Her burning eyes were fixed on Girke, but in reality she saw him no longer. She was no longer speaking to this unknown man, whose professional curiosity left her quite unmoved. She was relieving herself by breaking the convulsive silence of her lonely days. Her hands lay on her lap like empty shells, and the child’s garment had slipped to the floor. Her tongue was unleashed. The words poured forth—words born of her brooding, words familiar to her through many days and nights of strangeness and amazement. In her voice there was something metallic, and in her face the slack muscles grew taut.
Girke listened tensely and took mental notes. He noticed that he need ask no questions now. The machine, fed by a secret fire, had started itself.
Karen went on: “He comes here and sits down and looks around. He sits down and opens a book and studies. Thenhe puts the book away and looks around again. Then he notices me sudden like, as if I’d just been blown in. If only he don’t begin asking questions again, I says to myself. Then I say to him: ‘There was a big noise in the street to-day.’ Or I say: ‘Isolde’s hands are swollen; we got to have some ointment. My mother was here,’ I says maybe, ‘and told me of a place on Alexander Square where you can buy linen cheap.’ He just nods. Then I put on the water for the coffee, and he tells me how a mangy dog followed him for a long time and how he fed it, and that he’d been to a workingmen’s meeting in Moabit and had talked to some people. But he don’t tell me much, and acts kind of ashamed. I’m satisfied so long as he don’t ask questions. But his eyes get that expression in ’em, and then he asks if my time wasn’t coming soon,”—brutally she pointed to her distended body—“and if I wasn’t glad, and how it was the other times, and if I was glad then, and if I’d like to have this or that. And he brings me apples and cake and chocolate and a shawl and a fur-piece for my neck. ‘Look, Karen,’ he says, ‘what I’ve brought you,’ and he kisses my hand. Kisses my hand, I tell you, ’sif I was God knows what, and he didn’t know about me. Did you ever hear of anybody kissing the hand of a woman like me?”
She was pale as she asked the question; her features were distorted, and the helmet of her yellow hair seemed to rise. Girke’s eyes became blank and stony. “Very remarkable,” he murmured; “most interesting.”
Karen paid no attention to him. “‘How are you, Karen?’” she mocked Christian’s voice. “‘Do you want for anything?’ What should I be wanting? So I get desperate and I says: ‘A runner for the floor or cretonne curtains for the bedroom. Red cretonne,’ I says, ‘because it pops into my mind. Sometimes we go out together to Humboldthain or the Oranienburger Gate. He thinks to himself and smiles and says nothing. The people stare and I get a goose-flesh. I’d like to scream out at’em: ‘Yes, there he is, the great man, that’s him walking with me. And this is me—a woman of the streets that’s going to have a baby. A fine couple, eh? Mighty fine! We’re a grand couple, we are!’ Sometimes that Voss comes and they talk in the other room; or anyhow Voss talks. He knows how to, too; better’n any preacher. And once there was a baron here, a young blond fellow. That was a funny business. He took to crying, and cried and cried like a child. Christian said nothing, but just sat down by him. You never know what he’s thinking. Sometimes he walks up and down the room, and other times he’ll stand and look out of the window. I don’t know where he goes, and I don’t know where he comes from. Mother says I’m a fool. She says she’s going to find out what’s what. If she smells money she sticks like a burr. Only I wish she hadn’t sicked Niels Heinrich on to me. He gets more shameless all the time. I get scared when I hear him on the stairs. He begins to cut up rough in the hall. Last Monday he was here and wanted money. ‘I got none,’ I says, ‘you go to work.’ He’s learned bricklaying and can earn good money, but doing nothing suits him better. He told me to shut my trap or he’d lay me out. Just then Christian came in. Niels Heinrich glares at him. My legs was shaking, and I draws Christian aside and says: ‘He wants brass.’ Christian didn’t know what I meant. So I says: ‘Money.’ And he gave him money, gave him a cool hundred, and turned and went out. Niels Heinrich followed him; I thought there’d be a fight. Nothing happened; but it was a nasty business. I can’t get the scare out of my bones.”
She stopped and panted for breath.
Girke thought it his duty to interpolate: “We have accumulated sufficient evidence to prove that Niels Heinrich pursues him with demands for money.”
Karen scarcely listened. Her face grew darker and darker. She put her hands against her breast, arose clumsily, and looked around in the room. Her feet were turned inward andher abdomen protruded. “He comes and he goes, he comes and he goes,” she complained, in a voice that gradually became almost a scream. “That’s the way it is, day out and day in. If only he wouldn’t ask questions. It makes me feel hot and cold. It’s like being searched by a matron. D’you know how that is? Everything’s turned inside out and everything’s handled. Awful! And I ought to try to be comfortable here; there’s nothing better in the world. When you’ve been kicked around like some stinking animal, you ought to thank God to have a chance to breathe easy. But to sit and wait and tell how things was at this place and at that, and how this thing happened and the other—no, I can’t stand it no more! It’s too much! It’s like splitting a person’s head open!” She struck her fist against her temple. She seemed an animal, an animal with all the ugliness of a human soul dead or distorted, a wicked savage awakened now and untamable.
Girke was confounded. He got up, and pushed the chair, both as a protection and a weapon, between the woman and himself. He said: “I won’t take up more of your time. I beg you to consider my proposition carefully. I shall drop in again some time.” He went with a sensation as of danger at his back.
Karen hardly observed that she was alone in the room. She brooded. Her thinking processes were primitive. Two uncertainties tormented her to the point of morbidness and rage: What impelled Christian to search her soul and past, again and again, with the same patience, kindliness, and curiosity? And what inexplicable force made her answer, explain, relate, and give an accounting of her life?
Every time he began she struggled, but she always yielded to that force. She always began by turning her face in horror from her own past. But soon she was forced by an implacable power to embrace that vision, and everything that she had experienced, everything that had vanished, all that was desolate, turbid, dark, and dangerous reappeared with an incomparable vividness. It was her own life, and yet seemed another’s, who was herself and yet some one else. It seemed to her that all those desolate, turbid, dark, dangerous things began over again, doubly terrible, with a foreknowledge of each day’s disconsolate end.
Forgotten things and places plagued her and emerged terribly from her consciousness: rooms and beds and walls, cities and streets and street-corners and public houses and dark halls that led to police courts; human beings and words, and certain hours and days and tears and cries; and all terrors and degradations and crimes, all mockery and wild laughter—all this came back to her, and the past arose and lacerated her mind.
It was like being in an inconceivably long shaft through which one had already passed. And now one was commanded to retrace one’s steps and fetch something that one had forgotten. One resisted desperately and struggled against the command, but in vain. One had to turn back to search for that forgotten thing without knowing what it was. And as one wandered along, a figure met one from the opposite direction, and that other figure was one’s very self. One was inclined to believe in a mirror and its image. But that other self was lacerated; its breast was torn open, and within it one saw the crimson gleaming of a naked heart.
What was it? What did it all mean?
She fell back on the chair with a deep moan, and covered her face with her hands. Oh, he should be made to pay dearly for it—that tormentor of hers.
The darkness crept in and blotted out her form.
Amadeus Voss said to Christian: “I’ll tell you exactly how you feel. You are like a man who wants to harden himself to bear cold, and suddenly strips off his garments; or like one whohas never drunk whiskey nor even smelt it, and suddenly pours down a bottle of the vilest sort. But you are freezing in the cold, and reeling from the liquor. And that is not the worst. The worst is that you feel a secret horror. And how could it be otherwise? The elements of which you are made are in bitter conflict with your will. You are full of horror and will not confess it to yourself. Your hands are touching a hundred things, dirty and common and ugly, that once did not so much as enter the circle of your life. Now you sit and look at your nails that are still well manicured. You look at them with disgust, and you cannot bring yourself to touch the glass that greasy lips have touched and calloused hands have held. Yes, you are sorriest of all for your hands. And of what avail is the whole experiment so long as you feel sorry for your hands? Do you think you really lie on that bed and rest on that sofa?”
“I believe I do, Amadeus.”
“You are wrong. When the nights are cold, is it really you who stir the fire in that stove?”
“Who else? I’ve even learned how to do it.”
“And is it you who light the kerosene lamp, you whose light pressure made the lustres in palaces to radiate? No, it is not your real self. Think of that smoky ceiling. How restless you must be, and how shaken by aversion! Can you really sleep there? And is not your awakening ghastly? You go about among the poor, but your clothes are handsome; any one can see that a good tailor made them, and that they were pressed recently. It makes those people grin and feel cheated, for in their eyes the greatest cheat is a rich man who apes the poor. They will not take you seriously, though you were to throw your whole fortune into the river or were to wander among them in rags. You only embitter them, and they take your mood for a deception and a morbid whim. You don’t know them. You do not know the utter raggedness of their souls; you do not know what they have lacked and havebeen forced to lack for generations, nor how they hate you for the bitterness of that necessity. You do not know their interests, nor their thought, nor their speech. And they will never, never comprehend that a man can renounce that which is the very blood of all their hopes and wishes, the essence of their dreams, their envy and their rancour. They toil for ten, twenty, thirty years, to have breath and food in their belly. And you expect them to believe that all you ask is a little breath and food—you, to whom they were hitherto but nameless beasts of burden, you for whom they sent their sons into mines and their daughters into the streets and hospitals, for whom their lungs were corroded by the fumes of mercury and the shavings of steel, for whom hundreds of thousands were sacrificed in the dumb heat of those daily battles which the proletarian fights with capital, sacrificed as stokers and masons, weavers and smiths, glass-blowers and machine-hands, all wage-slaves of your own? What do you hope to accomplish? With what powers of the spirit are you reckoning? What space of time do you give yourself? You are but a gamester, nothing but a gamester; and so far you are but playing with counters, without knowing whether you will ever be able to redeem them.”
“All that you say is true,” Christian replied.
“Well, then?”
“I cannot do otherwise than I am doing.”
“Not a week ago such a horror of that place seized you that you fled to the Hotel Westminster to spend the night there.”
“It is true, Amadeus. How do you know it?”
“Never mind that. Do you want to smother your very soul in horror? See to it that you leave a way of escape for yourself. These Engelschalls, mother and son, will make your life a veritable hell. If you fall into their snares, you’ll be worse off than some poor devil in the hands of usurers. Surely you’re not deceived in regard to the character of thatcrowd? A child would know what they are after. I warn you. They and others like them—the longer you live with them, the nearer will they bring you to despair.”
“I am not afraid, Amadeus,” Christian said. “One thing I don’t understand,” he added gently, “and it is that you of all people would deter me from doing what I feel to be right and necessary.”
Voss answered with intense passion. “You threw me a plank so that I might save myself and reach the shore. Will you thrust me back into the abyss before I feel the firm earth beneath my feet? Be what you really are! Don’t turn into a shadow before my very eyes! If you withdraw the plank, I cannot tell what will become of either of us.”
His face was horribly distorted, and his clenched hands shook.
In his increasing oppression and confusion of mind, surrounded by hostility, mockery, and unbelief, the face of Ivan Becker appeared to Christian like a beautiful vision. Suddenly he knew that in some sense he had been waiting for Becker and counting on him.
He was heavily burdened, and it seemed to him that Becker was the one human being who could ease that burden. At times he was near despair. But whenever he thought of the words and the voice of Becker and those hours of the beginning of his present path—hours between darkness and dawn—his faith would return.
To him Becker’s word was the word of man, and Becker’s eye the eye of the race; and the man himself one upon whom one could cast all one’s own burdens and fetters and obstacles.
That vision grew clearer and clearer. Becker became a figure with an abyss in his breast, an inverted heaven, in which the tormenting and the heavy things of the world could be cast, and in which they became invisible.
He sent a telegram to Prince Wiguniewski requesting Becker’s present address. The reply informed him that, in all likelihood, Becker was in Geneva.
Christian made all preparations to go to Switzerland.
Karen gave birth to a boy.
At six o’clock in the morning she called Isolde Schirmacher and bade her go for the midwife. When she was alone she screamed so piercingly that a young girl from a neighbouring flat hastened in to ask what ailed her. This girl was the daughter of a Jewish salesman who went about the city taking orders for a thread mill. Her name was Ruth Hofmann. She was about sixteen. She had dark grey eyes and ash-blond hair that fell loose to her shoulders, where it was evenly clipped and made little attempts to curl.
Isolde in her haste had left the hall-door open, and Ruth Hofmann had been able to enter. Her pale face grew a shade paler when she caught sight of the screaming and writhing woman. She had never yet seen a woman in labour. Yet she grasped Karen’s hands and held them firmly in her own, and spoke to the suffering woman in a sweet and soothing voice until the midwife came.
When Christian arrived, a cradle stood by Karen’s bed, and on its pillows lay an unspeakably ugly little creature. Karen nursed the child herself; but no maternal happiness was to be seen in her. A sombre contempt lay in the very way in which she handled the infant. If it cried, she gave it to Isolde Schirmacher. The odour of diapers filled the room.
On the second day Karen was up and about again. When Christian came that evening, he found the widow Engelschall and Ruth Hofmann. The widow Engelschall said that she would take the child into her care. Karen cast an uncertain glance at Christian. The woman said in a loud tone:“Five thousand marks for the care of it, and everything’s settled. What you need is rest, and then you’ll have it.”
“Far’s I’m concerned you can do what you please,” said Karen peevishly.
“What do you think, Herr Wahnschaffe?” The widow Engelschall turned to Christian.
He replied: “It seems to me that a child should stay with its mother.”
Karen gave a dry laugh, in which her mother joined. Ruth Hofmann arose. Christian asked her courteously whether she had any request to make. She shook her head so that her hair moved a little. Suddenly she gave him her hand, and it seemed to Christian as though he had long known her.
He had already told Karen that he was leaving the city for a time; but he postponed his departure a whole week.
The house was slowly turning in for the night. Heavy trucks rattled on the street. Boys whistled piercingly. The outer door was closed thunderously. The walls shook with the tread of a hundred feet. In the yard some one was driving nails into a box. Somewhere a discordant voice was singing. Tumult arose from the public houses at the corners. A bestial laugh sounded from above.
Christian opened the window. It was warm. Groups of workingmen came from Malmöer Street and scattered. At one corner there was a green-grocer’s shop. In front of it stood an old woman with a lidless basket, in which there were dirty vegetables and a dead chicken with a bloody neck. Christian could see these things, because the light of the street lamp fell on them.
“She’ll take the child for four thousand,” said Karen.
Surreptitiously Christian glanced at the cradle. The infantboth repelled and attracted him. “You had better keep it,” he said.
Hollow tones could be heard from the adjoining flat. Hofmann had come home. He was talking, and a clear boyish treble answered him.
The clock ticked. Gradually the confused noises of the house blended into a hum.
Karen sat down at the table and strung glass beads. Her hair had recently become even yellower and more touselled; but her features had a firmer modelling. Her face, no longer swollen and puffed from drinking, was slimmer and showed purer tints.
She looked at Christian, and, for a moment, she had an almost mad feeling; she yearned to know some yearning. It was like the glowing of a last spark in an extinguished charcoal stove.
The spark crimsoned and died.
“You were going to tell me about Hilde Karstens and your foster-father, Karen,” Christian said persuasively. “You made a promise.”
“For God’s sake, leave me alone! It’s so long ago I can’t remember about it!” She almost whined the words. She held her head between her hands and rested her elbows on her knees. Her sitting posture always had a boastful lasciviousness. Thus women sit in low public houses.
Minutes passed. Christian sat down at the table facing her. “I want to give the brat away,” she said defiantly. “I can’t stand looking at it. Come across with the four thousand—do! I can’t, I just can’t bear looking at it!”
“But strangers will let the child sicken and perhaps die,” said Christian.
A grin, half coarse and half sombre, flitted across her face. Then she grew pale. Again she saw that mirrored image of herself: it came from afar, from the very end of the shaft. She shivered, and Christian thought she was cold. He wentfor a shawl and covered her shoulders. His gestures, as he did so, had something exquisitely chivalrous about them. Karen asked for a cigarette. She smoked as one accustomed to it, and the way she held the cigarette and let the smoke roll out of her mouth or curl out from between pointed lips was also subtly lascivious.
Again some minutes passed. She was evidently struggling against the confession. Her nervous fingers crushed one of the glass beads.
Then suddenly she spoke: “There’s many that isn’t born at all. Maybe we’d love them. Maybe only the bad ones are born because we’re too low to deserve the good ones. When I was a little girl I saw a boy carry seven kittens in a sack to the pool to drown ’em. I was right there when he spilled them into the water. They struggled like anything and came up again and tried to get to land. But as soon as one of the little heads came up, the boy whacked at it with a stick. Six of ’em drowned, and only the ugliest of ’em managed to get into a bush and get away. The others that was drowned—they was pretty and dainty.”
“You’re bleeding,” said Christian. The broken bead had cut her hand. Christian wiped the blood with his handkerchief. She let him do it quietly, while her gaze was fixed on old visions that approached and receded. The tension was such that Christian dared scarcely breathe. Upon his lips hovered that strange, equivocal smile that always deceived men concerning his sympathies.
He said softly: “You have something definite in mind now, Karen.”
“Yes, I have,” she said, and she turned terribly pale. “You wanted to know how it was with Hilde Karstens and with the cabinet-maker. He was the man with whom my mother was living at that time. Hilde was fifteen and I was thirteen. She and I was good friends, together all the time, even on the dunes one night when the spring-tide came. The men werewild after her. Lord, she was pretty and sweet. But she laughed at ’em. She said: ‘When I’m eighteen I’m going to marry a man—a real man that can do things; till then, just don’t bother me.’ I didn’t go to the dance at the ‘Jug of Hösing’; I had to stay home and help mother pickle fish. That’s when it all happened. I could never find out how Hilde Karstens got to the mounds on the heath alone. Maybe she went willingly with the pilot’s mate. It was a pilot’s mate; that’s all we ever knew about him. He was at the ‘Jug’ for the first time that night, and, of course, he wasn’t never seen again. It was by the mounds that he must have attacked her and done her the mischief, ’cause otherwise she wouldn’t have walked out into the sea. I knew Hilde Karstens; she was desperate. That evening the waves washed her body ashore. I was there. I threw myself down and grasped her wet, dead hair. They separated me from her, but I threw myself down again. It took three men to get me back home. Mother locked me up and told me to sift lentils, but I jumped out of the window and ran to Hilde’s house. They said she’d been buried. I ran to the church yard and looked for her grave. The grave-digger showed it to me far off in a corner. They looked for me all night and found me by the grave and dragged me home. Half the village turned out to see. Because I’d run away from the lentils my mother beat me with a spade handle so that my skin peeled from my flesh. And while I lay there and couldn’t stir, she went to the schoolmaster, and they wrote a letter to the squire asking if he wouldn’t take me to work on the estate. The house was empty, and the cabinet-maker came into the kitchen where I was lying. He was drunk as a lord. He saw me stretched out there by the hearth, and stared and stared. Then he picked me up and carried me into the bedroom.”
She stopped and looked about as though she were in a strange place and as though Christian were a menacing stranger.
“He tore off my clothes, my skirts and my bodice and my shirt and everything, and his hands shook. In his eyes there was a sparkling like burning alcohol. And when I lay naked before him he stroked me with his trembling hands over and over again. I felt as if I’d have to scratch the brain out of his skull; but I couldn’t do nothing. I just felt paralyzed, and my head as heavy as iron. If I get to be as old as a tree, I’ll never forget that man’s face over me that time. A person can’t forget things like that—never in this world. And as soon as ever I could stir again, he reeled in a corner and fell down flat, and it was all dark in the room.” She gave a deep sigh. “That was the way of it. That’s how it started.”
Christian did not turn his eyes from her for the shadow of a moment.
“After that,” she went on, “people began to say, ‘Lass, your eyes are too bold.’ Well, they was. I couldn’t tell everybody why. The vicar drivelled about some secret shame and turning my soul to God. He made me laugh. When I went into service on the estate, they grudged me the food I ate. I had to wait on the children, fetch water, polish boots, clean rooms, run errands for the Madame. There was an overseer that was after me—a fellow with rheumy eyes and a hare-lip. Once at night when I got to my little room, there he was and grabbed me. I took a stone jug and broke it across his head. He roared like a steer, and everybody came hurrying in—the servants and the master and the mistress. They all screamed and howled, and the overseer tells them a whacking lie about me, and the master says: ‘Out with you, you baggage!’ Well, why not, I thought. And that very night I tied up my few rags, and off I was. But next night I slunk back, ’cause I’d found no shelter anywhere. I crept all around the house, not because I was tired or hungry, but to pay them out for what they’d done to me. I wanted to set the house on fire and burn it down and have my revenge. But I didn’t dare, and I wandered about the countryside for three days, andalways at night came back to the house. I just couldn’t sleep and I’d keep seeing the fire that I ought to have lit, and the house and stables flaring up and the cattle burning and the hay flying and the beams smoking and the singed dogs tugging at their chains. And I could almost hear them whine—the dogs and the children who’d tormented me so, and the mistress who’d stood under the Christmas tree in a silk dress and given presents to everybody except to me. Oh, yes, I did get three apples and a handful o’ nuts, and then she told me to hurry and wash the stockings for Anne-Marie. But at last my strength gave out, wandering about that way and looking for a chance. The rural policeman picked me up and wanted to question me. But I fainted, and he couldn’t find out nothing. If only I’d set fire to that house, everything would have been different, and I wouldn’t have had to go with the captain when my mother got me in her claws again. I let him talk me into going for a blue velvet dress and a pair of cheap patent leather shoes. And I never heard till later about the bargain that mother’d struck with him.”
With her whole weight she shoved the chair she sat on farther from the table, and bent over and rested her forehead on the table’s edge. “O gee,” she said, absorbed by the horror of her fate, “O gee, if I’d set fire to that house, I wouldn’t have had to let everybody wipe their boots on me. If only I’d done it! It would have been a good thing!”
Silently Christian looked down upon her. He covered his eyes with his hand, and the pallor of his face and hand was one.
On the train between Basel and Geneva Christian learned from some fellow travellers that an attempt to assassinate Ivan Michailovitch Becker had been made in Lausanne. A student named Sonya Granoffska had fired at him.
Christian knew nothing of the events that explained thedeed. He neither read newspapers nor took any interest in public events. He now asked some questions, and was told what all the world was talking about.
TheMatinof Paris had printed a series of articles that had caused intense excitement all over Europe, and had been widely reprinted and commented on. They were signed by a certain Jegor Ulitch, and consisted of revelations concerning the Russian revolution, its foreign committee, and the activities of the terrorists. They dragged evidence with so wide a net that they materially strengthened the case of the Russian state against the workingmen’s delegate Trotzky, who was then being tried at Petrograd, and thus contributed to his condemnation.
Jegor Ulitch remained in the background. The initiated asserted that there was no such person, and that the name was the mask assumed by a traitor to the revolution. TheGauloisand the GenevaJournalpublished vitriolic attacks on the unknown writer. Ulitch did not hesitate to reply. To justify himself he published letters and secret documents that vitally incriminated several leaders of the revolutionary party.
With increasing definiteness the authorship of theMatinarticles was being assigned to Becker. The newspapers openly voiced this suspicion, and had daily reports of his supposed activities. During a strike of the dock-hands of Marseilles, he was said to have appeared at a strikers’ meeting in the garb of a Russian pope; a report had it that he had addressed a humble letter to the Czarina, another that he had become an outcast fleeing from land to land, a third, that he had succeeded in mediating between the Russian police and his exiled country-men, and that hence the Western Powers, who were slavishly supine before Czarism, had somewhat relaxed their cruel vigilance.
Yet Becker’s very face remained a mystery and a source of confusion, and the knowledge of his mere existence spread a wide restlessness.
And Christian sought him. He sought him in Geneva, Lausanne, Nice, Marseilles. Finally he followed a hint that led him to Zürich. There he happened to meet the Russian Councillor of State Koch, who introduced him to several of his compatriots. These finally gave him Becker’s address.
“I’ve never lost sight of you,” said Becker. “Alexander Wiguniewski wrote me about you, and told me that you had altered the conditions of your life. But his hints were equivocal; so I commissioned friends in Berlin to inquire, and their information was more exact.”
They sat in a wine room in an obscure quarter. They were the only guests. From the smoky ceiling hung the great antlers of a stag, to which the electric bulbs had been fastened with an effect of picturesqueness.
Becker wore a dark litevka buttoned to his chin. He looked poor and ill; his bearing had a touch of the subtly fugitive. Sometimes a sad quietude overspread his features, like the quietude of waves where a ship has gone down. In moments of silence his face seemed to become larger, and his gaze to be fixed upon an outer emptiness and an inner flame.
“Are you still in communication with Wiguniewski and the—others?” Christian asked; and his eyes seemed to express a delicate deprecation of the level impersonality of his own demeanour.
Becker shook his head. “My old friends have all turned against me,” he replied. “Inwardly I am still deeply at one with them; but I no longer share their views.”
“Must one absolutely share the views of one’s friends?” Christian asked.
“Yes, in so far as those views express one’s central aim in life. The answer depends also on the degree of affection that exists among people. I’ve tried to win them over, but mystrength failed me. They simply don’t understand. Now I no longer feel the urge to shake men and awaken them, unless some one flings his folly at me in the form of a polemic, or unless I feel so close to one that any dissonance between us robs me of peace or weighs upon my heart.”
Christian paid less attention to the meaning of the words than to Becker’s enchanting intonation, the gentleness of his voice, the wandering yet penetrating glance, the morbid, martyred face. And he thought: “All that they say of him is false.” A great trust filled him.
One night, as they were walking together, Becker spoke of Eva Sorel. “She has attained an extraordinary position,” he said. “I’ve heard people say that she is the real ruler of Russia and is having a decisive influence on European diplomacy. She lives in incomparable luxury. The Grand Duke presented to her the famous palace of Duke Biron of unblessed memory. She receives ministers of state and foreign ambassadors like a crowned sovereign. Paris and London reckon with her, bargain with her, consult her. She will be heard of more and more. Her ambition is inconceivable.”
“It was to be foreseen that she would rise high,” Christian remarked softly. He wanted more and more to talk to Becker about his own affairs and explain the errand on which he had come. But he did not find the right word.
Becker continued: “Her soul was bound to lose the harmony that rules her body so severely. It is a natural process of compensation. She desires power, insight, knowledge of the obscure and intricate. She plays with the fate of men and nations. Once she said to me, ‘The whole world is but a single heart.’ Well, one can destroy that single heart, which is all humanity, in one’s own bosom. Ambition is but another form of despair; it will carry her to the outermost boundary of life.There she will meet me and many others who have come to the same spot from another direction, and we shall clasp hands once more.”
They had reached the shores of the lake. Becker buttoned his coat and turned up the collar. His voice sank almost to a whisper. “I saw her in Paris once crossing the floor in an old house. In either hand she bore a candelabrum, and in each candelabrum burned two candles. A brownish smoke came from the flames, a white veil flowed from her shoulders; an undreamed-of lightness took possession of me. Once when she was still appearing at the Sapajou, I saw her lying on the floor behind the stage, watching with the intensest scrutiny a spider that was spinning its web in a crack between two boards. She raised her arm and bade me stand still, and lay there and observed the spider. I saw her learning of the spider, and I knew then the power of utter absorption that she had. I scarcely knew it, but she drew me into the burning circle of her being. Her unquenchable thirst for form and creation and unveiling and new vision taught me whom she called her master. Yes, the whole world is but a single heart, and we all serve but a single God. He and I together are my doom.”
Christian thought restlessly: “How can I speak to him?” But the right word did not come.
“The other day,” Becker said, “I stood in a chapel, lost in the contemplation of a miracle-working image of the Mother of God, and thinking about the simple faith of the people. A few sick men and women and old men were kneeling there and crossing themselves and bowing to the earth. I lost myself in the features of the image, and gradually the secret of its power became clear to me. It was not just a painted piece of wood. For centuries the image had absorbed the streams of passionate prayer and adoration that had come to it from the hearts of the weary and the heavy-laden, and it became filled with a power that seemed to proceed from it to the faithful and that was mirrored in itself again. It became aliving organism, a meeting place between man and God. Filled with this thought, I looked again upon the old men and the women and the children there, and I saw the features of the image stirred by compassion, and I also kneeled down in the dust and prayed.”
Christian made no comment. It was not given him to share such feelings. But Becker’s speech and ecstatic expression and the great glow of his eyes cast a spell upon him; and in the exaltation which he now felt, his purpose seemed more possible to realize.
Walking restlessly up and down in the inhospitable room of his hotel, he was surprised to find himself in an imaginary conversation with Becker, which drew from him an eloquence that was denied him in the presence of men.
“Hear me. Perhaps you can understand. I possess fourteen millions, but that is not all. More money pours in on me, daily and hourly, and I can do nothing to dam the torrent. Not only is the money a vain thing to me, but an actual hindrance. Wherever I turn, it is in my way. Everything I undertake appears in a false light on account of it. It is not like something that belongs to me, but like something that I owe; and every human being with whom I speak explains in some way how and why I owe it to him or to another or to all. Do you understand that?”
Christian had the feeling that he was addressing the Ivan Becker of his imagination in a friendly, natural, and convincing tone; and it seemed to him that Ivan Becker understood and approved. He opened the window, and caught sight of some stars.
“If I distribute it I cause mischief,” he continued, and walked up and down again without articulating a sound. “That has been proved. The fault is probably in me; I haven’t the art of doing good or useful things with money. And it’s unpleasant to have people remind me wherever I go: ‘You’ve got your millions behind you; whenever you haveenough of this, you can quit and go home.’ This is the reason why everything glides from my grasp and no ground is secure under my feet; this is the reason why I cannot live as I would live, nor find any pleasantness within myself. Therefore relieve me of my millions, Ivan Michailovitch. Do with them whatever you wish. If necessary we can go to a notary and make out a deed of gift. Distribute the money, if you desire, feed the hungry, and relieve the suffering. I can’t do it; it repels me. I want to be rid of my burden. Have books printed or build refuges or bury it or waste it; only take the burden from me. I can only use it to fill maws that afterwards show me their teeth.”
And as he spoke those words within himself, a serenity overspread his features. His smooth forehead, his deep blue eyes, his large and rather pallid cheeks, his healthy red lips, and the clean-shaven skin about them were all bathed in that new serenity.
It seemed to him that on the next day, when he would see Becker, he might be able to speak to him quite as he had spoken to-night, or at least nearly so.
One passed through a little hall-way into a poorly furnished room. There were several young men in this hall. One of these exchanged a few words with Becker, and then went away.
“It’s my bodyguard,” Becker explained, with a faint smile. “But like all the others they distrust me. They’ve been ordered not to lose sight of me. Didn’t you notice that we were constantly shadowed out of doors?”
Christian shook his head.
“When that unhappy woman pointed her revolver at me in Lausanne,” Becker went on, shivering, “her lips flung the word ‘traitor’ at me. I looked into the black muzzle and awaiteddeath. She missed me, but since that moment I have been afraid of death. That evening many of my friends came to me, and besought me to clear and justify myself. I replied to them and said: ‘If I am to be a traitor in your eyes, I shall not avoid any of the horror, any of the frightfulness of that position.’ They did not understand me. But a summons has come to me to destroy, to extinguish and destroy myself. I am to build the pyre on which I am to be consumed. I am to spread my suffering until it infects all who come near me. I am to forget what I have done and abandon hope, and be lowly and loathed and an outcast, and deny principles and break fetters and bow down before the spirit of evil, and bear pain and cause pain, and tear up and plough the earth, even though beautiful harvests be destroyed. Traitor—how little that means! I wander about and hunger after myself. I flee from myself, and yet cry out after myself, and am the sacrificer and the sacrifice. And that has caused an unparalleled increase of pain in the world. The souls of men descend to the source of things in order to become brothers to the damned.”
He pressed his hands together and looked like a madman. “My body seeks the earth, the depths, pollution, and the night,” he said. “My innermost being gapes like a wound; I feel the thongs and weight of doom and the terror of time; I pray for prayers; I am a shadowy figure in the ghostly procession of created things in travail; the grief that fills the air of the world grinds me to dust;mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”
The feeling of pained embarrassment grew in Christian. He simply looked at Becker.
Suddenly, a repeated knocking sounded at the outer door. Becker started and listened. The knocking increased in loudness and speed.
“It has come after all,” Becker murmured in consternation. “I must leave. Forgive me, I must leave. A car is waiting for me. Stay a few minutes longer, I beg of you.” He tooka valise that lay on the bed, looked about vaguely, pressed his mutilated hand to his coat, and murmured hastily, “Lend me five hundred francs. I spent my last money at noon. Don’t be angry with me; I’m in a fearful hurry.”
Mechanically Christian took out his wallet and gave Becker five bank-notes. The latter stammered a word of thanks and farewell, and was gone.
Christian left the house fifteen minutes later in a bewildered condition. For hours he wandered in the valleys and on the hills around the city. He took the night train back to Berlin.
During the many hours of the journey he felt very wretched in body and soul.
In his flat he found many begging letters, one from his former valet, one from a Society for Succouring the Shelterless, one from a musician whom he had met casually in Frankfort. There was also a letter from the bank, requesting his signature on an enclosed document.
Next day Amadeus Voss asked for six thousand marks; the widow Engelschall, loudly lamenting that her furniture would be sold unless she met a promissory note, asked for three thousand.
He gave and gave, and the act of giving disgusted him. In the lecture halls of the university they came to him—the merest strangers, the most indifferent persons. Wherever he appeared, even in an eating-house, people came to him and told him of their troubles, and were diffident or brazen, and begged or demanded.
He gave and gave, and saw no end to it and no salvation in it, and felt a leaden heaviness steal over him. And he gave and gave.
He saw greed and expectation in every eye. He dressed himself more plainly, he cut down his expenditures to the barest necessities; the gold towered up behind him like rolling lava,and burned everything he touched. He gave and gave, and people asked and asked.
And so he wrote to his father: “Take my money from me!” He was aware of the strangeness and the unheard-of nature of what he asked, so he accompanied his request with elaborate reasons and persuasive phrases. “Assume that I have emigrated and have been lost sight of, or that I live far away under a false name, or that through your fault or mine there had been a definite breach between us, that you had therefore reduced my allowance to a minimum, but that my pride forbade my accepting even that, since I desire to stand on my own feet and live by the work of my hands. Or else imagine that I had wasted my means, and hopelessly mortgaged the capital and interest still due me. Or, finally, imagine that you yourself had become impoverished, and were forced to withdraw all assistance from me. At all events, I want to live without independent means. I have lost all pleasure in living with them. It is hard, I know, to explain that to any one who has money and has never been without it. Do me this favour! First of all, dispose of the sums that are banked in my name; next stop the income that has hitherto been paid out to me. The money is all yours, indisputably so. During our conversation last year you gave me very clearly and justly to understand that I have always lived on the fruit of your labour.”
Lastly he made the proposal to which he had referred in his imaginary conversation with Ivan Becker. “If it wounds your sensibilities to make a personal or practical use of the money which I am returning to you who gave it—use it to build orphanages, homes for foundlings, hospitals, institutions for the disabled, or libraries. There is so much misery in the world, and so much suffering that needs to be alleviated. I cannot do these things. They do not attract me; indeed, the very thought of them is disagreeable. I do not deny that this specific inability argues a weakness in my character; so if youdetermine to expend the money upon charities, don’t do it in my name.”
He ended thus: “I do not know whether it even interests you to have me say that I think of you affectionately. Perhaps in your heart you have already cast me off and separated yourself from me wholly. If any bond is to continue to exist between us, it can only be, however, if you do not refuse me your help in this matter, which is, from one point of view, so difficult, and from another, so perfectly simple.”
The letter remained unanswered. But several days after it had been sent, a friend of the Wahnschaffe family, Pastor Werner, called on Christian. He came both on a mission from the Privy Councillor and of his own impulse. Christian had known him since childhood.
Very attentively the clergyman examined the room, the shabby, ugly furniture, the window shades bordered by sentimental pictures, the dirty, white-washed walls, the dim, little lamp, the split boards of the flooring, the imitation leather of the sofa, the chest of drawers which was broken and which bore a cheap plaster of Paris bust. A dumb yet fiery amazement appeared on his face.
“I am asked to inform you,” Pastor Werner said, “that your father is of course ready to comply with your request. What else, after all, can he do? But I need not conceal from you the fact that his anxiety about you is very grave, and that he finds your actions wholly incomprehensible.”
Christian answered a little impatiently. “I told him months ago that there wasn’t the slightest ground for anxiety.”
“You must admit,” Werner objected gently, “that your latest plan does involve the question of your very existence. Have you taken up any occupation that secures you from need?”
Christian replied that, as his father was aware, he was definitely preparing himself for a profession. The measure of his talent and success was, of course, still in question.
“And until that profession begins to pay, what will you live on?” the pastor asked. “Let me repeat to you the words which your father cried out at our last interview: ‘Does he intend to beg? Or to accept gifts from the charitable? Or starve? Or trust to chance and false friends? Or take refuge in shady and dishonourable things, and yet be forced at last, a remorseful fool, to ask for that which he now casts aside?’ I have never in all these many years seen your father in such a state of mind, or heard him express such grief and such passion.”
“My father may calm himself,” Christian replied. “Nothing of what he fears is likely to happen; nor what, perhaps, he hopes, namely, that I shall ask my patrimony back again. It is as inconceivable as that the bird should return to the egg or the burning log to the tree whence it came.”
“Then you did not intend to renounce all pecuniary assistance at once?” the pastor asked, feeling his way carefully.
“No.” Christian hesitated. “I suppose not. I’m not equal to that; not yet. One has to learn that. It is a difficult thing and must be learned; and life in a great city would involve fatal and disturbing elements. Then, too, I have assumed certain obligations; there are several people who have definitely been counting on my help. I don’t know whether they could follow my own course. I haven’t in fact, any programme at all. What good would it do me? My great aim just now is to get into a situation that is clear and reasonable, and get rid of all sorts of stupid torments. I want to drop the burden of the superfluous; and everything is superfluous except what I and those few people absolutely need on the most stringent estimate. But every supposed need, I think, can be reduced, until such gradual renunciation produces a profit.”
“If I understand you correctly,” the pastor said, “it isyour intention to retain such a portion of your fortune as will secure you against actual need.”
Christian sat down at the table and rested his head on his hand. “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes. But there the great difficulty arises. I cannot fix the boundary between necessity and superfluity in terms of money. Unhappily I was brought up amid conditions that make it hard for me to have a practical opinion on this net basis. I lack a norm of what is necessary and what is dispensable, and I lack it especially where others are concerned. You’ve understood me quite rightly. I want to retain a part, but only a very small part; and I hate to bargain with myself over the exact amount. The whole question of money is so absurd and trivial; it is only dragged in the wake of the really important things. One thing I couldn’t endure; and that would be to invest a capital, however modest, and use the interest. Then I’d be a capitalist again, and back in the world of the protected. But what other way is there? You’re an experienced man. Advise me.”
The clergyman considered. From time to time he looked searchingly at Christian; then he lowered his eyes and reflected again. “I am rather confounded by your words,” he confessed at last. “Much that you say surprises me—no, everything—yet it also seems to give me a certain insight. Very well then; you ask my advice.” Again he thought, and again observed Christian. “You renounce your personal fortune as well as the income which the firm and family have paid you. So far, so good. This renunciation will be officially acknowledged. I am also willing to believe that you will never ask back what you now renounce. The manner in which you bind yourself impresses me more than many solemn oaths would do. You are through with your past. That, too, will be respected on the other side. I understand the spiritual pain caused you by the question as to what leeway you should permit yourself in the matter of your personal and bodilyneeds during the period on which you are entering, and which will be bitter and full of necessities for self-conquest. I understand that. The problem is one of inner delicacy, of spiritual modesty. To consider it runs counter to your feelings and attitude. Yes, I understand that.”
Christian nodded, and the pastor continued in a raised voice. “Then listen to me. What I shall propose is subtle and difficult. It is almost like a game or a trick. You may remember that I am chaplain of the prison at Hanau. I try to help the souls of the lost and the outcast. I study these people. I know their inmost motives, the darkness of their hearts, their frozen yearnings. I dare to assert that there is not one of them who cannot, in the higher sense, be saved, nor one whose heart will not be reached by simple words earnestly realized in action. That awakens the divine spark, and the vision of such an awakening is beautiful. I serve my cause with all my strength, and the improvement and transformation of some of my flock has been so complete, that they have returned into society as new men, and bravely resisted all temptations. I admit that success often depends on my ability to save them from immediate need. Here is my problem. Kindly people help; the state, too, though in its frugal manner, contributes. But it is not enough. How would it be if from the fortune which you are returning to your father a capital were to be deducted the interest of which is to be used for my discharged convicts? Don’t draw back, but hear me out. This capital would be in good securities and would amount, let us say, to three hundred thousand marks. The interest would be in the neighbourhood of fifteen thousand marks. That would suffice. A great deal of good could be done with it. To touch or sell the securities would be a privilege reserved to you alone. From the capital itself you take in monthly or quarterly installments such sum or sums as you need to live on. To draw and expend the interest should be a privilege reserved to me and my successors. All these conditions mustbe secured by legal means. The purpose, as you see, is a double one. First, the plan will effect a great and needed good; secondly, it furnishes an inherent norm and aim for you. Every superfluous or thoughtless expenditure of yours jeopardizes a human soul; every frugality you practise is at once translated into concrete human weal. That gives you a point of orientation, a line of moral action. It is, if I may call it so, an automatic moral mechanism. I judge that the independence you desire will be achieved in two or three years. Within that time you can hardly use up even one-tenth of the capital according to your present standard of life. Of course, even this plan involves a problem for you, but it is a problem that would, I think, attract you. You don’t have to think of my humanitarian aims. I know that in your letter to your father you expressed your dislike of such aims, a dislike which I have no means of understanding. But I could tell you things and relate circumstances that would show you how the subtlest fibres of humanity are poisoned, and what a sacred duty it is to plough up the spiritual soil in my particular little field. If you could once see face to face some of these men restored to freedom and hope, your heart would be won for my cause. It is such visible evidence that instructs and converts.”
“You have too high an opinion of me,” Christian said, with his old, equivocal smile. “It’s always the same. Everybody overestimates me in this respect and judges me wrongly. But don’t bother about that, and don’t ask about it. It doesn’t matter.”
“And what answer do you make to my proposal?”
Christian lowered his head, and said: “It’s a nice little trap that you are setting for me. Let me consider it a moment. I am to feed, one might say, on my own charity. What a horrible word that is—charity. And by feeding on it myself I, of course, diminish it. And that, you think, will constitute a sort of moral gymnastic for me, and make it easier to realize my purpose——?”
“Yes, that was what, since you have chosen this path, I had in mind.”
“Well, if I disappoint you, you will have nothing to regret but your own modesty,” Christian continued, with a peculiarly mocking expression. “You could ask twice or even three times the sum you named, and I would probably or, rather, assuredly not refuse. For into whose pockets the millions go that I refuse, is a matter I care little about. Why don’t you do that and thus decrease your own risk?”
“Is your question inspired by distrust of the cause I represent?”
“I don’t know. Answer it, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ve explained the situation to you. The circumstances themselves are the guide to what I can and ought to ask for. On the one hand there is an urgent need. On the other hand there are definite considerations that not only set a natural limit, but forbid my using this opportunity in such a way as to give a handle to the malicious and quarrelsome.”
Christian continued his purely argumentative resistance. “Do you think it means anything to me or attracts me to know that you will give some discharged criminal, whose moral nature you think you have saved, one or two hundred marks to start life anew? That doesn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t know those men. I don’t know how they look or act or talk or smell, or what they’ll do with the money, or whether it will really be of service to them. And since I don’t know that, the arrangement has no meaning to me.”
Pastor Werner was taken aback. “To be sure,” he replied. “But I do know them, you see.”
Christian smiled again. “We’re very differently constituted; we neither think nor act alike.” Suddenly he looked up. “But I’m not making these objections to create difficulties. Quite the contrary. You personally ask me for assistance and I personally render it. In return you do me the service of acting as my paymaster and showing me how tosolve my problem. I hope you will have no reason to complain.”
“Then you do consent and I may proceed to make definite arrangements?” the clergyman asked, half delighted and half doubtful still.
Christian nodded. “Go ahead,” he said. “Make what arrangements seem best to you. It’s all too trivial to bother about.”
“What do you mean by that exactly?” Werner asked, just as Eva had once, between laughter and amazement, asked his meaning. “A while ago you also said that what was really important was dragged down by these matters of money. What is the truly important thing to you?”
“I can’t explain that to you. But I feel the triviality of all this. All I am doing is the merest beginning, and everyone overestimates it absurdly and makes a mountain of this molehill. I haven’t reached the real difficulty yet. And that will consist in earning back all one has given away—earning it back in another manner, and so, above all, that one does not feel one’s loss.”
“Strange,” murmured the pastor. “It is strange. To hear you talk, one would think you were discussing a sporting event or a matter of barter.”
Christian laughed.
The pastor came up to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. His eyes were serious as he asked: “Where is the woman whom you ... have taken in?”
Christian’s reply was a gesture in the direction of Karen’s flat.
A thought that was strange and new seemed to flash into the clergyman’s mind. “Then you don’t live with her?” His voice sank to a whisper. “You are not living together?”
“No,” Christian answered with a frown. “Certainly not.”
The pastor’s arm dropped. There came a long silence. Then he spoke again: “Your father is stricken to the heart by afeeling as though several people whom he loves had succumbed to the same disease. He tries to hide his emotion, but he doesn’t succeed. Before he had any reason to be anxious about you, he once spoke to me of your sister Judith. He used the expression, ‘self-degradation.’ He described her as afflicted by a perverse impulse toward self-degradation.”
Christian swept the matter aside with a vivid gesture. “Oh, yes, Judith! She flings a trivial challenge at the world. That’s no self-degradation. She’s curious as to how far she dare go, how far others will go for her, and what the upshot will be. She confessed as much to me. She’ll plunge into water and be affronted because it’s wet; she’ll go through fire in the hope that it won’t burn her. After her experiment she’ll hate both fire and water. No, I have nothing in common with that.”
“You speak very harshly for a brother,” the pastor said with gentle reproachfulness. “However that may be, this new trouble has wounded your father to the very core. He feels that all his life’s effort is being negated from within, and that the fruit of all his toil is rotting in his hands. He stood on the very peaks of success. What does it mean to him now? His own flesh and blood rises up against him. His hand seemed blessed; he feels it withering now. His wealth carried him to a very great height. Now he is lonely there, and the son who, above all others, should rejoice in that station, turns from him, and fills him with a feeling for which he knows no name but shame and disgrace.”
Christian did not answer. He seemed quite indifferent. Werner continued: “I ask you to consider the social structure of mankind. Cruelty and force may seem to cling to it, yet there is something infinitely delicate and venerable within. You might liken it to a tree, deep-rooted in the earth, expanding in the air with many branches and twigs, buds and blossoms. It has come to be through some action of God, and no one should contemn it.”
“Why do you tell me that?” Christian asked, with a subtle withdrawal of himself.
“Because your father suffers. Go to him, and explain yourself and your ways. You are his son; it is your duty.”
Christian shook his head. “No,” he answered. “I cannot.”
“And your mother? Do I have to remind you of her too? I did not think I should have to admonish you in her name. She waits. All her days are one long waiting.”
Once more Christian shook his head. “No,” he said, “I cannot.”
The pastor buried his chin in his hollow hand and looked dully at the floor. He left with divided feelings.
Crammon desired a friend. The one who was lost could never be replaced. The hope of winning him back still smouldered within, but the empty space in his bosom was desolate and chill. To install a lodger there seemed wise and would be stimulating.
Franz Lothar von Westernach had the first claim upon the place. They had agreed by letter to meet at Franz Lothar’s country house in Styria, so at the beginning of spring Crammon left Vienna. At Nürnberg he left in the lurch a certain handsome Miss Herkinson in whose car he had travelled from Spa.
To an acquaintance whom, by a mere chance, he met in the dining-car, he said, “I can no longer bear the noise that young people always make. The subdued and clarified attracts me now. The fifth decade of our lives demands milder ways.”
Crammon found Franz Lothar in the thick of a mental struggle. His sister Clementine wanted him to get married. Laughing and yet helpless, he confided the state of affairs to Crammon. His sister had picked out a girl of excellent family, and was sure that the alliance would have a wholesome influence on her brother’s career, as well as on his uncertain and idle way of life. All preliminaries had been arranged, and the parents of the young lady had intimated their full approval.
Crammon said: “Don’t let them take you in, my son. The affair can have none but a disgraceful outcome. I do not know the girl in question personally. But she is a vampire. Her ancestors were among the most infamous robber knights of the Middle Ages. Later they came into conflict with the empire on account of cruelty to their serfs. You can imagine what your future would be.”
Franz Lothar was highly amused. Crammon’s rage at the thought of being robbed of this friend too, in the same old stupid way, was positively rabid and passed all the bounds of decency. He treated Clementine with embittered silence. If any dispute arose, he barked at her like an angry dog.
Franz Lothar’s own indecision and fear of change saved Crammon from further conflicts. He simply informed his disappointed sister one day that he was thoroughly unprepared for so important a step, and begged her to break off the negotiations.
This turn of affairs satisfied Crammon, but brought him no definite peace of mind. He wanted to prevent the possibility of a similar assault on his contentment. The best thing seemed to be to marry off Clementine herself. It would not be easy. She was no longer in her first youth; she had had her experiences and knew her world; she possessed a clear vision and a sharp understanding. Great care would have to be taken. He looked about in his mind for a candidate, and his choice fell on a man of considerable wealth, distinguished ancestry, and spotless reputation, the Cavaliere Morini. He had made his acquaintance years ago through friends in Trieste.
He took to cultivating Clementine’s society. Fragrant little anecdotes of married bliss and unstilled longing and cosy households flowed from his lips. He found her very receptive. Hedropped, as though casually, intimations of his friendship with an uncommonly distinguished and able Italian gentleman. He built up the character with an artist’s care, and turned the excellent cavaliere into a striking figure. Next he wrote to Morini, feigned deep concern for his well-being, recalled the memory of hours they had passed together, pretended a great longing and a desire to see him again, and inquired after his plans. So soon as the correspondence flourished it was not difficult to mention Clementine and praise her admirable qualities.
Morini nibbled at the bait. He wrote that he would be in Vienna in May, and would be charmed to meet Crammon there. He added that he dared scarcely hope to meet the Baroness von Westernach at the same time. Crammon thought, “The old idiot!” but he persuaded Franz Lothar and Clementine to promise to join him in Vienna. The plan succeeded; Morini and Clementine liked each other at once. Crammon said to her: “You have charmed him wholly.” And to him: “You have made an ineffaceable impression on her.” Two weeks later the betrothal took place. Clementine seemed to revive and was full of gratitude toward Crammon. What he had planned, hardly with the purest intentions, became an unalloyed blessing to her.
Crammon bestowed upon himself the recognition he held to be his due. His action was as useful as any other. He said: “Be fruitful and multiply! I shall be the godfather of your first-born. It goes without saying that I shall celebrate that event with a solemn feast.”
Furthermore he said: “In the records of history I shall be known as Bernard the Founder. Perhaps I am myself the remote ancestor of a race destined to fame—a race of kings. Who can tell? In that case my far descendants, whom God protect, will have every reason to regard me with veneration.”
But all this was but the deceptive flash of a fleeting mood. The worm of doubt burrowed in his mind. The future seemedblack to him. He prophesied war and revolution. He took no joy in himself or in his deeds. When he lay in bed and the lights were out, he felt surrounded by troops of evils; and these evils fought with one another for the chance to lacerate him first. Then he would close his eyes, and sigh deeply.
Fräulein Aglaia became aware of his depression, and admonished him to pray more industriously. He thanked her for her counsel, and promised to follow it.