His manner of reading tormented Johanna. There was a fanaticism in it from which her soul, attuned to semitones, shrank.
“Woe to him who is alone,” said Voss. He kneeled down before Johanna. All his limbs trembled. “Johanna,” he implored her, “give me your hand, only your hand, and have pity on me.”
Her will failed her. More in consternation than obedience, she gave him her hand, which he kissed with a devouring passion. What he did seemed blasphemous and desperate after his words and his reading; but she dared not withdraw her hand.
Her watchful ear caught a noise. “Some one is coming,” she whispered faintly. Voss arose. There was a knock at the door, and Christian entered.
He greeted them in a friendly way. His calm contrasted almost resonantly with Amadeus’s wild distraction, for Voss could not control himself wholly. While Christian sat down at the table with the lamplight full upon his face, and looked now at Johanna, now at Voss, the latter walked excitedly up and down, and said: “We have been talking about Saint Francis, Fräulein Johanna and I.”
Christian looked his surprise.
“I know nothing of him,” he said. “All I remember is that once in Paris, at Eva Sorel’s, some verses about him were read. Every one was delighted, but I didn’t like the poem. I have forgotten why, but I recall that Eva was very angry.” He smiled. “Why did you two talk about Saint Francis?”
“We were talking of his poverty,” replied Voss, “and of his marriage to the Lady Poverty, as the legend has it. And we agreed that such things must not be translated into actuallife, for the result would be falsehood and misunderstanding....”
“We agreed about nothing,” Johanna interrupted him drily. “I am no support for any one’s opinions.”
“Never mind,” said Voss, somewhat depressed. “It is a vision, a vision born of the sufferings of religious souls. That poverty, that sacred poverty is unthinkable except upon a Christian foundation. Whoever would dare to attempt it, and to turn backward the overwhelming stream of life in a distorted world, amid distorted conditions, where poverty means dirt and crime and degradation—such an one would only create evil and challenge humanity itself.”
“That may be correct,” said Christian. “But one must do what one considers right.”
“It’s cheap enough to take refuge in the purely personal when general questions are discussed,” Voss said rancorously.
Johanna rose to say good-bye, and Christian prepared himself to follow her, since it was on her account that he had come. Voss said he would walk with them as far as Nollendorf Square. There he left them.
“It is hard for us to talk,” said Christian. “There is much for which I should ask you to forgive me, dear Johanna.”
“Oh,” said Johanna, “it doesn’t matter about me. I’ve conquered that. Unless I probe too deeply, even the pain is gone.”
“And how do you live?”
“As best I can.”
“You don’t mind my calling you Johanna still, do you? Won’t you come to see me some day? I’m usually at home in the evening. Then we could sit together and talk.”
“Yes, I’ll come,” said Johanna, who felt her own embarrassment yielding before Christian’s frank and simple tone.
While she was walking beside him and hearing and answering his direct and simple questions, all that had happened inthe past seemed a matter of course, and the present seemed harmonious enough. But when she was alone again she was as vexed with herself as ever; the nearest goal seemed as irrational as the farthest, and the world and life shut in by dreariness.
Two days later she went to Christian’s dwelling. The wife of the night watchman Gisevius ushered her into Christian’s room. Shivering and oppressed by the room, in which she could not imagine him, she waited for over an hour. Frau Gisevius advised her to look in at Karen Engelschall’s or the Hofmanns’ flat. To this she could not make up her mind. “I’ll come again,” she said.
When she stepped out into the street she saw Amadeus Voss. He greeted her without words, and his expression seemed to take it for granted that they had agreed to meet here. He walked on at her side.
“I love you, Johanna,” he said.
She did not answer, nor turn her eyes toward him. She walked more swiftly, then more slowly, then more swiftly again.
“I love you, Johanna,” said Amadeus Voss, and his teeth rattled.
On the alabaster mantelshelf candles were burning in the silver Renaissance candlesticks. The more salient light of the burning logs reached only far enough to envelop the figures of Eva and of Cornelius Ermelang in its glow. It did not penetrate as far as the porphyry columns or the gold of the ceiling. A dim, red flicker danced in the tall mirrors, and the purple damask curtains before the huge windows, which shut in the room more solemnly than the great doors, absorbed the remnants of light without reflection.
The tea-gown of white lace which the dancer wore—experts declared each square inch of it to have the value of a provincial governor’s annual pay—was vivid as a fantastic pastel on the side turned to the fire.
“You have been very kind to me,” said Eva. “After you had been here so many times in vain, I was afraid you would leave without having seen me. But Susan probably told you how my days are spent. Men and happenings whirl through them so that I find it hard to retain a consciousness of my own self. Thus friends become estranged, and the faces about me change and I hardly notice it. A mad life!”
“Yet you summoned me in spite of that,” Ermelang whispered, “and I have the happiness of being with you at last. Now I have attained everything that my stay in Russia promised. How shall I thank you? I have only my poor words.” He looked at her with emotion, with a kind of ecstasy in his watery blue eyes. He had a habit of repeating the formula concerning his poor words; but despite the artifices of his speech, his feeling was genuine. Indeed, there was always a trifle too much feeling, too much soulfulness in his speech. Sometimes the impression arose that he was in reality not quite so deeply stirred, and that, if necessary, he could well limit his emotional expansion.
“What would one not do to please a poet?” Eva said with a courteous gesture. “It is pure selfishness too. I would have the image of me made perpetual in your mind. Both ancient and modern tyrants assure us that the only man whom they strove to please is the poet.”
Ermelang said: “A being like you exists in so elemental a fashion that any image is as negligible in comparison as the shadow of a thing when the sun is at its zenith.”
“You are subtle. Yet images persist. I have so great a faith in your vision that I should like you to tell me whether I am really so changed as those friends assert who knew me in my Parisian days. I laugh at them; but in my laughter there is a little rebellion of my vanity and a little fear ofwithering and fading. Don’t say anything; a contradiction would be trivial. Tell me, above all, how you came to be travelling in Russia, and what you have seen and heard and experienced.”
“I have experienced very little. The total impression has been so unforgettable that details have faded into insignificance. Various difficulties made Paris unpleasant to me, and the Princess Valuyeff offered me a refuge on her estate near Petrograd. Now I must return to the West—to Europe, as the Russians mockingly say. And they are right. For I must leave my spiritual home-land, and people who were close to me, although I did not know them, and a loneliness full of melody and presage, and return to senseless noise and confusion and isolation. I have spoken to Tolstoi and to Pobiedonostzev; I have been to the fair at Nijni-Novgorod, and been driven across the steppe in a troika. And about all—the people and the landscape—there is a breath of innocence and of the times to come, of mystery and of power.”
Eva had not listened very attentively. The hymns to Russia, intoned by wayfaring literary men and observers, began seriously to bore her. She made a faintly wry mouth. “Yes,” she said, “it’s a world all its own,” and held out her lovely hands toward the warmth of the fire.
It seemed to Ermelang that she had never, in the old days, let some one to whom she was talking thus drift out of the circle of her mind. He felt that his words had had no friendly reception. He became diffident and silent. Guardedly he observed her with his inner eye, which was truly austere. He saw the change of which she had spoken, and recorded the image as she had demanded.
The oval of her face had acquired a line hardened as by the will. Nothing was left of goodness in it, little of serenity. An almost harsh determination was about her mouth. There were losses, too. Shadows lay on her temples and under her lids. Her body still betrayed her lordship over it, preciselyin its flowing ease, its expansion and repose, such as one sees in wildcats. Ermelang had heard that she toiled unceasingly, spending six to seven hours a day in practice, as in the years of her apprenticeship. The result was evident in the satiation with rhythm and grace which her limbs and joints showed and her perfect control of them.
Yet nothing gracious, nothing of freedom came from her. Ermelang thought of the rumours that accused her of an unquenchable lust after power, of dangerous political plotting, fatal conspiracies, and a definite influence upon certain secret treaties that threatened to disquiet the nations, and of not being guiltless of journalistic campaigns that in their blended brutality and subtlety menaced the peace of Europe. It had seemed as though great coal deposits in the depth of the earth were on fire; but the men above still lived and breathed without suspicion.
Those who distrusted her declared her to be a secret agent of Germany, yet she enjoyed the friendship of French and British diplomatists. Her defenders asserted that she was used without her knowledge to cover the plans and guile of the Grand Duke Cyril. Those who believed in her wholly declared that she really crossed his plans and only feigned to be his tool. The nobility disliked her; the court feared her; the common people, goaded by priests and sectaries, saw in her the embodied misfortune of their country. At a rebellion in Ivanova she had been publicly proclaimed a witch, and her name had been pronounced accursed with solemn rites. Not later than the day before, a deputation of peasants from Mohilev, whom he had met in the fish market, had told him that they had seen the Tsar at Tsarskoye Selo, and in their complaints concerning the famine in their province had, in their stubborn superstition, pointed out the wicked splendour of the foreign dancer’s life. It had become proverbial among them. The Tsar, they said, had been unable to give an answer, and had gazed at the floor.
All these things were incontrovertible parts of her life and fate. He looked upon her lovely hands, rosy in the glow of the flames, and felt a dread for her.
“Is it true,” he asked, with a shy smile, “that you entered the forbidden fortress thrice in succession?”
“It is true. Has it been taken amiss?”
“It has certainly aroused amazement. No stranger has ever before crossed that threshold, nor any Russian unless he entered as a prisoner. No one seems able to fathom your impulse. Many suppose that you merely wanted to see Dmitri Sheltov, who fired at the Grand Duke. Tell me your motive; I should like to have a reply to the gossips.”
“They need no reply,” Eva said. “I do not fear them, and need no defence. I don’t know why I went. Perhaps I did want to see Sheltov. He had insulted me; he even took the trouble to publish a broadside against me. Five of his friends were sent to Siberia for that—boys of sixteen and seventeen. The mother of one of the boys wrote me a letter imploring me to save him. I tried but failed. Perhaps I really wanted to see Dmitri Sheltov. They say that he has vowed to kill Ivan Becker.”
“Sheltov is one of the purest characters in the world,” Ermelang said very softly. “To force a confession from him, they beat him with whips.”
Eva was silent.
“With whips,” Ermelang repeated. “This man! And men still dare to laugh and speak, and the sun to shine.”
“Perhaps I wanted to see a man writhing under the blows of the knout,” Eva said. “Perhaps it meant much to me as a stimulus. I must be nourished somehow, and the uncommon is my nourishment. A strange twitching, an original posture in crouching—such things satisfy my imagination. But as a matter of fact”—her voice grew sombre, and she stared fixedly at a spot on the wall—“I did not see him at all. But I saw others who have spent ten, twelve, fifteen years in darkcells of stone. Once they moved about in the great world and busied their minds with noble things; now they cower in their rags, and blink at the light of a little lantern. They have forgotten how to look, to walk, to speak. An odour of decomposition was about them, and all their gestures were full of a gentle madness. But it was not for their sake either that I went. I went for the sake of the imprisoned women, who, on account of an intellectual conviction, have been torn from love and life and motherhood and devotion, and condemned to death by slow torture. Many of them had never been condemned by any tribunal. They had merely been forgotten—simply forgotten; and if their friends were to demand a trial, the same fate would threaten them. I saw one who had been brought in when she was a girl; now she was an aged woman and near her death. I saw Natalie Elkan, who was violated by a colonel of gendarmes at Kiev, and killed the monster with his own sword. I saw Sophie Fleming, who put out her own eyes with a piece of steel wire, because they had hanged her brother in her presence. Do you know what she said when I entered her cell? She lifted her blind face, and said: ‘That’s the way a lady smells.’ Ah, that taught me something concerning women. I put my arms about her and kissed her, and whispered in her ear, asking whether I should smuggle some poison to her; but she refused.”
Eva arose and walked up and down. “Yes,” she said, “and still men speak and laugh, and still the sun shines. This room is filled with precious things. Lackeys stand on the stairs. Fifty feet from here is the bed of state in which I sleep. It is all mine. What I touch is mine, what I glance at is mine. They would give me the round earth itself if they had it to give and I asked it. And I would cast it like a billiard-ball into a noisome puddle, so that it might no longer defile the home of stars with its filth and its torments. I am so full of hate! I no longer know where to hide it or how to be redeemed from it! I no longer believe in anything—neitherin art, nor in poets, nor in myself. I only hate and destroy. I am a lost soul!”
Ermelang folded his hands. “Wonderful as you are, you should remember all you have given and to how many.”
Eva stood still. “I am a lost soul. I feel it.”
“Why lost? You are playing a sad game with yourself.”
She shook her head and whispered the verses of theInferno:
“O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci,Che le cose di Dio, che di bontateDeono essere spose, e voi rapaciPer oro e per argento adulterate.”[1]
“O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci,Che le cose di Dio, che di bontateDeono essere spose, e voi rapaciPer oro e per argento adulterate.”[1]
“O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci,Che le cose di Dio, che di bontateDeono essere spose, e voi rapaciPer oro e per argento adulterate.”[1]
“O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci,
Che le cose di Dio, che di bontate
Deono essere spose, e voi rapaci
Per oro e per argento adulterate.”[1]
Thoughtfully Ermelang added:
“Fatto v’avete Dio d’oro e d’argento;E che altro è da voi all’idolatre,Se non ch’egli uno, e voi n’orate cento?”[2]
“Fatto v’avete Dio d’oro e d’argento;E che altro è da voi all’idolatre,Se non ch’egli uno, e voi n’orate cento?”[2]
“Fatto v’avete Dio d’oro e d’argento;E che altro è da voi all’idolatre,Se non ch’egli uno, e voi n’orate cento?”[2]
“Fatto v’avete Dio d’oro e d’argento;
E che altro è da voi all’idolatre,
Se non ch’egli uno, e voi n’orate cento?”[2]
“What is that I hear?” Eva asked, and listened. Raucous and angry voices were heard from the street, and yells and hisses. Ermelang listened too. Then he went to the window, pushed the draperies aside, and looked out.
On the snow-covered street in front of the palace fifty or sixty mujiks had assembled. One could clearly distinguish their sheepskin caps and their long coats. They stood there silently and gazed up at the windows. They had attracted a great crowd of people, men and women, and these gesticulated, full of hatred, and seemed to urge the mujiks on.
“I believe those are the Mohilev peasants,” Ermelang said nervously. “I saw them march through the city yesterday.”
Eva joined him for a moment at the window, and glancedout; then she returned to the middle of the room. Her smile was contemptuous. At that moment Susan Rappard came in, badly frightened. “There are people downstairs. Pierre went out to ask them what they wanted. They want to talk to you; they beg humbly to be admitted to your presence. What are we to answer such riffraff? I’ve telephoned police headquarters. Good heavens, what a country, what an abominable country!”
Eva lowered her eyes. “They are very poor people, Susan,” she said. “Give them money. Give them all the money that is in the house.”
“Nonsense!” Susan cried, horrified. “Then the next time they’ll break down the door and rob us.”
“Do as I tell you,” Eva replied. “Go to M. Labourdemont and tell him to let you have all available cash. Then go out and take it to them. No, you had better send some one who can speak to them, and let him say that I have gone to bed and cannot receive them. And telephone the police at once and assure them that we have no need of protection. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Susan and went out.
The crowd had increased, the noise grew, and drunken men yelled. Only the peasants remained silent. The oldest of them had come to the edge of the sidewalk. A little white lump of snow lay on his cap, and to his beard clung snow and ice. Pierre, the doorkeeper, in his livery set with silver tresses, was facing him arrogantly. The old peasant bowed low while the lackey spoke.
Eva turned to Ermelang. “Good-bye, dear friend. I am tired. Guard this hour in your memory, but forget it when you speak of me to others. The innermost things are revealed to but one. Good night.”
When Ermelang reached the door of the palace, he saw a troop of mounted police appear at the other end of the street. The crowd melted away with an agility that showed longexperience. It took but a minute. Only the peasants remained. Ermelang did not know whether money had been given them as Eva had commanded. He did not care to witness the play of crude force that was sure to occur on the arrival of the armed men.
Ruth hurried home. Every Sunday afternoon her father was accustomed to spend a few hours with her. She was surprised not to find him in the flat. A letter lay on the table addressed: “To my children.”
The letter read: “Dear daughter and dear son: I must leave you, and only Almighty God knows when I shall see you again. I have hesitated, and I have fought against my decision, but it is made at last. I am no longer equal to the struggle of existence under the circumstances which obtain. To get ahead in Berlin a man needs iron fists and an iron forehead. I am no longer young enough to push all obstacles brutally out of the way, so utter destitution threatens us. Instead of being your protector and provider, I am faced by the terrible possibility of becoming a burden to you, Ruth, and your exertions are even now superhuman. I have often been attracted by the thought of putting an end to my life; but my religion as well as my concern for my children’s memory of me has kept me alive. I have found a friend, a fellow Jew, who has persuaded me to emigrate to America. He is advancing the money for the voyage, and is hopeful of our success. Perhaps fate will relent to me at last. Perhaps my terrible sacrifice in leaving you two in uncertainty and want will move it to pity. I see no other way of saving myself from certain destruction. Only because I know your strength of soul, dear Ruth, only because I have the firm faith that some kind angel watches over you, do I venture upon this difficult and bitter step. I must not and dare not think. You are so young, both of you, and without protection or friends or kinsmen. Perhaps God will forgive me and protect you. I could bear no farewell but this. If I have anything good to report I shall write. Then you, too, must let me hear. I am inclosing fifty marks for your immediate needs; I cannot spare more. The rent for November is paid. Six marks and fifty pfennigs are due to the shoemaker Rösicke. With all my heart I embrace you both. Your unhappy Father.”
Ruth wept.
She had been sitting still for a whole hour, when she heard a knocking at the door. She thought it was Michael. She was a little afraid of his coming, and in her need of a confidant she hoped deeply that it was Christian Wahnschaffe.
It was neither. She opened the door, and saw a ragged girl accompanied by a dog, a butcher’s dog, big as a calf, with a horribly smooth, gleaming, black and white skin.
Ruth kept her hand on the door-knob while she asked the girl, who might have been anything from twelve to twenty, what she wanted. The dog had an evil glare.
The girl quietly handed her a piece of paper. It was greasy and covered with the writing of some illiterate. Ruth was frightened, and thought: “All bad news comes in writing to-day.” She had not yet read the writing on the paper, but she felt that it boded some evil.
For a moment she looked out through the hall window that framed a group of black chimneys. The uncanny dog growled.
The writing on the paper was difficult to decipher. She read: “You must plese come rite away to somebody what is terrible bad of. He has took poisen it is killing him and he has got to tel you something before he dis. He is in the back room of Adeles Rest a wine room Prenzlaur Alley 112 in the yard to the left. Plese come rite away with the girl and god wil reward you. Plese for gods sake do come.”
“What is the matter? What can I do?” Ruth whispered.
The girl shrugged her shoulders. As though she were dumb, she pointed to the piece of paper.
She was full of foreboding and of an inner warning, full of pain over the letter and the flight of her father, and full of horror of the butcher’s dog. She was undecided, looked at the paper, and stammered: “I don’t know.... I ought to wait for Michael.... Who is it.... He should have given his name.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders.
It seemed to Ruth that it would be wrong to disregard this cry for help. The bloodshot eyes of the dog were fixed upon her. Never had she seen an animal that seemed so naked. She put her hand over her forehead and tried to gather her troubled thoughts. She went back into the room and looked about. It seemed very lonely and bare. She slipped into her little coat and put on her hat. A faint smile gleamed for a moment on her face, as though she were glad to have come to a decision. She ran her eyes over the writing once more. “Plese for gods sake do come.” One’s duty seemed quite clear.
For a little she held her father’s letter uncertainly in her hand. Then she folded it again, and laid it on the table beside her slightly disordered books and writing utensils. She closed the books that were open, and made a little pile of them. The dog had noiselessly followed her into the room. It followed her as she left. On the door there hung by a string a little slate and a slate pencil. Ruth wrote: “I’ll be back soon. Have gone to Prenzlauer Alley. Wait for me. I must talk to you about something important.” She locked the door and hid the key under the door-mat of straw.
The strange girl preserved her sleepy indifference.
On the stairs Ruth bethought herself, and knocked at Karen’s door. If Christian were there, she could say a few words to him; but no one opened. She thought that Karen was asleep, and did not ring. As she descended the stairs behind thegirl and the naked dog the new responsibilities and problems of her life came into her mind. But in Ruth’s young and intrepid heart, confusions grew clear and difficult things lost their terror.
In the lower hall she hesitated for a last time. She wanted to stop at Gisevius’s to see if Christian were there. But two old women were reviling each other loudly and filthily in the yard, and she went on.
It was raining. It was Sunday afternoon, a time of ghastly dreariness in Stolpische Street. There was quiet under the grey November sky, save for a hum from the public houses. The pale street-lamps flickered in the twilight.
“Let us go, then,” Ruth said to the girl.
The naked dog trotted between them on the wet pavement.
Crammon had written as follows to the Countess Brainitz: “Since I have pledged my word, of course I shall come. But I beg you to have the kindness to prepare Letitia in some appropriate way. As the fatal moment approaches I feel more and more uncomfortable. It is a very difficult act of expiation that you demand of me. I would rather make a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat and become a hermit there for a few years and seek for the remains of Noah’s ark. I grant you that I have always enjoyed the delights that came to me without scruple; but it does not seem to me that I have deserved this. It is too much.”
The countess replied that she would do her utmost to mitigate the painfulness of the meeting. She had no objection to the dear child’s weeping on her bosom, before facing a father who admitted his fatherhood with so many hesitations and fears. “And so, Herr von Crammon,” she wrote at the end of her letter, “we are expecting you. Letitia has returned from Paris more enchanting than ever. All the world is at her feet. I trust you will not be an exception.”
“The devil take her!” Crammon growled, as he packed his bags.
When he arrived at the countess’s country-house, which was called the Villa Ophelia, he was told that the ladies had gone to the theatre. He was taken to the room that had been prepared for him. He washed, dressed for dinner, strolled back to the drawing-room, stuck his hands deep into his pockets like a shivering tramp, and dropped morosely into an easy chair. He heard the rain plash, and from another room the crying of an infant. “Aha,” he thought, in his vexation, “that is my grandchild, one of the twins. How do I know that some misguided creature won’t put it on my knee, and ask me to admire and pet and even kiss it? Who, I say, will protect me from a bourgeois idyl of that sort? You might expect anything of a woman like the countess. These sentimental actresses who refuse to grow old are capable of anything. Is there anything more annoying in the world than a baby? It is neither a human being nor an animal; it smells of cow-udders and scented powder, and makes an insufferable and repulsive noise. It pokes its limbs into the faces of older persons; and if there are two of them, and all these horrors assail one doubly, one is apt to be quite defenceless, and may fairly inquire: ‘What have you, Bernard Crammon, whose interest in the propagation of the race has always been strictly negative—what have you to do with such things?’”
Crammon ended his reflections with a smile of self-mockery. At that moment he heard cheerful voices, and Letitia and the countess entered.
He arose with exquisite chivalry. He was most friendly and most polished.
He did not conceal his astonishment over Letitia’s appearance. His Austrian delight in feminine charm and his impulse to do homage to it scattered the fog of his egotistical vexation. Either, he thought, his memory was playing himfalse, or else Letitia had undergone a marvellous development since the days at Wahnschaffe Castle. Crude young girls had never, to be sure, attracted him. The women whom he admired and courted had to be rich in knowledge and responsible, for that eased his own responsibility.
After the first greetings the countess spoke. “Dear people,” she said, with her North German readiness to meet all occasions, “I must leave you for half an hour now. A theatre is a grimy place. I must wash my hands. Everything about it is grimy—the seats, the spectators, the actors, and the play. It always gives me a yearning for soap and water. You can use the time to chat a bit. Afterwards we’ll have supper.”
She rustled out, not without having cast a severe glance at Crammon.
Crammon asked thoughtfully: “I wonder why she called this building the Villa Ophelia. There are many inexplicable things in life. This is one of them.”
Letitia laughed. She regarded him with a mixture of irony and shyness. But as she stood before him in her frock of soft, pale yellow silk, her neck and bosom radiating an ivory shimmer, Crammon found it difficult to sustain his self-pity. Letitia approached him, and said archly yet with feeling: “So you are my papa. Who would have thought it? It must have been quite unpleasant for you to have an old, forgotten sin suddenly transformed into a great girl.”
Crammon chuckled, although a shadow still lay on his face. He took her hand into both of his and pressed it warmly. “I see that we understand each other,” he said, “and that consoles me. What I feared was an outburst and tears and the emotional display that is considered fitting. It is so nice of you to be sensible. But let us sacrifice something to the ceremonial tradition of the emotions. I shall imprint a paternal kiss upon your brow.”
Letitia inclined her head, and he kissed her. She said: “Weshare a delightful secret now. How shall I call you in company—Uncle, or Uncle Crammon, or Uncle Bernard, or simply Bernard?”
“Simply Bernard, I’m sure,” Crammon replied. “I need not remind you, of course, that you are legally the daughter of the late Herr von Febronius and of his late wife. Our situation demands of us both the most delicate tactfulness.”
“Certainly,” Letitia agreed, and sat down. “But just fancy the dangers that lurk in this world. Suppose I hadn’t known anything and had fallen in love with you. How horrible! And I must tell you at once that I don’t seem to revere you a bit. My feeling is rather sisterly, and I’m sure that I like you very, very much. Will you be satisfied with that, or is it terribly unfilial?”
“It quite suffices,” said Crammon. “I can’t indeed impress on you too strongly the wisdom of emotional frugality. Most people carry their feelings about the way the Ashanti women do their glass beads. They rattle them in public, and never realize what very ordinary stuff they are. But that is by the way. For our relations we must have a very special programme. This is important in order to ward off the intrusion of outsiders. I am—it goes without saying—at your service at any time and in any way. You may rely wholly upon my friendship, upon my ... let us use the odious word—paternal friendship.”
Letitia was immensely amused at his grave and anxious zeal to gain what easements the situation permitted. She was quite worthy of him in the capacity for a certain hypocrisy. Beneath her charming expression and her innocent appearance of pliability, she hid a good deal of mockery and not a little self-will. She answered: “There’s no reason why we should limit each other’s freedom. We shall not stand in each other’s way, nor become unduly indebted to each other. Each has the right to assume the other’s confidence, and thus to preserve his freedom of action. I hope that that suits you.”
“You are a very determined little person, and I took you to be foolishly enthusiastic and fanciful. Did the cattle drivers in the land of fire sharpen your wits? Yes, it suits me; it suits me admirably.”
“There is so much ahead of me,” Letitia continued, and her eyes glowed with desires and dreams, “I hardly know how I shall get through it all—people, countries, cities, works of art. I’ve lost so much time and I’m nearly twenty-one. Auntie wants me to stay with her, but that’s impossible. I’m expected in Munich on the first of December and in Meran on the tenth. In Paris it was divine. The people were perfectly charming to me. Every one wanted me at once.”
“I quite believe it, quite,” said Crammon, and rubbed his chin. “But tell me, how did that adventure with the vicomte end that the countess told me about?”
“Oh, did she tell you about it?” Letitia blushed. “That wasn’t very discreet.” For a moment her face showed an expression of sorrow and of embarrassment. But unhappy experiences, even when they made their way into her consciousness, could not really darken it. In a moment her eyes were again full of laughter. All dark memories had fled. “Take me on a motor drive to-morrow, won’t you, Bernard,” she urged him, and stretched out her hands impulsively. “And you must invite the little Baron Rehmer who lives in the Grand Hotel. He’s Stanislaus Rehmer, the Polish sculptor. He’s going to model me and teach me Polish. He’s a charming person.”
Crammon interrupted her: “Explain one thing to me! Tell me what is happening in the Argentine. Hasn’t that blue-skinned bandit in whom you once saw the essence of all manly virtues taken any steps against you? You don’t imagine, do you, that he will simply stand by while you take French leave with his double offspring? As for me, I wouldn’t have sharedthe same board with him, far less the same bed. But that was not your opinion, and the law doesn’t consider fluctuations of taste.”
“He’s brought a suit for divorce against me, and I’ve entered a countersuit,” Letitia said. “I’ve seen mountains of documents. The children are mine, since he forced me to flight by his extreme cruelty. I’m not worried about it a bit.”
“Does he pay you an income?”
“Not a penny so far.”
“Then how do you live? You’re obviously not retrenching. Where does the money come from? Who pays for all these luxuries? Or is it all a sham with a background of debts?”
Letitia shrugged her shoulders. “I hardly know,” she answered, with some embarrassment. “Sometimes I have money and sometimes I haven’t any. Poor auntie sold a few old Dutch pictures that she had. One can’t spend one’s life reckoning like a shopkeeper. Why do you talk of such horrid things?” There was such sincere pain and reproachfulness in her voice that Crammon felt like a sinner. He looked aside. Held by her charm, he lost the courage to burden her farther with coarse realities. And now, too, the countess appeared in the room. She had put on gloves of gleaming white, and her face glowed like freshly scrubbed porcelain. In her arms she carried Puck, the little Pekingese, who had grown old and slept much.
“My dears, supper is served,” she cried, with the slightly stagy cheeriness of her youth.
Karen believed that, in his own mind, Christian expected her to pay some attention to her child. She had secretly written to her mother, but no answer had come.
Christian had never mentioned the child. He did not expect to find any softening in Karen. Her behaviour gave no sign of any.
But brooding in her bed she wondered both what Christian expected of her and what had become of her child. Occasionally a glassy clinking could be heard. It came from the pearls. She would reach for them to assure herself of their presence. When she felt them, a smile of mysterious well-being appeared on her face.
For three days Christian had not been out of his clothes. He fell asleep in a corner of the sofa. Since morning a formless disquietude had possessed him.
Isolde Schirmacher, noisily bringing in Karen’s soup, wakened him. He put the chairs in their places, cleared the table of his books, put the checked cover on it, and opened the window. “It’s Sunday,” he said.
“I don’t want soup,” Karen grumbled.
“And I went and made it for you extry,” Isolde whined, “and a pork fricassee and all. You never want nothing.”
“Eat the stuff yourself,” Karen said spitefully.
Isolde carried the soup out again.
“Can’t you close the window?” Karen whined. “Why do you always have to open it? A person can freeze to death.”
Christian closed the window.
“I’d like to know why she carried the soup out again,” Karen said after a while. “That’d suit her, to gorge herself on what’s meant for me. I’m hungry.”
Christian went to the kitchen and brought in the soup. He sat down beside her bed, and held the plate in both hands while she laboriously ate the soup. “It’s hot,” she moaned, and pressed her head against the pillows. “Open the window so’s I can get a bit of air.”
He opened the window. Karen looked at him with a dull wonder in her eyes. His patience was unfathomable to her. She wanted to get him to the point of scolding and showing her her place.
During the night she would make twenty demands and then reverse them with embittered impatience. His kindliness remained uniform. It enraged her; she wanted to scream. She cried out to him: “What kind of a man are you, for God’s sake?” She shook her fists.
Christian did not know what to answer.
At two o’clock Dr. Voltolini arrived. The clinical assistant who had examined Karen at Ruth’s request had no time to make regular visits, so Ruth had suggested that Voltolini, whom she knew, be permitted to continue the treatment.
Karen refused to answer nearly all his questions. Her hatred of physicians dated from her experiences on the streets.
“I hardly know what attitude to take,” Dr. Voltolini said to Christian, who accompanied him to the stairs. “There’s an incomprehensible stubbornness in her. If I didn’t want to accommodate you, I would have given up the case long ago.” He had been deeply charmed by Christian, and often observed him tensely. Christian did not notice this.
He reproached Karen for her behaviour.
“Never mind,” she said curtly. “These doctors are swindlers and thieves. They speculate on people’s foolishness. I don’t want him to lay his hand on me. I don’t want him to listen to my heart so I can smell his bald head, or tap me all over and look like an executioner. I don’t need him if I’m going to live, and less if I’ve got to die.”
Christian did not answer.
Karen crouched in her bed. She suffered from pain to-day. A saw seemed to be drawn up and down between her ribs. She went on: “I’d like to know why you bother to study medicine. Tell me that. I’ve never asked you anything, but I’d like to know. What attracts you about being a saw-bones? What good will you get out of it?”
Christian was surprised at her insistent tone and at the glitter in her eyes. He tried to tell her, arguing clumsily. He talked to her as to an equal, with respect and courtesy. She did not wholly understand the sense of his words, but she thrust her head far forward, and listened breathlessly.
Christian said that it was not the study itself that had attracted him, but the constant contact with human beings into which it brought you. Then, too, there was the natural temptation to choose a study the length of which could be shortened by bits of knowledge that he already had. When he first determined to take it up, he had also thought of its practical usefulness to him. That thought he had now abandoned. He had believed that he might earn his livelihood by practising medicine; but he had been forced to the conclusion that he was morally incapable of earning money by any means. He had reached this conclusion not long since. He had gone to visit the student Jacoby and found him out. Just then a child of the landlady had fallen from a ladder and become unconscious. He had carried the child into the room, rubbed it with alcohol, listened to its heart, and stayed with it a while. When the child had quite recovered and he himself had been ready to go, the mother had pressed a two-mark piece into his hand. He had had the impulse to laugh into the woman’s face. He hadn’t been able to realize the cause of his shame, but the sense of it had been so strong as to make him dizzy. And that incident had taught him the impossibility of his taking money for services.
Even while he was speaking, it came to him that this was the first time he had ever talked to Karen about himself. It seemed quite easy to do so, because of the solemn attention with which she listened and which changed her whole expression. It seemed to rejuvenate him. A sense of well-being surged through him, a peculiar joy that seemed to affect his very skin. He had never known a joy like that. It was a new feeling.
And so he continued more freely—quite frankly and without reserve. Science, he told her, was rather indifferent to him in itself. He valued it as a means to an end. He didn’t know whither it would lead him. The future had grown less rather than more clear to him recently. At first, as he had told her,he thought that he might enter a profession and practise it like most young men. In that hope he had been disappointed. Nevertheless he knew that he was fundamentally on the right track. It was a time of preparation for him, and every day was enriching him. He got a great deal closer to people now, and saw them without pretence and falseness. In a hospital dormitory, in the waiting-room of a clinic, in the operating room, in the presence of hundreds of sufferers—in such scenes all hypocrisy died; there truth gripped one, and one understood what one had never understood before, and one could read the open book of life. Tubercular children, scrofulous children, large-eyed children beholding death—whoever had not seen that had not yet truly lived. And he knew whence they came and whither they went and what they said to one another, these fathers and mothers and strange crowds, and how each human creature was supremely interesting and important to itself. No horror frightened him any more, no wound, no terrible operative incision; he could see such things quite coldly now; he had even thought of volunteering for service in the lepers’ colony in East Prussia. But his urge was toward deeper and ever deeper abysses of life. He was never satisfied. He wanted to steep himself in humanity. There were always new horrors behind the old, other torment beyond any he had seen; and unless he could absorb all that into himself, he had no peace. Later he hoped to find still other ways. He was only practising upon sick bodies; later he would sink himself into sick souls. But it was only when he had unveiled something secret and hidden that his heart felt free and light.
Resting her arms on the edge of the bed and bending over far, Karen watched him with avid wonder. She understood and yet did not understand. At times she caught the drift, at times the sense of the words themselves. She nodded and brooded, contorted her mouth and laughed silently and a little wildly; she held her breath, and had a dim vision of him atlast, of this noble and strange and beautiful being who had been utterly mysterious to her to this very hour. She saw him as he was, and it seemed to her as though she were in the midst of a flaming fire. It made her desperate that she had to be so silent, that she was so like stone within, that she had no words at her command, not one, that she could not even say: “Come to me, brother.” For he was of flesh like her own; and that made her feel alive. She felt gratitude as she had before felt despair and weariness, disgrace and hatred. Her gratitude was like a flame cleansing her wilderness, and it was also a great urge and a woeful joy, and at last again despair. For she felt that she was dumb.
Christian left in strange haste. Karen called in Isolde Schirmacher, and told the girl she was free for the evening. She got up and dressed slowly and painfully. She could hardly stand, and the room whirled around with her. The table seemed to cling to the ceiling and the oven to be upside down. But at each step she trod more firmly. She hid the pearls in her bosom. She faltered down the stairs, and strange colours flickered before her eyes. But she wanted to do something for him. That thought drove her onward. She wanted to drag herself to a cab and drive to her mother and ask: “Where is the child? Where did you take it?” And if the old woman was impudent, she meant to clutch her and strangle her till she told the truth.
To do something for him! To prove to him that there was a Karen whom he did not know.
She crept along the walls of the houses.
Christian was just coming back when a policeman and a working man, followed by an idle crowd, half led, half carried her home. He was confounded. She was white as chalk. They laid her on the bed. Since Isolde was not there, Christian knocked at the door of the Hofmann flat to ask Ruth to help him with Karen. But he caught sight of the little slate, and read the message that Ruth had left for her brother.
The chaotic unrest that he had felt all day rose more powerfully within his soul.
And now things had gone so far with Johanna that she had given herself to him whom she despised. At last she had the valid proof of her own feebleness of soul. She needed no longer to fear an inner voice that would defend her, nor any hope that might counsel her to guard herself. It was superfluous now to spare her body, and no longer necessary to keep up the little self-deceptions that bolstered up her brittle pride. She was unmasked in her own eyes, and, in a sense so different from the ordinary moral one, dishonoured ... dishonoured for all time and all eternity ... branded.... She had become what she had always suspected herself capable of becoming. Things were settled.
From the moment that he had waited for her in the street that day, Amadeus Voss had not left her side. From time to time he had repeated with mad monotony: “I love you, Johanna.” She had made no reply. With compressed lips and lowered eyes she had walked on and on, for more than an hour. The fear of human glances and human presences had kept her from fleeing by tram. Furthermore it was he who chose their path by a silent command. At last he had stopped in front of a little coffee-house. He neither asked her nor invited her in. He took it for granted that she would follow, and she did.
In a dim corner they sat facing each other. He took out a pencil and drew mystic symbols on the marble top of the table. This oppressive state of silence had lasted nearly half an hour. At last he had spoken: “To utter the word ‘love’ is to become guilty of an enormous triviality. It has been flattened out and savours of cheap fiction. Speak it and you become secondhand. The feeling is unique, incomparable, strange, and wondrous—an unheard-of adventure, a dream ofdreams. The word is a base sound taken from a tattered reader. But how shall one communicate with another when the feeling strangles and shakes you, and your days are the days of a madman? I came to the age of twenty-six without knowing this magic and this wonder. No hand was stretched out toward me, no eye sought me out, and so I looked with hatred upon all who were in the grip of what seemed to be a blasphemous passion. Among the playmates of my childhood little erotic friendships were common. Every boy had his little sweetheart with whom he flirted instinctively and yet innocently. I excluded myself from all that and hated. On Sunday afternoon they would stroll out beyond the village. I would follow some couple, and if the boy and girl sat down somewhere to chat, I would observe them from some ambush with rage and bitterness. You have a keen enough insight to realize how I felt then and later and until this very day. Longing—yes, well, that’s another of those pale, drained concepts. Occasionally I stretched out my hand in my confusion and my cowardly desire, and trembled when a woman’s sleeve brushed mine. I became the fool of one who sought to trap me, and I let the accursed dancer poison my blood. Sometimes I flung myself into the gutter, and became defiled merely to silence the pitiless voice of nature, which is a heritage of the Evil One and the work of Satan.”
She had not raised her eyes from the table, and the hieroglyphs covered half of its top. “I won’t make any promises in the name of my so-called love,” he continued, and his bowed face became a mask of pain. “I don’t know whither it will lead either me or her who elects to be mine. To be mine—that has a sound of horror, hasn’t it? All I can say is that that woman will contribute to my salvation and redeem me from torment. You may reply: ‘What have I to do with your salvation or with the torments of a lost soul?’ Very well. Let us not bring that in. But consider whether in all the world there is another man whom you canwin wholly, utterly, body and soul? Every step and every breath of yours is infinitely precious to me; there is an equal life and loveliness to me in the lashes of your eyes and the hem of your garment. I am within your very body, and throb in the pulsing of your heart. There is a fear that one feels of one’s own heart-beats; and there is one that is felt of another’s. Shall I use more words? These are enough. All words are unholy, and creep on the fringe of experience.”
The woman in Johanna had succumbed. A terrible curiosity had enslaved her. Because all that she was and did seemed unnatural and distorted to her, and because she was weary and sore, she let herself glide into those desperately outstretched arms.
She seemed to fall into a depth where heat and glow corroded what they touched. Shattering ecstasy and crushing weariness alternated. Scenes pallid and terrible flitted by as on the screen of a cinematograph, and the hours raced to their hideous death.
She wrote to her sister in Bucharest: “You’re so very near the Orient, and I’ve always been told that it is full of mighty wizards. Couldn’t you, please, use your well-tried charms to get the better of one of them, and steal from him some magic formula by virtue of which one can lose the consciousness of one’s self? Mine, you see, is quite ragged and tattered. And if I could exchange it for a nice, new, fashionable one, I’d be helped so much! I could marry a nice Jewish manufacturer and have babies and eat chocolates and flirt with thejeunesse doréeand realize similar ideals. I beseech you, Clarisse, find me a wizard—young or old, it doesn’t matter. But I must have a wizard to be saved.”
At eight o’clock in the evening Christian knocked at Ruth’s door again. No one answered. He was surprised.
He knew that the key was put under the door-mat when no one was at home. He raised the mat and saw the key. Then he went back to Karen’s rooms.
She seemed to be sleeping. Her face was like a piece of chalk. Her strawy hair, like a flaming helmet, contrasted in ghastly fashion with that pallor. After she had lain rigid for a while, she had undressed herself and crept back into bed.
Christian listened at the wall again and again, trying to catch some voice, some sign of life from the Hofmann flat. Silence. When two hours had passed, he took a lighted candle and stepped out into the hall. The key was still under the mat.
He thought he heard a sound of lamentation in the air. He did not think he had the right to unlock the door and enter the flat. And yet, after he had stood there for some time in indecision, he slipped the key into the keyhole and opened the door.
A breath of melancholy came from the empty room. He put the candle on the table and caught sight of Hofmann’s letter of farewell. He hesitated to read it. He thought he heard steps and stopped to listen. The feeling that the letter would explain Ruth’s absence finally decided him to read it.
The letter seemed to him to remove all doubt. She had probably thought her father still in the city, and set out to find him and dissuade him from his plan. The acquaintance with whom she had hoped to find him probably lived in Prenzlauer Alley, and Michael, when he had read her message, had probably hurried on to the same place.
Although this reasoning seemed plausible enough, his imagination was unsatisfied. He looked questioningly at the furniture and the walls, and touched with tenderness the books on the table that Ruth had so recently had in her hands. He left the room, locked the door, hid the key under the mat, and returned to Karen’s rooms.
He blew out the light and lay down on the sofa. Thesenights of brief and light slumber were exhausting him. His cheeks were thin, his profile peaked, his lids inflamed, and his brain morbidly tense.
The house, sunk into the treacherous immobility of its nights, appeared to him in the guise of a monstrous skeleton, consisting of countless walls and beds and doors steeped in malodorous darkness. Yet he loved it—loved the shabby stairs, the weather-beaten walls and posts, the fires in its many hearths that he had seen in passing, the emaciated woman who, in some room, scolded her wailing babe to sleep. He loved the manifold disconsolateness of these tangled lives; he loved the withered, sooty little flowerpots by the court windows, the yellow apples on the shelves, the scraps of paper in the halls, the very refuse that dishevelled women carried in troughs into the street.
But still his inner vision clung to the door-mat of straw and to the key under it, to Hofmann’s letter, the books and papers on the table, the little cotton frock on a nail, the loaf of bread on the side table. And from all these things there emerged in his consciousness the figure of Ruth, as though it were rising from the elements of which it was made.
He remembered accompanying her to one of the great shops, where she bought a pair of cheap gloves. With the crowd they had drifted through the show-rooms and he recalled the very still delight upon her face with which she had regarded the mountains of snowy lingerie and of brilliantly hued silks—the laces and hats and girdles and costumes and all things that enchant and lure a young girl. But she had been content with that strange, still delight that seemed to say: how well it is that such things are! She had had no desire, no reaching out of her own, only a pleasure in the lovely qualities of things that were.
And thus too, without desire and without reaching out, she passed among men, and perceived the festive glitter of the great shops, the radiant wealth of palaces, and the fever ofpleasure-seeking that throbbed in the streets when the great city strove to forget its toil. With that same gesture and that still content, she withdrew herself from sharp allurements and the anodynes of a thousand temptations, from all that transcended true measure and her own power; she threw the mantle of her youth over the world and stood in its midst, deeply moved, and yet aloof.
He had been present one day when she was arguing with the student Lamprecht, whose ideas were those of a demagogue. She had a charming lightness of speech, although her opinions were decided enough. Action and sacrifice had been mentioned, and Ruth said that she could not see the difference, that often they were closely akin or even identical. And finally she said: “It is the mind alone that conquers obstacles, and in it action and sacrifice are one.” When her opponent replied that the mind must somehow communicate itself to the world and that this was, in itself, action, she had replied with burning cheeks: “Must one really proclaim and communicate the mind to the world? Then it ceases to be itself. The service of the heart is better than the service of lips or hands.”
Although Christian had listened with the superior smile of one who never engages in argument, he had seen then that this voice had become necessary to his very life, and also this radiant eye and this glowing heart, and this vibrant soul that was so profoundly experienced and yet so incomparably young. She gave him to himself. She was his sister and his friend. He was revealed to himself through her pure humanity. And he could find no sleep, for her shadow appeared to him constantly and yet did not find the courage to address him. Now and then he started suddenly and his heart beat quickly. Once he beheld her in bodily form, and seemed to hear an imploring whisper; and a cold shudder ran over him. He arose and lit the candle again. Karen moaned.
He stepped up to her bed. “Water,” she murmured.
He brought her water, and while she drank he bent affectionately over her. Her eyes were large and looked at him with a great sadness. There were tears in them.
Amadeus Voss lived in Zehlendorf, near the race track, in the gabled attic of a new house. He had a view of meadows stretching toward a rim of pine-woods. On the green plain projected a huge advertising sign with gigantic letters: Zehlendorf-Grunewald Development Company, Ltd.
“They put that up within the last week so as to keep my soul within proper bounds,” Voss said. “It’s a clever memento, isn’t it? I’m told the company plans to build a church here. Magnificent! In the neighbourhood there is also a bell-foundry.”
Johanna sat at the opposite window, through which the sunlight that she sought shone in. Her little face had grown thin. Her beautifully curved mouth with its sweet sadness lost its charm on account of her homely nose. “You might get employment as a lay reader,” she said impudently, and dangled her legs like a schoolgirl. “Or do you think it’s a Protestant business? Of course, every one is Protestant here. Why don’t you convert the unbelievers? You let your most solid talents go to waste.”
Voss made a grimace. With dragging steps he went through the large studio-like room. “To your kind of free thought all faith is an object of barter,” he said bitterly. “Why do you mock even at yourself? See to it lest the light that is in you be not darkness! That is the monition of the Gospel. But what does that word ‘Gospel’ mean to you? A cultured phrase, or something to buy and sell.”
Johanna, supporting her head on her hand, whispered inaudibly, “No one knows how it came that Rumpelstilzkin is my name.” Aloud she said: “I’m getting a bad report, I see.I’m resuming my seat, teacher. I know that my laziness is obvious even from your exalted seat.”
Amadeus stopped in front of her. “Have you never believed? Has the inscrutable never touched your heart? Have you never trembled before Him? Have you no reverence? What kind of a world do you come from?”
She answered with biting sarcasm. “We spent our days dancing around the golden calf—all of us, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and child. Fancy that! It’s dizzying.”
Impervious to the mockery through which she expressed the fragile charm of her clever mind, Voss fixed on her a look of sombre passion. “Do you at least believe in me?” he asked, and grasped her shoulders.
She resisted and withdrew herself. She thrust her hands against his chest and bent back her head. “I believe in nothing, nothing.” Her whole body throbbed and shook. “Not in myself nor you nor God nor anything. You are quite right. I don’t.” Her brows contracted with pain. Yet she melted, as always, before his glow. It was her ultimate of earth and life, her last anodyne, her weakness yearning for destruction. Her lips grew soft and her lids closed.
With savage strength Amadeus lifted her in his arms. “Neither in yourself nor God nor me,” he murmured. “But in him! Or perhaps you do not believe in him either? Tell me!”
She opened her eyes again. “In whom?” she asked astonished.
“In him!” His utterance was tormented. She understood him, and with an infinitely sinuous movement glided from his arms.
“What do you want of me?” she asked, and rearranged her abundant brown hair with nervous gestures.
“I want to know,” he answered, “to know at last. I cannot bear this any longer. What happened between you two? How do you explain the intimate tone of your letter to him, andyour questions whether he had already forgotten you, whether you dared even ask? No doubt you played the well-known game—the dangerous, lecherous game of moths in the lamplight. I am not so stupid as not to have guessed that. But how far did you venture toward the lamp—as far as the chimney or as far as the flame? And when he left you, what demands had you the right to make? What was he to you? What is he?”
It was the first time that Voss had spoken out. The question had been strangling him. He had set little traps for Johanna and searched her expression, resented her evasions and yet respected her delicacy. And all that had heightened his impatience and suspicion. The fingers of one hand clenched under his chin, he stood there lean and rocking strangely to and fro.
Johanna said nothing. A smile, half mocking, half of suffering, hovered about her lips. She wished that she were far away.
Voss gritted his teeth and went on: “Don’t think it’s jealousy. And if it is—perhaps there is no other word—yet I do not mean what you were taught to think it in the poisoned gardens in which you grew up. Why have you not been frank with me? Am I not worthy of so much? Did you not feel my dumb beseeching? I need not tell you what is at stake. If you did not suspect it, you would not fear to speak. From my childhood on I have lived in outer servitude and inner obedience. I have been taught the lofty and sacred ideal of chastity of our faith. Only despair over the unreachable farness of that ideal plunged me into the sinks of the earth’s iniquity. And so I place on innocence and spotless purity quite another value than the sleek little gentlemen, the trained animals, of your world. I who stand before you am sin and the sense of sin, with all its misery and uncleanness; and you can save me by a word. I have confessed to you all the cries of my own breast. Have I not said enough? Yet even whatI have said seems shameless beside the vanity of your reserve. Can I do nothing but sting your senses, you heathen girl, and never reach your vitals or your soul? Confess, or I will tear the truth from you with red-hot pincers. Shall I have waited and renounced, to be fed on the leavings of another’s satiety? Did you live with him? Speak! Did he cheat me of your purity—he who has cheated me of everything? Speak!”
Johanna, aflame with indignation, took her hat and coat and left him. He did not move. Scarcely had she closed the door behind her, scarcely did he hear the sound of her retreating steps, when he raced after her. With equal speed he returned for his hat. When she was leaving the house he was beside her. “Hear me,” he stammered. “Don’t judge me harshly.” She quickened her pace to escape him. He would not fall behind. “My words were rough, Johanna, even brutal. But they were inspired by the very humbleness of love.” She turned into the street to the railway station. He blocked her path; he threatened to use force if she persisted. Passers-by turned and looked at them. To avoid a public scandal she had to go back with him. “At least,” she pleaded, “let us not return to the house. I can’t stay in the room. We can talk while we are out. But don’t come so near. People are laughing at us.”
“People, people! The world is full of people. They know nothing of us nor we of them. Say that you forgive me, and I’ll be as calm as though I had come from a card party.” He was pale to his forehead.
They walked in the wet, snowy air and over the soaking earth. The street ran into a field-path. Above the setting sun the sky was full of shredded clouds—red, yellow, green, blue. An express train thundered past them. Electric signals trilled. It was tiring to walk over the slippery leaves, but the damp wind cooled their faces.
Amadeus wore himself out in explanations. In the defence of himself, the rejected and humiliated one, the tormentedmember of a caste and race of the rejected and humiliated, he found expressions of such power that they oppressed Johanna and bent her will. He spoke of his love for her, of this terrible storm in his blood, from which he had hoped purification and strength and liberation, but which was wasting and crushing him instead. And so his doubt of her was like a doubt of God. If a youth doubts God the world breaks down and sinks into pure agony. And such was his case in the nights in which he panted for alleviation, and the darkness became an abyss filled with a thousand purple tongues of flame.
And like a blinded man turning in a circle, he began again to ask his question, first carefully and slyly, then impetuously and with passion. He pointed out incriminating details and circumstances that poisoned his imagination. He appealed to her pity, her sense of honesty, to some not wholly buried spark of piety within her. And again he painted the state of his soul, besought her with uplifted hands, then became silent, and with his sombre eyes looked helplessly about.
Johanna had been astonished from the beginning that the nature of her brief contact with Christian, which shone to her from the past like a bit of dawn, had not been obvious to him. If he had understood and taken what had happened as a matter of course, she would probably have admitted it quite naïvely. But his savagery and his avidity aroused her defiance and her fear more and more. Every new attack of his made her feel more unapproachable, and she suddenly felt that she had a secret to guard from him, a deep and proud secret, which no assurances and no persecutions would make her yield up. It was a possession that all good spirits bade her keep, that she should never give up to him who would regard it as a shameful thing and into whose unblessed power she had fallen. So she built defences, and was ready to fight and to lie, to endure all that was ugly and repulsive, reproof and degradation.
And these, indeed, she came to endure. All his obsessionsconcentrated themselves on this one point. His glances searched and his words probed her; behind every tenderness and every touch there lurked a question. If she evaded him, he became enraged. If she soothed him, he cast himself down and kissed her feet. She took pity on him, and for the space of a few ecstatic hours deceived him with the liberally invented details of a platonic relationship. He seemed to believe her and begged her forgiveness, promising more gentleness and silence and consideration. But hardly had a day passed before the old mischief sprang up anew. His eye was sharpened as by acid. Christian Wahnschaffe was the enemy, the thief, the adversary. What happened at such and such a time? What did she say to him on such an occasion? What had he answered? Whence had he come? Whither was he going? Did he ask her to yield herself? Did she kiss him? Once? Many times? Had she desired his kisses? When was she ever alone with him? How did the room look? What sort of a dress had she worn? It was hopeless. It was like a drill that turns and eats into wood. Johanna repulsed him violently; she jeered and sighed and hid her face. She wept and she laughed, but she did not yield by the breadth of a hair.
Next came utter exhaustion. She was often so worn out that she lay on a sofa all day, pale and still. She let her relatives take her to theatres, concerts, picture galleries. With dull eyes and freezing indifference she endured these demands. The sympathy of people was a burden to her. What could they do to soften her cruel self-contempt? This killing contempt she transformed into a weapon, the two-edged sword of her wit, and this she turned against her own breast. Her sayings became famous in large circles of society. She described how she had once been bathing by a lake and how a sudden gust of wind had blown away her bath-chair. “And there,” she closed, “I stood as naked as God had created me in His wrath.”