the fruit artistically, carried the basket to Crammon, and presented it to him with jesting solemnity.
They separated. When, late that afternoon, Crammon returned to the hotel, he learned to his bitter amazement that Christian had left.
He could not compose himself. It seemed to him that he was the victim of some secret cabal. “They all leave me in the lurch,” he murmured angrily to himself; “they make a mock of me. It’s like an epidemic. You are through with life, Bernard Gervasius, you are in every one’s way. Go to your cell and bemoan your fate.”
He ordered his valet to pack, and to secure accommodations on the train to Vienna. Then he placed the basket of fruit onthe table, and in his sad reflections plucked berry after berry of the grape.
In his quiet little house, furnished in the style of the age of Maria Theresa, he forgot what he had suffered. He lived an idyl.
He accompanied the two pious ladies to church, and out of considerateness and kindness to them even prayed occasionally. His chief prayer was: Lord, forgive those who have trespassed against me and lead me not into temptation. On sunny afternoons the carriage appeared and took the three for a ride through the parks. In the evening the bill of fare for the following day was determined on, and the national and traditional dishes were given the preference. Then he read to the devoutly attentive Misses Aglaia and Constantine classical poems: a canto of Klopstock’s “Messiah,” Schiller’s “Walk,” or something by Rückert. And he still imitated the voice and intonation of Edgar Lorm. Also he related harmless anecdotes connected with his life; and he adorned and purified them so that they would have been worthy of a schoolgirl’s library.
Not till the two ladies had retired did he light his short pipe or pour himself out a glass of cognac; he practised reminiscence or introspection, or became absorbed in his little museum of treasures, which he had gathered during many years.
Shortly before his proposed meeting with Franz Lothar von Westernach, he received an alarming letter from Christian’s mother.
Frau Wahnschaffe informed him that Christian had ordered all his possessions to be sold—Christian’s Rest, Waldleiningen, the hunting lodge, the stables and kennels, the motor cars, the collections, including the wonderful collection of rings. This incomprehensible plan was actually being carried out, and no one had an inkling of the motive. She herself was in theutmost despair, and begged Crammon for some explanation and, if possible, to come to the castle. She besought him in God’s name for some hint in regard to Christian’s actions and state of mind. No news of her son had reached her for weeks; he seemed lost, and they were groping in the dark. The family did not, of course, desire his possessions to pass into the hands of strangers, and would bid in everything, although it was both difficult and hateful to oppose the impudent offers and the tricky manœuvres which the auction ordered by Christian would entail. Above all, however, there was her personal anxiety about Christian. She expected Crammon to stand by her in her hour of need, and justify the high opinion she had formed both of his friendship for her son and of his attachment to her family.
Crammon re-read the lines that mentioned the sale of Christian’s Rest and of the collections. He shook his head long and sadly, pressed his chin into his hands, and two large tears rolled down his cheeks.
END OF VOL. I