THE GLOBE ON THE FINGERTIPS OF AN ELF

I

Crammon had been a true prophet. Ten months had sufficed to fix the eyes of the world upon the dancer, Eva Sorel. The great newspapers coupled her name with the celebrated ones of the earth; her art was regarded everywhere as the fine flower of its age.

All those to whose restless spiritual desires she had given form and body were at her feet. The leaders of sorely driven humanity drew a breath and looked up to her. The adorers of form and the proclaimers of new rhythms vied for a smile from her lips.

She remained calm and austere with herself. Sometimes the noise of plaudits wearied her. Hard beset by the vast promises of greedy managers, she felt not rarely a breath of horror. Her inner vision, fixed upon a far and ideal goal, grew dim at the stammered thanks of the easily contented. These, it seemed to her, would cheat her. Then she fled to Susan Rappard and was scolded for her pains.

“We wandered out to conquer the world,” said Susan, “and the world has submitted almost without a struggle. Why don’t you enjoy your triumph?”

“What my hands hold and my eyes grasp gives me no cause to feel very triumphant yet,” Eva answered.

Susan lamented loudly. “You little fool, you’ve literally gone hungry. Take your fill now!”

“Be quiet,” Eva replied, “what do you know of my hunger?”

People besieged her threshold, but she received only a few and chose them carefully. She lived in a world of flowers. Jean Cardillac had furnished her an exquisite house, the garden terrace of which was like a tropical paradise. When she reclined or sat there in the evening under the softened light of the lamps, surrounded by her gently chatting friends, whose most casual glance was an act of homage, she seemed removed from the world of will and of the senses and to be present in this realm of space only as a beautiful form.

Yet even those who thought her capable of any metamorphosis were astonished when a sudden one came upon her and when its cause seemed to be an unknown and inconsiderable person. Prince Alexis Wiguniewski had introduced the man, and his name was Ivan Michailovitch Becker. He was short and homely, with deep-set Sarmatian eyes, lips that looked swollen, and a straggling beard about his chin and cheeks. Susan was afraid of him.

It was on a December night when the snow was banked up at the windows that Ivan Michailovitch Becker had talked with Eva Sorel for eight hours in the little room spread with Italian rugs. In the adjoining room Susan walked shivering up and down, wondering when her mistress would call for help. She had an old shawl about her shoulders. From time to time she took an almond from her pocket, cracked it with her teeth, and threw the shells into the fireplace.

But on this night Eva did not go to bed, not even when the Russian had left her. She entered her sleeping chamber and let her hair roll down unrestrained so that it hid her head and body, and she sat on a low stool holding her fevered cheeks in her hollow hands. Susan, who had come to help her undress, crouched near her on the floor and waited for a word.

At last her young mistress spoke. “Read me the thirty-third canto of the Inferno,” she begged.

Susan brought two candles and the book. She placed the candles on the floor and the volume on Eva’s lap. Then she read with a monotonous sound of lamentation. But toward the end, especially where the poet speaks of petrified and frozen tears, her clear voice grew firmer and more eloquent.

When she had finished she was frightened by the gleaming moisture in Eva’s eyes.

Eva arose and bent her head far backward and closed her eyes and said: “I shall dance all that—damnation in hell and then redemption!”

Then Susan embraced Eva’s knees and pressed her cheek against the bronze coloured silk of the girl’s garment and murmured: “You can do anything you wish.”

From that night on Eva was filled with a more urgent passion, and her dancing had lines in which beauty hovered on the edge of pain. Ecstatic prophets asserted that she was dancing the new century, the sunset of old ideas, the revolution that is to come.

II

When Crammon saw her again she showed the exquisitely cultivated firmness of a great lady and forced his silent admiration. And again there began that restless burning in his heart.

He talked to her about Christian Wahnschaffe and one evening he brought him to her. In Christian’s face there was something radiant. Adda Castillo had drenched it with her passion. Eva felt about him the breath of another woman and her face showed a mocking curiosity. For several seconds the young man and the dancer faced each other like two statues on their pedestals.

Crammon wondered whether Christian would ever thank him for this service. He gave his arm to Susan, and the two walked to and fro in the picture gallery.

“I hope your blond German friend is a prince,” said Susan with her air of worry.

“He’s a prince travelling incognito in this vale of tears,” Crammon answered. “You’ve made some stunning changes here,” he added, gazing about him. “I’m satisfied with you both. You are wise and know the ways of the world.”

Susan stopped and told him of what weighed upon her mind. Ivan Michailovitch Becker came from time to time, and he and Eva would talk together for many hours. Always after that Eva would pass a sleepless night and answer no questions and have a fevered gleaming in her eyes. And how was one to forbid the marvellous child her indulgence in this mood? Yet it might hold a danger for her. No stray pessimist with awkward hands should be permitted to drag down as with weights the delicate vibrations of her soul. “What do you advise us to do?” she asked.

Crammon rubbed his smooth chin. “I must think it over,” he said, “I must think it over.” He sat down in a corner and rested his head on his hands and pondered.

Eva chatted with Christian. Sometimes she laughed at his remarks, sometimes they seemed strange and astonishing to her. Yet even where she thought her own judgment the better, she was willing to hear and learn. She regarded his figure with pleasure and asked him to get her, from a table in the room, an onyx box filled with semi-precious stones. She wanted to see how he would walk and move, how he would stretch out his arm and hand after the box and give it to her. She poured the stones into her lap and played with them. She let them glide through her fingers, and said to Christian with a smile that he should have become a dancer.

He answered naïvely that he was not fond of dancing in general, but that he would think it charming to dance with her. His speech amused her, but she promised to dance with him. The stones glittered in her hands; a quiver of her mouth betrayed vexation and pride but also compassion.

When she laughed it embarrassed Christian, and when she was silent he was afraid of her thoughts. He had promised to meet Adda Castillo at almost this hour. Yet he stayed although he knew that she would be jealous and make a scene. Eva seemed like an undiscovered country to him that lured him on. Her tone, her gestures, her expression, her words, all seemed utterly new. He could not tear himself away, and his dark blue eyes clung to her with a kind of balked penetration. Even when her friends came—Cardillac, Wiguniewski, d’Autichamps—he stayed on.

But Eva had found a name for him. She called him Eidolon. She uttered that name and played with its sound even as she played with the mani-coloured jewels in her lap.

III

One night Crammon entered a tavern in the outer boulevards. It was called “Le pauvre Job.” He looked about him for a while and then sat down near a table at which several young men of foreign appearance were conversing softly in a strange tongue.

It was a group of Russian political refugees whose meeting place he had discovered. Their chief was Ivan Michailovitch Becker. Crammon pretended to be reading a paper while he observed his man, whom he recognized from a photograph which Prince Wiguniewski had shown him. He had never seen so fanatical a face. He compared it with a smouldering fire that filled the air with heat and fumes.

He had been told that Ivan Becker had suffered seven years of imprisonment and five of Siberian exile and that many thousands of the young men of his people were wholly devoted to him and would risk any danger or sacrifice at his bidding.

“Here they live in the most brilliant spot of the habitable earth,” Crammon thought angrily, “and plan horrors.”

Crammon was an enemy of violent overthrow. If it did not interfere with his own comfort, he was rather glad to see the poor get the better of the over-fed bourgeois. He was a friend of the poor. He took a condescending and friendly interest in the common people. But he respected high descent, opposed any breach of venerable law, and held his monarch in honour. Every innovation in the life of the state filled him with presentiments of evil, and he deprecated the weakness of the governments that had permitted the wretched parliaments to usurp their powers.

He knew that there was something threatening at the periphery of his world. A stormwind from beyond blew out lamps. What if they should all be blown out? Was not their light and radiance the condition of a calm life?

He sat there in his seriousness and dignity, conscious of his superiority and of his good deeds. As a representative of order he had determined to appeal to the conscience of these rebels if a suitable opportunity were to come. Yet what tormented him was less an anxiety over the throne of the Tsar than one over Eva Sorel. It was necessary to free the dancer from the snares of this man.

An accident favoured his enterprise. One man after another left the neighbouring table and at last Ivan Becker was left alone. Crammon took his glass of absinthe and went over. He introduced himself, referring to his friendship with Prince Wiguniewski.

Silently Becker pointed to a chair.

True to his kind and condescending impulses Crammon assumed the part of an amiable man who can comprehend every form of human aberration. He approached his aim with innocent turns of speech. He scarcely touched the poisonous undergrowth of political contentions. He merely pointed out with the utmost delicacy that, in the West of Europe, the private liberty of certain lofty personages would have to remain untouched unless force were to be used to oppose force. Gentle as his speech was, it was an admonition. Ivan smiled indulgently.

“Though the whole sky were to flare with the conflagrations that devastate your Holy Russia,” Crammon said with conscious eloquence, and the corners of his mouth seemed to bend in right angles toward his square chin, “we will know how to defend what is sacred to us. Caliban is an impressive beast. But if he were to lay his hands on Ariel he might regret it.”

Again Ivan Michailovitch smiled. His expression was strangely mild and gentle, and gave his homely, large face an almost feminine aspect. He listened as though desiring to be instructed.

Crammon was encouraged. “What has Ariel to do with your misery? He looks behind him to see if men kiss the print of his feet. He demands joy and glory, not blood and force.”

“Ariel’s feet are dancing over open graves,” Ivan Michailovitch said softly.

“Your dead are safe at peace,” Crammon answered. “With the living we shall know how to deal.”

“We are coming,” said Ivan Michailovitch still more softly. “We are coming.” It sounded mysterious.

Half fearfully, half contemptuously Crammon looked at the man. After a long pause he said as though casually, “At twelve paces I can hit the ace of hearts four times out of five.”

Ivan Michailovitch nodded. “I can’t,” he said almost humbly, and showed his right hand, which he usually concealed skilfully. It was mutilated.

“What happened to your hand?” Crammon asked in pained surprise.

“When I lay in the subterranean prison at Kazan a keeper forged the chain about me too hard,” Ivan Michailovitch murmured.

Crammon was silent, but the other went on: “Perhaps you’ve noticed too that it’s difficult for me to speak. I lived alone too long in the desert of snow, in a wooden hut, in the icy cold. I became unused to words. I suffered. But that is only a single word: suffering. How can one make its content clear? My body was but a naked scaffolding, a ruin. But my heart grew and expanded. How can I tell it? It grew to be so great, so blood red, so heavy that it became a burden to me in the fearful attempt at flight which I finally risked. But God protected me.” And he repeated softly, “God protected me.”

In Crammon’s mind all ideas became confused. Was this man with his gentle voice and the timid eyes of a girl the murderous revolutionary and hero of possible barricades whom he had expected to meet? In his surprise and embarrassment he became silent.

“Let us go,” said Ivan Michailovitch. “It is late.” He arose and threw a coin on the table and stepped out into the street at Crammon’s side. There he began again, hesitatingly and shyly: “I don’t want to presume to judge, but I don’t understand these people here. They are so certain of themselves and so reasonable. Yet that reasonableness is the completest madness. A beast of the field that feels the tremor of an earthquake and flees is wiser. And another thing: Ariel, the being whom you strive so eloquently to protect, has no moral responsibility. No one thinks of blaming it. What is it but form, gesture, beauty? But don’t you think that the darker hue and deeper power that are born of the knowledge of superhuman suffering might raise art above the interests of idle sybarites? We need heralds who stand above the idioms of the peoples; but those are possibilities that one can only dream of with despair in one’s heart.” He nodded a brief good-night and went.

Crammon felt like a man who had merrily gone out in a light spring suit but had been overtaken by a rainstorm and returns drenched and angry. The clocks were striking two. A lady of the Opéra Comique had been waiting for him since midnight; the key to her apartment was in his pocket. But when he came to the bridge across the Seine he seized the key and, overcome by a violent fit of depression, flung it into the water.

“Sweet Ariel!” He spoke softly to himself. “I kiss the prints of your feet.”

IV

Adda Castillo noticed that Christian was turning from her. She had not expected that, at least not so soon; and as she saw him grow cold, her love increased. But his indifference kept pace with her ardour, and so her passionate heart lost all repose.

She was accustomed to change and, in spite of her youth, had been greatly loved. She had never demanded fidelity before nor practised it. But this man was more to her than any other had been.

She knew who was robbing her of him; she had seen the dancer. When she called Christian to account he frankly admitted as a fact what she had mentioned only as a suspicion in the hope of having it denied. She instituted comparisons. She found that she was more beautiful than Eva Sorel, more harmoniously formed, racier and more impassioned. Her friends confirmed her in this opinion; and yet she felt that the other had some advantage to which she must yield. Neither she nor her flatterers could give it a name. But she felt herself the more deeply affronted.

She adorned her person, she practised all her arts, she unfolded all sides of her wild and entrancing temperament. It was in vain. Then she vowed vengeance and clenched her fists and stamped. Or else she begged and lay on her knees before him and sobbed. One method was as foolish as the other. He was surprised and asked calmly: “Why do you throw aside all dignity?”

One day he told her that they must separate. She turned very white and trembled. Suddenly she took a revolver from her pocket, aimed at him and fired twice. He heard the bullets whiz past his head, one on either side. They hit the mirror and smashed it, and the fragments clattered to the floor.

People rushed to the door. Christian went out and explained that the noise meant no harm and was due to mere carelessness. When he returned he found Adda Castillo lying on the sofa with her face buried in the pillows. He showed no fright and no sense of the danger that he had escaped. He thought merely how annoying such things were and how banal. He took his hat and stick and left the room.

It was long before Adda Castillo arose. She went to the mirror and shivered. There was but one fragment of it left in the frame. But by the help of this fragment she smoothed her coal-black hair.

A few days later she came to see Christian. On the card that she had sent in she begged for an interview of but five minutes. Her farewell performance in Paris was to take place that evening and she begged him to be present at the circus. He hesitated. The glowing eyes in the wax-white face were fixed on him in a mortal terror. It made him uncomfortable, but something like pity stirred within him and he agreed to come.

Crammon accompanied him. They entered just as Adda Castillo’s act was about to begin. The cage with the lions was being drawn into the arena. Their seats were near the front. “They’re getting to be a bit of a bore, these lions,” Crammon grumbled and watched the audience through his glasses.

Adda Castillo in scarlet fleshings, her dark hair loose, her lips and cheeks heavily rouged, entered the cage of the lionness and her four cubs. Perhaps something in the woman’s bearing irritated Teddy, the youngest lion. At all events he backed before her, roared and lifted his paw. Adda Castillo whistled and commanded him with a gesture to leave the mother animal. Teddy crouched and hissed.

At that moment Adda, instead of mastering the beast with her glance, turned to the public and searched the front rows with her sparkling eyes. Teddy leaped on her shoulder. She was down. One cry arose from many throats. The people jumped up. Many fled. Others grew pale but stared in evil fascination at the cage.

At that moment Trilby, the mother animal, came forward with a mighty leap, not to attack her mistress but to save her from the cubs. With powerful blows of her paw she thrust Teddy aside and stood protectingly over the girl who was bleeding from many wounds. But the cubs, greedy for blood, threw themselves on their mother and beat and bit her back and flanks, so that she retreated howling to a corner and left the girl to her fate.

The keepers had rushed up with long spears and hooks, but it was too late. The cubs had bitten their teeth deep into the body of Adda Castillo and torn her flesh to shreds. They did not let go until formaldehyde was sprinkled on her scattered remains.

The cries of pity and terror, the weeping and wringing of hands, the thronging at the gates and the noise of the circus men, the image of a clown who stood as though frozen on a drum, a horse that trotted in from the stables, the sight of the bloody, unspeakably mutilated body in its dripping shreds—none of all this penetrated in any connected or logical form the consciousness of Christian. It seemed to him mere confusion and ghostly whirl. He uttered no sound. Only his face was pale. His face was very pale.

In the motor car on their way to Jean Cardillac, with whom they were to dine, Crammon said: “By God, I wouldn’t like to die between the jaws of a lion. It is a cruel death and an ignominious one.” He sighed and surreptitiously looked at Christian.

Christian had the car stop and asked Crammon to present his excuses to Cardillac. “What are you going to do?” Crammon asked in his astonishment.

And Christian replied that he wanted to be alone, that he must be alone for a little.

Crammon could scarcely control himself. “Alone? You? What for?” But already Christian had disappeared in the crowd.

“He wants to be alone! What an insane notion!” Crammon growled. He shook his head and bade the chauffeur drive on. He drew up the collar of his greatcoat and dedicated a last thought to the unhappy Adda Castillo without assigning any guilt or blame to his friend.

V

“Eidolon is not as cheerful as usual,” Eva said to Christian. “What has happened? Eidolon mustn’t be sad.”

He smiled and shook his head. But she had heard of the happening at the circus and also knew in what relation Adda Castillo had stood to Christian.

“I had a bad dream,” he said and told her of it.

“I dreamed that I was in a railroad station and wanted to take a train. Many trains came in but roared and passed with indescribable swiftness. I wanted to ask after the meaning of this. But when I turned around I saw behind me in a semi-circle an innumerable throng. And all these people looked at me; but when I approached them, they all drew away slowly and silently with outstretched arms. All about in that monstrous circle they drew silently away from me. It was horrible.”

She passed her hand over his forehead to chase the horror away. But she recognized the power of her touch and was frightened by her image in his eye.

When from the stage where she was bowing amid the flowers and the applause she perceived the touch of his glances she felt in them a threat of enslavement. When on his arm she approached a table and heard the delighted whisper of people at them both, she seemed to herself the victim of a conspiracy, and a hesitation crept into her bearing. When Crammon, practising a strange self-abnegation, spoke of Christian in extravagant terms, and Susan, even in their nocturnal talks, grew mythical concerning his high descent, when Cardillac grew restless and Cornelius Ermelang, the young German poet who adored her, asked questions with his timid eyes—when these things came to pass she feigned coldness and became unapproachable.

She scolded Susan, she made fun of Crammon, she laughed at Jean Cardillac, jestingly she bent her knee to the poet. She confused her entire court of painters, politicians, journalists, and dandies with her incomprehensible mimicry and flexibility, and said that Eidolon was only an illusion and a symbol.

Christian did not understand this—neither this nor her swift withdrawals from him, and then her turning back and luring him anew. A passionate gesture would arise and suddenly turn to reproof, and one of delight would turn into estrangement. It was useless to try to bind her by her own words. She would join the tips of her fingers and turn her head aside and look out of the corners of her eyes at the floor with a cool astuteness.

Once he had driven her into a corner, but she called Susan, leaned her head against the woman’s shoulder and whispered in her ear.

Another time, in order to test her feeling, he spoke of his trip to England. With charmingly curved hands she gathered up her skirt and surveyed her feet.

Another time, in the light and cheerful tone they used to each other, he reproached her with making a fool of him. She crossed her arms and smiled mysteriously, wild and subdued at once. She looked as though she had stepped out of a Byzantine mosaic.

He knew the freedom of her life. But when he sought for the motives that guided her, he had no means of finding them.

He knew nothing of the intellectual fire of the dancer, but took her to be a woman like any other. He did not see that that which is, in other women, the highest stake and the highest form of life, needed to be in her life but a moment’s inclination and a moment’s gliding by. He did not grasp the form in her, but saw the contour melt in glimmering change. Coming from the sensual regions of one possessed like Adda Castillo, he breathed here an air purified of all sultriness, which intoxicated but also frightened him, which quickened the beat of the heart but sharpened the vision.

Everything was fraught with presages of fate: when she walked beside him; when they rode side by side in the Bois de Boulogne; when they sat in the twilight and he heard her clear and childlike voice; when in the palm garden she teased her little monkeys; when she listened to Susan at the piano and let the bright stones glide through her fingers.

One evening when he was leaving he met Jean Cardillac at the gate. They greeted each other. Then involuntarily Christian stopped and looked after the man, whose huge form threw a gigantic shadow on the steps. Invisible little slaves seemed to follow this shadow, all bearing treasures to be laid at Eva’s feet.

An involuntary determination crystallized in him. It seemed important to measure his strength against this shadow’s. He turned back and the servants let him pass. Cardillac and Eva were in the picture gallery. She was curled up on a sofa, rolled up almost like a snake. Not far from those two, on a low stool, sat Susan impassive but with burning eyes.

“You’ve promised to drive with me to the races at Longchamp, Eva,” said Christian. He stood by the door to show that he desired nothing else.

“Yes, Eidolon. Why the reminder?” answered Eva without moving, but with a flush on her cheeks.

“Quite alone with me——?”

“Yes, Eidolon, quite alone.”

“My dream suddenly came back to me, and I thought of that train that wouldn’t stop.”

She laughed at the naïve and amiable tone of his words. Her eyes grew gentle and she laid her head back on the pillows. Then she looked at Cardillac, who arose silently.

“Good-night,” said Christian and went.

It was during these days that Denis Lay had arrived in Paris. Crammon had expected him and now welcomed him with ardour. “He is the one man living who is your equal and who competes with you in my heart,” Crammon had said to Christian.

Denis was the second son of Lord Stainwood. He had had a brilliant career at Oxford, where his exploits had been the talk of the country. He had formed a new party amid the undergraduates, whose discussions and agitations had spared no time-honoured institutions. At twenty-two he was not only a marksman, hunter, fisherman, sailor, and boxer, but a learned philologist. He was handsome, wealthy, radiant with life, and surrounded by a legend of mad pranks and by a halo of distinction and elegance—the last and finest flower of his class and nation.

Christian recognized his qualities without envy and the two became friends at once. One evening he was entertaining Cardillac, Crammon, Wiguniewski, Denis Lay, the Duchess of Marivaux, and Eva Sorel. And it was on this occasion that Eva, in the presence of the whole company, lightly broke the promise that she had given him.

Denis had expressed the desire to take her to Longchamp in his car. Eva became aware of Christian’s look. It was watchful, but still assured. She held a cluster of grapes in her hand. When she had placed the fruit back on the plate before her, she had betrayed him. Christian turned pale. He felt that she needed no reminder. She had chosen. It was for him to be quiet and withdraw.

Eva took up the cluster of grapes again. Lifting it on the palm of her hand she said with that smile of dreamy enthusiasm which seemed heartless to Christian now: “Beautiful fruit, I shall leave you until I am hungry for you.”

Crammon raised his glass and cried: “Whoever wishes to do homage to the lady of our allegiance—drink!”

They all drank to Eva, but Christian did not lift his eyes.

VI

On the next night after her performance, Eva had invited several friends to her house. She had danced the chief rôle in the new pantomime called “The Dryads,” and her triumph had been very great. She came home in a cloud of flowers. Later a footman brought in a basket heaped with cards and letters.

She sank into Susan’s arms, happy and exhausted. Every pore of her glowed with life.

Crammon said: “There may be insensitive scoundrels in the world. But I think it’s magnificent to watch a human being on the very heights of life.”

For this saying Eva, with graceful reverence, gave him a red rose. And the burning in his breast became worse and worse.

It had been agreed that Christian and Denis were to have a fencing bout. Eva had begged for it. She hoped not only to enjoy the sight, but to learn something for her own art from the movements of the two young athletes.

The preparations had been completed. In the round hall hung with tapestries, Christian and Denis faced each other. Eva clapped her hands and they assumed their positions. For a while nothing was heard except their swift, muffled, and rhythmical steps and the clash of their foils. Eva stood erect, all eye, drinking in their gestures. Christian’s body was slenderer and more elastic than the Englishman’s. The latter had more strength and freedom. They were like brothers of whom one had grown up in a harsh, the other in a mild climate; the one self-disciplined and upheld by a long tradition of breeding, the other cradled in tenderness and somewhat uncertain within. The one was all marrow, the other all radiance. In virility and passion they were equals.

Crammon was in the seventh heaven of enthusiasm.

When the combat was nearly at an end, Cornelius Ermelang appeared, and with him Ivan Michailovitch Becker. Eva had asked Ermelang to read a poem. He and Becker had known each other long, and when he had found the Russian walking to and fro near the gate he had simply brought him up. It was the first time that Ivan showed himself to Eva’s other friends.

Both were silent and sat down.

Christian and Denis had changed back to their usual garments, and now Ermelang was to read. Susan sat down near Becker and observed him attentively.

Cornelius Ermelang was a delicate creature and of a repulsive ugliness. He had a steep forehead, watery blue eyes with veiled glances, a pendulous nether lip, and a yellowish wisp of beard at the extreme end of his chin. His voice was extraordinarily gentle and soft, and had something of the sing-song rhythm of a preacher’s.

The name of the poem was “Saint Francis and Why Men Followed Him,” and its content was in harmony with the traditions and the writings.

Once upon a time Saint Francis was tarrying in the convent of Portiuncula with Brother Masseo of Marignano, who was himself a very holy man and could speak beautifully and wisely concerning God. And for this reason Saint Francis loved him greatly. Now one day Saint Francis returned from the forest where he had been praying, and just as he emerged from the trees Brother Masseo came to meet him and said: “Why thee rather than another? Why thee?” Saint Francis asked: “What is the meaning of thy words?” Brother Masseo replied: “I ask why all the world follows thee, and why every man would see thee and listen to thee and obey thee. Thou art not goodly to look upon, nor learned, nor of noble blood. Why is it that all the world follows thee?” When Saint Francis heard this he was glad in his heart, and he raised his face to Heaven and stood without moving for a long space, because his spirit was lifted up to God. But when he came to himself again, he threw himself upon his knees and praised and thanked God, and full of a devout passion turned to Brother Masseo and spoke: “Wouldst thou know why they follow me, and me always, and me rather than another? This grace has been lent to me by the glance of Almighty God Himself which rests on the good and the evil everywhere. For His holy eyes saw among the sinners on earth none who was more wretched than I, none who was less wise and able, nor any who was a greater sinner. For the miraculous work that He had it in His heart to bring about He found no creature on earth so mean as I. And therefore did He choose me to put to shame the world with its nobility and its pride and its strength and its beauty and its wisdom, in order that it might be known that all power and goodness proceed from Him alone and from no created thing, and that no one may boast before His face. But whoever boast, let him boast in the Lord.” And Brother Masseo was frightened at this answer, which was so full of humility and spoken with such fervour.

And the poem related how Brother Masseo went into the forest out of which Saint Francis had come, and how tones as of organ music came from the tops of the trees and formed more and more clearly the question: Wouldst thou know why? Wouldst thou know? And he cast himself upon the earth, upon the roots and stones, and kissed the roots and stones and cried out: “I know why! I know why!”

VII

The stanzas had a sweetness and an inner ecstasy; their music was muffled and infinitely fluid, with many but shy and half-hidden rimes.

“It is beautiful,” said Denis Lay, who understood German perfectly.

And Crammon said: “It is like an old painting on glass.”

“What I admire most,” said Denis, “is that it brings the figure of Saint Francis very close to one with that magical quality of cortesia which he possessed above all other saints.”

“Cortesia? What does it mean exactly?” Wiguniewski asked. “Does it mean a humble and devout courtesy?”

Eva arose. “That is it,” she said, “just that.” And she made an exquisite gesture with both hands. All looked at her, and she added: “To give what is mine, and only to appear to take what is another’s, that is cortesia.”

During all this conversation Christian had withdrawn himself from the others. Aversion was written on his face. Even during the reading he had hardly been able to keep his seat. He did not know what it was that rebelled in him and irritated him supremely. A spirit of mockery and scorn was in him and fought for some expression. With assumed indifference he called out to Denis Lay, and began to talk to him about the stallion that Lay desired to sell and Christian to possess. He had offered forty thousand francs for it. Now he offered forty-five thousand, and his voice was so loud that all could hear him. Crammon stepped to his side as though to guard him.

“Eidolon!” Eva cried suddenly.

Christian looked at her with a consciousness of guilt. Their eyes met. The others became silent in surprise.

“The beast is worth that anywhere,” Christian murmured, without taking his eyes from Eva.

“Come, Susan,” Eva turned to the woman, and about her mouth curled an expression of bitterness and scorn. “He knows how to fence and how to trade horses. Of cortesia he knows nothing. Good-night, gentlemen.” She bowed and slipped through the green hangings.

In consternation the company scattered.

When she had reached her room Eva threw herself into a chair, and in bitterness of spirit hid her face in her hands. Susan crouched near her on the floor, waiting and wondering. When a quarter of an hour had passed she arose and took the clasps out of Eva’s hair and began to comb it.

Eva was passive. She was thinking of her own master and of what he had taught her.

VIII

This is what her master had taught her: Train your body to fear and obey the spirit. What you grant the body beyond its necessity makes you its slave. Never be the one seduced. Seduce others, and your way will always be your own to see. Be a secret to others or you grow vulgar to yourself. Give yourself wholly only to your work. Passions of sense lay waste the heart. What one man truly receives of another is never the fullness of the hour or the soul, but lees and dregs that are fructified late and unconsciously.

She had been only twelve, when, persuaded by jugglers and answering the call of her fate, she had left her home in a remote little Franconian town. She was very far from her master then. But the way was pre-determined.

She never lost herself. She glided over difficulties and degradations as the chamois does over boulders and abysses. Whoever saw her amid the strolling jugglers held her to be the kidnapped child of distinguished parents. She was, as a matter of fact, the daughter of an obscure musician named Daniel Nothafft and of a servant girl. A dreamy feeling of pity and admiration united her to her father; her mother she had never known, and so discarded her ill-sounding name.

She was accustomed to pass the night in tents and barns. In towns by the sea she had often slept in the shelter of cliffs wrapped in a blanket. She knew the nocturnal sky with its clouds and stars. She had slept on straw amid the animals too, near asses and dogs, and on the rickety, over-burdened cart had ridden on the roadways through rain and snow. It was a romantic life that recalled another age.

She had had to sew her own costumes and to go through her daily and difficult exercises under the whip of the chief of the jugglers. But she learned the language of the country, and secretly bought at fairs in cities the books of the poets who had used it. Secretly she read, sometimes from pages torn out of the volumes and thus more easily concealed, Béranger, Musset, Victor Hugo, and Verlaine.

She walked the tight rope which, without any protective net below, was slung from gable to gable across the market-places of villages, and she walked as securely as on the ground. Or she acted as the partner of a dancing she-bear or with five poodles who turned somersaults. She was a trapeze artist too, and her greatest trick was to leap from one horse in full gallop to another. When she did that the hurdy-gurdy stopped its music so that the spectators might realize what a remarkable thing they were seeing. She carried the collection plate along the rope, and her glance persuaded many a one to dip into his pocket who had meant to slink away.

It was in villages and little towns lying along the Rhône that she first became aware among the spectators of a man who dragged himself about with difficulty on two crutches. He followed the troupe from place to place, and since his whole attention was fixed on Eva, it was evident that he did so for her sake.

It was after two years of this wandering life that in Lyons she was seized with typhoid fever. Her companions sent her to a hospital. They could not wait, but the chief juggler was to return after a period and fetch her. When he did return she was just beginning to convalesce. Suddenly by her bed-side she also saw the man with the crutches. He took the juggler aside and one could see that they were talking about money. From the pressure of her old master’s hand Eva knew that she saw him for the last time.

IX

The man with the crutches was named Lucas Anselmo Rappard. He saved Eva and awakened her. He taught her her art. He took her under his care, and this care was tyrannical enough. He did not set her free again until she had become all that he had desired to make of her.

He had long lived in retirement at Toledo, because there were three or four paintings in the Spanish city that rewarded him for his isolation from the busy world. Also he found that the sun of Spain warmed him through and through, and that he liked the folk.

In spite of his crippled state he journeyed northward once a year to be near the ocean. And like the men of old he went slowly from place to place. His sister Susan was his unfailing companion. It was on one of his return journeys that he had seen Eva quite by chance. The village fairs of this region had long attracted him. And there he found unexpectedly something that stimulated his creative impulse. It was a sculptor’s inspiration. He saw the form in his mind’s eye. Here was the material ready to his hand. The sight of Eva relit an idea in him to which he had long despaired of giving a creative embodiment.

First he called the whole matter a whim. Later, absorbed in his task, he knew the passion of a Pygmalion.

He was forty at that time or a little more. His beardless face was thick-boned, peasant-like, brutal. But on closer observation the intellect shone through the flesh. The greenish-grey eyes, very deep-set in their hollows, had so compelling a glance that they surprised and even frightened others.

This remarkable man had an origin and a fate no less remarkable. His father had been a Dutch singer, his mother a Dalmatian. They had drifted to Courland, where an epidemic killed both at almost the same time. The two children had been taken into the ballet school of the theatre at Riga. Lucas Anselmo justified the most brilliant hopes. His incomparable elasticity and lightness surpassed anything that had yet been seen in a young dancer. At seventeen he danced at the Scala in Milan, and roused the public to a rare exhibition of enthusiasm. But his success was out of its due time—too late or too early. His whole personality had something strange and curiously transplanted; and soon he became estranged from himself and from the inner forces of his life. At twenty a morbid melancholy seized him.

He happened at that time to be dancing in Petrograd. A young but lately married lady of the court fell in love with him. She persuaded him to visit her on a certain night in a villa beyond the city. But her husband had been warned. He pleaded the necessity of going on a journey to make his wife the more secure. Then with his servants he broke into the lovers’ chamber, had the lad beaten cruelly, then tied, and thrown naked into the snow. Here in the bitter cold the unhappy dancer lay for six hours.

A dangerous illness and a permanent crippling of his legs were the result of this violent adventure. Susan nursed him and never left him for an hour. She had always admired and loved him. Now she worshipped him. He had already earned a little fortune, and an inheritance from his mother’s side increased it, so he was enabled to live independently.

A new man developed in him. His deformity gave to his mind the resilience and power that had been his body’s. In a curious way he penetrated all the regions of modern life; and above pain, disappointment, and renunciation, he built a road from the senses to the mind. In his transformation from a dancer to a cripple he divined a deep significance. He now sought an idea and a law; and the harsh contrast between external calm and inner motion, of inner calm and outward restlessness, seemed to him important in any interpretation of mankind and of his age.

At twenty-two he set himself to study Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. He became a thorough student, and took courses at the German universities. And this strange student, who dragged himself along on crutches, was often an object of curiosity. At the age of thirty he travelled with Susan to India, and lived for four years at Delhi and Benares. He associated with learned Brahmins and received their mystic teachings. Once he had sight of an almost legendary Thibetan priest, who had lived in a cave of the mountains for eighty years, and whom the eternal darkness had blinded, but whom the eternal loneliness had made a saint. The sight of the centenarian moved him, for the first time in his life, to tears. He now understood saintliness and believed in it. And this saint danced: he danced at dawn, turning his blinded eyes to the sun.

He saw the religious festivals in the temple cities on the Ganges, and felt the nothingness of life and the indifference of death when he saw those who had died of pestilence float by hundreds down the stream. He had himself carried into primeval forests and jungles, and saw everywhere in the inextricable coil of life and death each taking the other’s form and impulse—decay becoming birth and putrefaction giving life. He was told of the marble-built city of a certain king, in which dwelled only dancing girls taught by priests. When their flesh faded and their limbs lost their agility, they were slain. They had vowed chastity, and none was permitted to survive the breaking of that vow. He approached the fabled city but could not gain admission. At night he saw the fires on its roofs, and heard the songs of its virginal dancers. Now and then it seemed to him that he heard a cry of death.

This night, with its fires and songs, its unseen dancers and uncertain cries, stored up new energies within his soul.

X

He took Eva with him to Toledo. He had rented a house there in which, men said, the painter El Greco had once dwelled.

The building was a grey cube, rather desolate within. Cats shared the dwelling, and owls, bats, and mice.

Several rooms were filled with books, and these books became Eva’s silent friends in the years that came now, and during which she saw almost no one but Rappard and Susan.

In this house she learned to know loneliness and work and utter dedication to a task.

She entered the house full of fear of him who had forced her into it. His speech and behaviour intimidated her so that she had terror-stricken visions when she thought of him. But Susan did all in her power to soothe the girl.

Susan would relate stories concerning her brother at morning or in the evening hours, when Eva lay with her body desperately exhausted, too exhausted often to sleep. She had not been spoiled. The life with the troupe of jugglers had accustomed her to severe exertions. But the ceaseless drill, the monotonous misery of the first few months, in which everything seemed empty and painful, without allurement or brightness or intelligible purpose, made her ill and made her hate her own limbs.

It was Susan’s hollow voice that besought her to be patient; it was Susan who massaged her arms and legs, who carried her to bed and read to her. And she described her brother, who in her eyes was a magician and an uncrowned king, and on whose eyes and breath she hung, described him through his past, which she retold in its scenes and words, at times too fully and confusedly, at others so concretely and glowingly that Eva began to suspect something of the good fortune of the coincidence that had brought her to his attention.

Finally came a day on which he spoke to her openly: “Do you believe that you were born to be a dancer?” “I do believe it,” she answered. Then he spoke to her concerning the dance, and her wavering feeling grew firmer. Gradually she felt her body growing lighter and lighter. When they parted on that day, ambition was beginning to flame in her eyes.

He had taught her to stand with outstretched arms and to let no muscle quiver; to stand on the tips of her toes so that her crown touched a sharp arrow; to dance definite figures outlined by needles on the floor with her naked feet, and, when each movement had passed into her very flesh, to brave the needles blindfolded. He taught her to whirl about a taut rope adjusted vertically, and to walk on high stilts without using her arms.

She had had to forget how she had walked hitherto, how she had stridden and run and stood, and she had to learn anew how to walk and stride and run and stand. Everything, as he said, had to become new. Her limbs and ankles and wrists had to adjust themselves to new functions, even as a man who has lain in the mire of the street puts on new garments. “To dance,” he would say, “means to be new, to be fresh at every moment, as though one had just issued from the hand of God.”

He inducted her into the meaning and law of every movement, into the inner structure and outer rhythm of every gesture.

He created gestures with her. And about every gesture he wove some experience. He showed her the nature of flight, of pursuit, of parting, of salutation, of expectancy and triumph and joy and terror; and there was no motion of a finger in which the whole body did not have a part. The play of the eyes and of facial expression entered this art so little that the swathing of the face would not have diminished the effect that was aimed at.

He drew the kernel from each husk; he demanded the quintessential only.

“Can you drink? Let me see you!” It was wrong. “Your gesture was a shopworn phrase. The man who had never seen another drink did not drink thus.”

“Can you pray? Can you pluck flowers, swing a scythe, gather grain, bind a veil? Give me an image of each action! Represent it!” She could not. But he taught her.

Whenever she fell into a flat imitation of reality he foamed with rage. “Reality is a beast!” he roared, and hurled one of his crutches against the wall. “Reality is a murderer.”

In the statues and paintings of great artists he pointed out to her the essential and noble lines, and illustrated how all that had been thus created and built merged harmoniously again with nature and her immediacy of truth.

He spoke of the help of music to her art. “You need no melody and scarcely tone. The only thing that matters is the division of time, the audibly created measure which leads and restrains the violence, wildness, and passion, or else the softness and sustained beauty of motion. A tambourine and a fife suffice. Everything beyond that is dishonesty and confusion. Beware of a poetry of effect that does not issue from your naked achievement.”

At night he took her to wine rooms and taverns, where the girls of the people danced their artless and excited dances. He revealed to her the artistic kernel of each, and let her dance a bolero, a fandango, or a tarantella, which in this new embodiment had the effect of cut and polished jewels.

He reconstructed antique battle-dances for her, the Pyrrhic and the Karpaian; the dance of the Muses about the altar of Zeus on Helicon; the dance of Artemis and her companions; the dance of Delos, which imitated the path of Theseus through the labyrinth; the dance of the maidens in honour of Artemis, during which they wore a short chiton and a structure of willow on their heads; the vintners’ dance preserved on the cup of Hiero, which includes all the motions used by the gatherers of the vine and the workers at the winepress. He showed her pictures of the vase of François, of the geometrical vase of Dipylon, of many reliefs and terracotta pieces, and made her study the figures that had an entrancing charm and incomparable rhythm of motion. And he procured her music for these dances, which Susan copied from old manuscripts, and which he adapted.

And from these creative exercises he led her on to a higher freedom. He now stimulated her to invent for herself, to feel with originality and give that feeling a creative form. He vivified her glance, that was so often in thrall to the technical or merely beautiful, liberated her senses, and gave her a clear vision of that deaf, blind swarm and throng whom her art would have to affect. He inspired her with love for the immortal works of man, armoured her heart against seduction by the vulgar, against a game but for the loftiest stakes, against action without restraint, being without poise.

But it was not until she left him that she understood him wholly.

When he thought her ripe for the glances of the world he gave her recommendations to smooth the way, and also Susan. He was willing to be a solitary. Susan had trained a young Castilian to give him the care he needed. He did not say whether he intended to stay in Toledo or choose some other place. Since they had left him, neither Eva nor Susan had heard from him: he had forbidden both letters and messages.

XI

Often in the night Susan would sit in some dark corner, and out of her deep brooding name her brother’s name. Her thoughts turned about a reunion with him. Her service to Eva was but a violent interruption of the accustomed life at his side.

She loved Eva, but she loved her as Lucas Anselmo’s work and projection. If Eva gained fame it was for him, if she gathered treasure it was for him, if she grew in power it was for him. Those who approached Eva and felt her sway were his creatures, his serfs, and his messengers.

After the incident with Christian Wahnschaffe, as Susan crouched at Eva’s feet and, as so often, embraced the girl’s knees, she thought: Ah, he has breathed into her an irresistible soul, and made her beautiful and radiant.

But always she harboured a superstitious fear. She trembled in secret lest the irresistible soul should some day flee from Eva’s body, and the radiance of her beauty be dulled, and nothing remain but a dead and empty husk. For that would be a sign to her that Lucas Anselmo was no more.

For this reason it delighted her when ecstasy and glee, glow and tumult reigned in Eva’s life, and she was cast down and plagued by evil presentiments when the girl withdrew into quietness and remained silent and alone. So long as Eva danced and loved and was mobile and adorned her body, Susan dismissed all care concerning her brother. Therefore she would sit and fan the flame from which his spirit seemed to speak to her.

“Just because you’ve chosen the Englishman, you needn’t send the German away,” she said. “You may take the one and let the other languish a while longer. You can never tell how things will change. There are many men: they rise and fall. Cardillac is going down-hill now. I hear all kinds of rumours.”

Eva, hiding her face in her hands, whispered: “Eidolon.”

It vexed Susan. “First you mock him, then you sigh for him! What folly is this?”

Eva sprang up suddenly. “You shan’t speak of him to me or praise him, wretched woman.” Her cheeks glowed, and the brightly mocking tone in which she often spoke to Susan became menacing.

“Golpes para besos,” Susan murmured in Spanish. “Blows for kisses.” She arose in order to comb Eva’s hair and braid it for the night.

The next day Crammon appeared. “I found you one whose laughter puts to shame the laughter of the muleteer of Cordova,” he said with mock solemnity. “Why is he rejected?”

His heart bled. Yet he wooed her for his friend. Much as he loved and admired Denis Lay, yet Christian was closer to him. Christian was his discovery, of which he was vain, and his hero.

Eva looked at him with eyes that glittered, and replied: “It is true that he knows how to laugh like that muleteer of Cordova, but he has no more culture of the heart than that same fellow. And that, my dear man, is not enough.”

“And what is to become of us?” sighed Crammon.

“You may follow us to England,” Eva said cheerfully. “I’m going to dance at His Majesty’s Theatre. Eidolon can be my page. He can learn to practise reverence, and not to chaffer for horses when beautiful poems are being read to me. Tell him that.”

Crammon sighed again. Then he took her hand, and devoutly kissed the tips of her fingers. “I shall deliver your message, sweet Ariel,” he said.

XII

Cardillac and Eva fell out, and that robbed the man of his last support. The danger with which he was so rashly playing ensnared him; the abysses lured him on.

The external impetus to his downfall was furnished by a young engineer who had invented a hydraulic device. Cardillac had persuaded him with magnificent promises to let him engage in the practical exploitation of the invention. It was not long before the engineer discovered that he had been cheated of the profits of his labour. Quietly he accumulated evidence against the speculator, unveiled his dishonest dealings, and presented to the courts a series of annihilating charges. Although Cardillac finally offered him five hundred thousand francs if he would withdraw his charges, the outraged accuser remained firm.

Other untoward circumstances occurred. The catastrophe became inevitable. On a single forenoon the shares he had issued dropped to almost nothing. In forty-eight hours three hundred millions of francs had been lost. Innumerable well-established fortunes plunged like avalanches into nothingness, eighteen hundred mechanics and shop-keepers lost all they had in the world, twenty-seven great firms went into bankruptcy, senators and deputies of the Republic were sucked down in the whirlpool, and under the attacks of the opposition the very administration shook.

Felix Imhof hurried to Paris to save whatever was possible out of the crash. Although he had suffered painful losses, he was ecstatic over the grandiose spectacle which Cardillac’s downfall presented to the world.

Crammon laughed and rubbed his hands in satisfaction, and pointed to Imhof. “He wanted to seduce me, but I was as chaste as Joseph.”

On the following evening Imhof went with his friends to visit Eva Sorel. She had left the palace which Cardillac had furnished for her, and had rented a handsome house in the Chaussée d’Antin.

Imhof spoke of the curious tragedy of these modern careers. As an example he related how three days before his collapse Cardillac had appeared at the headquarters of his bitterest enemies, the Bank of Paris. The directors were having a meeting. None was absent. With folded hands and tear-stained face the sorely beset man begged for a loan of twelve millions. It was a drastic symptom of his naïveté that he asked help of those whom he had fleeced on the exchange year in and year out, whose losses had glutted his wealth, and whom he wanted to fight with the very loan for which he begged.

Christian scarcely listened. He stood with Crammon beside a Chinese screen. Opposite them sat Eva in a curiously dreamy mood, and not far from her was Denis Lay. Others were present too, but Christian gave them no attention.

Suddenly there was a commotion near the door. “Cardillac,” some one whispered. All glances sought him.

It was indeed Cardillac who had entered. His boots were muddy, his collar and cravat in disorder. He seemed not to have changed his garments for a week. His fists were clenched; his restless eyes wandered from face to face.

Eva and Denis remained calmly as they were. Eva pressed her foot against the edge of a copper jar filled with white lilies. No one moved. Only Christian, quite involuntarily, approached Cardillac by a few paces.

Cardillac became aware of him, and drew him by the sleeve toward the door of the adjoining room. They had scarcely crossed the threshold when Cardillac whispered in an intense but subdued tone: “I must have two thousand francs or I’m done for! Advance me that much, monsieur, and save me. I have a wife and a child.”

Christian was astonished. No one dreamed that the man had a family. And why turn precisely to him? Wiguniewski, d’Autichamps, many others knew him far better.

“I must be at the station in half an hour,” he heard the man say, and his hand sought his purse.

Wife and child! The words flitted through his head, and there arose in him the violent aversion he always felt in the presence of beggars. What had he to do with it all? He took out the bank notes. Two thousand francs, he thought, and remembered the huge sums which one was accustomed to name in connection with the man who stood before him begging.

“I thank you.” Cardillac’s voice came to him as through a wall.

Then Cardillac passed him with bent head. But two men had in the meantime appeared in the other room. At the open folding-door the lackeys stood behind them with an embarrassed expression, for the men were police officials who were seeking Cardillac and had followed him here.

Cardillac, seeing them and guessing their errand, recoiled with a gurgling noise in his throat. His right hand disappeared in his coat-pocket, but instantly the two men leaped on him and pinioned his arms. There was a brief, silent struggle. Suddenly he was made fast.

Eva had arisen. Her guests crowded about her. She leaned against Susan’s shoulder and turned her head a little aside, as though a touch of uncanny terror brushed her. But she still smiled, though now with pallid cheeks.

“He’s magnificent, magnificent, even at this moment,” Imhof whispered to Crammon.

Christian stared at Cardillac’s huge back. It was, he couldn’t help thinking, like the back of an ox dragged to slaughter. The two men between whom he stood hand-cuffed had greasy necks, and the hair on the back of their heads was dirty and ill-trimmed.

An unpleasant taste on his palate tormented Christian. He asked a servant for a glass of champagne.

Cardillac’s words, “I have a wife and a child,” would not leave his mind. On the contrary, they sounded ever more stridently within him. And suddenly a second, foolish, curious voice in him asked: How do you suppose they look—this wife, this child? Where are they? What will become of them?

It was as annoying and as painful as a toothache.

XIII

In Devon, south of Exeter, Denis Lay had his country seat. The manor stood in a park of immemorial trees, velvety swards, small lakes that mirrored the sky, and flowerbeds beautiful in the mildest climate of such a latitude on earth.

“We’re quite near the Gulf Stream here,” Crammon explained to Christian and Eva, who, like himself, were Lay’s guests. And he had an expression as though with his own hands he had brought the warm current to the English coast from the Gulf of Mexico simply for the benefit of his friends.

With a gesture of sisterly tenderness Eva walked for hours among the beds of blossoming violets. Large surfaces were mildly and radiantly blue. It was March.

A company of English friends was expected, but not until two days later.

The four friends, going for a walk, had been overtaken by showers and came home drenched. When they had changed their clothes, they met for tea in the library. It was a great room with wainscoting of dark oak and mighty cross-beams. Halfway up there ran along the walls a gallery with carved balustrades, and at one end, between the pointed windows, appeared the gilded pipes of an organ.

The light was dim and the rain swished without. Eva held an album of Holbein drawings, and turned the pages slowly. Christian and Crammon were playing at chess. Denis watched them for a while. Then he sat down at the organ and began to play.

Eva looked up from the pictures and listened.

“I’ve lost the game,” Christian said. He arose and mounted the steps to the gallery. He leaned over the balustrade and looked down. In an outward curve of the balustrade there lay, like an egg in its cup, a globe on a metal stand.

“What were you playing?” Eva asked, as Denis paused.

He turned around. “I’ve been trying to compose a passage from the Song of Songs,” he answered. He played again and sang in an agreeable voice: “Arise, thou lovely one, for the winter is past.”

The sound of the organ stirred a feeling of hatred in Christian. He gazed upon Eva’s form. In a gown of sea-green, slim, far, estranged, she sat there. And as he looked at her there blended with his hatred of the music another feeling—one of oppression and of poignant pain, and his heart began to throb violently.

“Arise, thou lovely one, and come with me,” Denis sang again, and Crammon softly hummed the air too. Eva looked up, and her glance met Christian’s. In her face there was a mysterious expression of loftiness and love.

Christian took the globe from its stand and played with it. He let it roll back and forth between his hands on the flat balustrade like a rubber ball. The sphere suddenly slipped from him, fell and rolled along the floor to Eva’s feet.

Denis and Crammon gathered about it; Christian came down from the gallery.

Eva picked up the globe and went toward Christian. He took it from her, but she at once held out her hands again. Then she held it daintily poised upon the fingertips of her right hand. Her left hand, with fingers spread out, she held close to it; her head was gently inclined, her lips half open.

“So this is the world,” she said, “your world! The blue bits are the seas, and that soiled yellow the countries. How ugly the countries are, and how jagged! They look like a cheese at which mice have nibbled. O world, the things that creep about on you! The things that happen on you! I hold you now, world, and carry you! I like that!”

The three men smiled, but a psychical shudder passed through them. For they could no longer stand in human erectness on this little round earth. A breath of the dancer could blow them down into the immeasurable depths of the cosmos.

And Christian saw that Denis, fighting with an impulse, regarded him. Suddenly the Englishman came up to him and held out his hand. And Christian took the hand of his victorious rival, and knew in his secretest mind that an ultimate advantage was his. For between Eva’s face and the smudged globe he seemed to see a ghostly little figure which charmed her with its glance and which was a tiny image of himself—Eidolon.

They planned that summer to return to the manor and hunt the deer, as was the custom of the gentlemen of that region. But when summer came all things had changed, and Denis had glided from the smooth sphere of earth into the depth.

XIV

One day in London Crammon came to Christian, sat down affectionately beside him, and said: “I am leaving.”

“Where are you going?” Christian asked in surprise.

“North, to fish salmon,” Crammon replied. “I’ll join you later or you can join me.”

“But why go at all?”

“Because I’ll go straight to the dogs if I have to see this woman any longer without possessing her. That’s all.”

Christian looked at Crammon with a flame in his eyes, and checked a gesture of angry jealousy. Then his face assumed its expression of friendly mockery again.

So Crammon departed.

Eva Sorel became the undisputed queen of the London season. Her name was everywhere. The women wore hats à la Eva Sorel, the men cravats in her favourite colours. She threw into the shade the most sought-after celebrities of the day—including the Negro bruiser, Jackson. Fame came to her in full draughts, and gold by the pailfuls.

XV

May was very hot in London that year. Denis and Christian planned a night’s pleasure on the Thames. They rented a steam yacht named “Aldebaran,” ordered an exquisite meal on board, and Denis sent out invitations to his friends.

Fourteen members of his set joined the party. The yacht lay near the houses of Parliament, and shortly before midnight the guests appeared in evening dress. The son of the Russian ambassador was among them, the Honourable James Wheely, whose brother was in the ministry, Lord and Lady Westmoreland, Eva Sorel, Prince Wiguniewski, and others.

On the stroke of twelve the “Aldebaran” started out, and the small orchestra of well-chosen artists began to play.

When the yacht on its way upstream had reached the railway bridge of Battersea, there became visible on the left bank in the dim light of the street lamps an innumerable throng of men and women, close-packed, head by head, thousands upon thousands.

They were strikers from the docks. Why they stood here, so silent and so menacing in their silence, was known to no one on board. Perhaps it was a demonstration of some sort.

Denis, who had had a good deal of champagne, went to the railing, and in his recklessness shouted three cheers across the river. No sound answered him. The human mass stood like a wall, and in the sombre faces that turned toward the gleam of the yacht’s light no muscle moved.

Then Denis said to Christian, who had joined him: “Let’s swim across. Whoever reaches shore first is victor of the race, and must ask those people what they are waiting for and why they don’t go home at this hour of the night.”

“Swim over to them?” Christian shook his head. He was asked to touch slimy worms with his hands and pretend they were trophies.

“Then I’ll do it alone!” Denis exclaimed, and threw his coat and waistcoat down on the deck.

He was known to be an admirable swimmer. The company therefore took his notion as one of the bizarre pranks for which he was known. Only Eva tried to restrain him. She approached him and laid her hand on his arm. In vain. He was quite ready to jump, when the captain grasped his shoulder and begged him to desist, since the river, despite its calm appearance, had a strong undercurrent. But Denis eluded him, ran to the promenade deck, and in another moment his slender body flew into the black water.

No one had a presentiment of disaster. The swimmer advanced with powerful strokes. The watchers on board were sure that he would easily reach the Chelsea shore. But suddenly, in the bright radiance of a searchlight from shore, they saw him throw up his arms above his head. At the same moment he cried piercingly for help. Without hesitation a member of the little orchestra, a cellist, sprang overboard in all his garments to help the drowning man. But the current caused by the ebbtide was very powerful, and both Denis and the musician were whirled onward by it, and disappeared in the inky waves.

Suddenly the confusion caused by these happenings lifted from Christian’s mind, and before any could restrain him, he was in the water. He heard a cry, and knew that it came from Eva’s lips. The ladies and gentlemen on board scurried helplessly to and fro.

Christian could no longer make out the forms of the other two. The water seemed to bank itself against him and hinder his movements. A sudden weakness took possession of him, but he felt no fear. Raising his head he saw the silent masses of the workers, men and women with such expressions as he had never seen. Although the glance which he directed toward them was but a momentary one, he felt almost sure that their sombre earnestness of gaze was fixed on him, and that these thousands and thousands were waiting for him, and for him alone. His weakness increased. It seemed to arise from his heart, which grew heavier and heavier. At that moment a life-boat reached him.

At three o’clock in the morning, in the earliest dawn, the bodies of Denis and the musician were found jammed between two beams near the arches of a bridge. Now they lay on deck and Christian could contemplate them. The guests had left the ship. Eva, too, had gone. She had been deeply shaken, and Prince Wiguniewski had accompanied her home.

The sailors had gone to their bunks. The deck was empty, and Christian sat alone with the two dead men.

The sun arose. The waters of the river began to glow. The pavements of the desolate streets, the walls and the windows of the houses flushed with the red of dawn. Sea-gulls circled about the smokestack.

Christian sat alone with the dead men. He was huddled in an old coat which the captain had thrown around his shoulders. Steadily he gazed upon the faces of the dead. They were swollen and ugly.

XVI

North of Loch Lomond, Christian and Crammon wandered about shooting snipes and wild ducks. The land was rough and wild; always within their hearing thundered the sea; storm-harried masses of cloud raced across the sky.

“My father will be far from pleased,” said Christian. “I’ve spent two hundred and eighty thousand marks in the last ten months.”

“Your mother will persuade him to bear it,” Crammon answered. “Anyhow, you’re of age. You can use several times that much without any one hindering you.”

Christian threw back his head, and drew the salty air deep into his lungs. “I wonder what little Letitia is doing,” he said.

“I think of the child myself at times. She shouldn’t be left entirely to that old schemer,” Crammon replied.

Her kiss no longer burned on Christian’s lips, for other flames had touched them since. Like laughing putti in a painting, the lovely faces fluttered about him. Many of them, to be sure, were laughing now no more.

In a dark gown, emerging from between two white columns, Eva had taken leave of him. He seemed to see her still—the brunette pallor of her face, her inexpressibly slender hand, the most eloquent hand in the world.

Jestingly and familiarly she had spoken to him in the language of her German homeland, which seemed more piercingly sweet and melodious in her mouth than in any other’s.

“Where are you going, Eidolon?” she had asked carelessly.

He had answered with a gesture of uncertainty. He evidently thought that his going or coming was indifferent to her.

“It isn’t nice of you to go without asking leave,” she said, and put her hands on his shoulders. “But perhaps it is just as well. You confuse me. I am beginning to think of you, and I don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t. Why do you need reasons?”

The dead and swollen face of Denis Lay rose up before them, and they both saw it in the empty air.

After a little he had dared to ask: “When shall we meet again?”

“It depends on you,” she had answered. “Always let me know where you are, so that I can send for you. Of course, it’s nonsense, and I won’t. But it might just happen that in some whim I may want you and none other. Only you must learn——” She stopped and smiled.

“What, what must I learn?”

“Ask your friend Crammon. He’ll teach you.” After these words she had left him.

The sea roared like a herd of steers. Christian stopped and turned to Crammon. “Listen, Bernard, there’s a matter that comes back curiously into my mind. When I last talked to Eva she said there was something I was to learn before I could see her again. And when I asked after her meaning, she said that you could give me a hint. What is it? What am I to learn?”

Crammon answered seriously: “You see, my boy, these things are rather complicated. Some people like their steak overdone, others almost raw, most people medium. Well, if you don’t know a certain person’s taste and serve the steak the way you yourself prefer it, you risk making a blunder and looking like a fool. People are far from simple.”

“I don’t understand you, Bernard.”

“Doesn’t matter a bit, old chap! Don’t bother your handsome head about it. Let’s go on. This damned country makes me melancholy.”

They went on. But there was an unknown sadness in Christian’s heart.