THE NAKED FEET

I

With her companion, Fräulein Stöhr, the Countess Brainitz travelled about the world.

She had been the guest of an incredibly aged Princess Neukirch at Berchtesgaden. But she grew to be immensely bored, and fled to Venice, Ravenna, and Florence. Armed with a Baedeker, and accompanied by a guide, she “did” the galleries, churches, basilicas, palaces, sarcophagi, and monuments, and her tirelessness reduced Fräulein Stöhr to despair.

She quarrelled with the gondoliers over their fare, with waiters over a tip, with shopkeepers over the price of their wares. She thought every coin a counterfeit, and in her terror of dirt and infection she touched no door-knob or chair, no newspaper and no one’s hand. She washed herself repeatedly, screeched uninterruptedly, and by her appetite struck her companions at the table d’hôte with awe.

With rancour in her heart she left the land of miracles and of petty fraud. She visited her nephews, the brothers Stojenthin, in Berlin. They were charmed at her coming, and borrowed a thousand marks of her over the oysters and champagne. Then she proceeded to Stargard, to be with her sisters Hilde Stojenthin and Else von Febronius.

She was vastly amused at the middle-class ladies in Stargard, who curtsied to her as to a queen. At their teas she lorded it over them from the heights of a sofa covered with dotted calico. She entertained her devoutly attentive audience with stories of the great world. At times these anecdotes were of such a character that the judge’s widow had to administer a warning pinch to the arm of her noble sister.

Frau von Febronius had been ailing since the beginning of winter. Careless exposure on a sleigh drive had brought on an attack of pneumonia. The consequences threatened to be grave. The countess, who not only feared illness for herself but hated it in others, grew restive and talked of leaving.

“When my dear husband saw his end approaching, he sent me to Mentone,” she told Fräulein Stöhr. “Stupid and devoid of understanding as he was—though not more so than most men—in this respect he showed a praiseworthy delicacy of feeling. I was simply not made to bear the sight of suffering. Charity is not among my gifts.”

Fräulein Stöhr assumed a pastoral expression and cast her eyes to heaven. She knew her mistress sufficiently to realize that the anecdote of the dying count and the expedition to Mentone was a product of the imagination. She said: “Man should prepare himself in time for his latter end, Madame.”

The countess was indignant. “My dear Stöhr, spare me your spiritual wisdom! It suits only times of trouble. Pastoral consolations are not to my taste. It is not your proper task to preach truths to me, but to offer me agreeable illusions.”

One evening Frau von Febronius asked to see the countess. The latter went. But terror made her pale. She put on a hat, swathed her face in a veil and her hands in gloves. Sighing she sat down beside her sister’s bed, and carefully measured the distance, so as to be out of reach of the patient’s breath.

Frau von Febronius smiled indulgently. Her illness had smoothed the lines of petty care and sorrow from her face, and, among her white pillows, she looked strikingly like her daughter Letitia. “I’m sorry to trouble you, Marion,” she began, “but I must talk to you. There’s something that weighs on my mind, and I must confide in some one. The fact in question should be told to one who knows me, and should not be buried with me.”

“I beseech you, Elsie, my poor darling, don’t talk of graves and such things,” the countess exclaimed in a whining voice. “My appetite will be gone for a week. If you’ll only fling the medicine bottles out of the window, and tell all quacks to go to the devil, you’ll be well by day after to-morrow. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t make a confession. It reminds one of quite dreadful things.”

But Frau von Febronius went on: “It’s no use, Marion. I must tell you this. The reason I turn to you is because you’ve really been so very good and kind to Letitia, and because Hilde, sensible and faithful as she is, wouldn’t quite understand. Her notions are too conventional.”

In whispers she now related the story of Letitia’s birth. An illness of his earlier years had deprived her husband of the hope of posterity; but he had yearned for a son, a child. This yearning had finally silenced all scruples and all contradictory emotions to such an extent that he had chosen a congenial stranger to continue his race. He had persuaded her, his wife, whom he loved above all things, after a long struggle. Finally she had yielded to his unheard-of demand. But when the child was born, a progressive melancholy had seized upon her husband. It had become incurable, and under its control he had ruined his estate and in the end himself. He had felt nothing of the happiness he had expected. He had, on the contrary, always shown a contemptuous dislike of Letitia, and had avoided her as far as possible.

“It doesn’t surprise me a bit,” the countess remarked. “You were uncommonly naïve to be astonished. A strange child is a strange child, no matter how it got into the nest. But it’s really like a fairy tale. I confess I underestimated you. Such delightful sophistication! And who is the child’s father? Who is responsible for the life of that darling angel? He deserves great credit for his achievement.”

Frau von Febronius mentioned the name. The countess screamed, and leaped up as though she had been stung. “Crammon? Bernard von Crammon?” She clasped her hands in agony. “Is that true? Aren’t you dreaming? Consider, my dear! It must be the fever. Oh, certainly, it’s sheer delirium. Take a little water, I beg of you, and then think carefully, and stop talking nonsense.”

Frau von Febronius gazed at her sister in utter amazement. “Do you know him?” she asked.

The countess’ voice was bitter. “Do I know him? I do. And tell me one more thing: Does this—this—creature know? Has he always known?”

“He knows. Two years ago he saw Letitia at our old home. Since that time he has known. But you act as if he were the fiend incarnate, Marion. Did you have a quarrel with him or what? You always exaggerate so!”

Excitedly the countess walked up and down. “He knows it, the wretch! He has always known it, the rogue! And such dissembling as he has practised! Such hypocrisy! The wretched rogue, I’ll bring it home to him! I’ll seek him out!” She turned to her sister. “Forgive me, Elsie, for letting my temperament run away with me. You are right. His name awakened an anger of some years’ standing. My blood boils, I confess. He may have been a man of honour and a gentleman in his youth. He must have been, or you would never have consented to such an adventure. But I hesitate to say what he is to-day. He is still perfectly discreet; you need have no anxiety on that score. But I assert that even discretion has its limits. Where these are passed, decent people shake their heads, and virtue looks like mere baseness. Voilà.”

“All that you say is quite dark to me,” Frau von Febronius replied wearily, “and I really haven’t any desire to fathom it. I wanted to tell you this oppressive secret. Keep it to yourself. Never reveal it, except to prevent some misfortune, or to render Letitia a service. I don’t quite see how either purpose will ever be served by a revelation. But it consoles me that one other human being, beside myself and that man, knows the truth.”

The countess gazed thoughtfully at her sister. “Your life wasn’t exactly a gay one, was it, Elsie?”

The sick woman answered: “No, hardly gay.”

During the following days she rallied a little. Then came a relapse that left no room for hope. In the middle of March she died.

By this time the countess was already far away. Her goings and comings were as purposeless as ever. But she nursed a favourite vision now. Some day she would meet Crammon, confront him with her knowledge, avenge herself upon him, challenge him and annihilate him, in a word, enjoy a rich triumph. At times when she was alone, or even in the presence of Miss Stöhr, whom it astonished, she would suddenly wrinkle her childlike forehead, clench her little fists, and her shiny face would turn red as a lobster, and her violet-blue eyes blaze as for battle.

II

It was three o’clock in the morning when Felix Imhof left a party in the Leopoldstrasse, where there had been gaming for high stakes. He had won several thousand marks, and the gold coins clinked in the overcoat pocket into which he had carelessly stuffed them.

He had had a good deal to drink, too. His head was a bit heavy. At his first steps into the fresh air he reeled a little.

Nevertheless he was in no mood to go home. So he wandered into a coffee-house that was frequented by artists. He thought he might still find a few people with whom he could chat and argue. The day he had passed was not yet full enough of life for him. He wanted it brimming.

In the room, which was blue with smoke, there were only two men, the painter Weikhardt, who had recently returned from Paris, and another painter, who looked rather ragged and stared dejectedly at the table.

Felix Imhof joined the two. He ordered cognac and served them, but, to his annoyance, the conversation would not get started. He got up and invited Weikhardt to walk with him. With contemptuous joviality he turned to the other: “Well, you old paint-slinger, your lamp seems about burned out!”

The man didn’t stir. Weikhardt shrugged his shoulders, and said softly: “He has no money for bread and no place to sleep.”

Felix Imhof plunged his hand into his pocket, and threw several gold coins on the table. The painter looked up. Then he gathered the gold. “Hundred and sixty marks,” he said calmly. “Pay you back on the first.”

Imhof laughed resoundingly.

When they were in the street, Weikhardt said good-naturedly: “He believes every word of it. If he didn’t absolutely believe it, he wouldn’t have taken the money. There are still eleven days before the first—time for a world of illusions.”

“It may be that he believes it,” Imhof replied, with an unsteady laugh, “it may be. He even believes that he exists, and yet he’s nothing but a melancholy corpse. O you painters, you painters!” he cried out into the silent night. “You have no feeling for life. Paint life! You’re still sitting by a spinning-wheel, instead of at some mighty wheel of steel, propelled by a force of sixteen thousand horse-power. Paint my age for me, my huge delight in being! Smell, taste, see, and grasp that colossus! Make me feel that great rhythm, create my grandiose dreams. Give me life—my life and its great affirmation!”

Weikhardt said drily: “I have heard that talk before—between midnight and dawn. When the cock crows we all calm down again, and every man pulls the cart to which fate has hitched him.”

Imhof stopped, and somewhat theatrically laid his hand on Weikhardt’s shoulder. He gazed at him with his intensely black, bloodshot eyes. “I give you a commission herewith, Weikhardt,” he said. “You have talent. You’re the only one with a mind above your palette. Paint my portrait. I don’t care what it costs—twenty, fifty thousand. Doesn’t matter. Take your own time—two months, or two years. But show me—me—the innermost me. Take this vulture’s nose, this Hapsburg lip, these gorilla arms and spindle shanks, this coat and this chapeau claque, and drag from it all the animating Idea. To hell with the accidents of my phiz, which looks as though an unskilful potter had bungled it in the making. Render my ambition, my restlessness, my inner tempo and colourfulness, my great hunger and the time-spirit that is in me. But you must hurry; for I am self-consumed. In a few years I shall have burned out. My soul is tinder. Render this process with the divine objectivity of art, and I’ll reward you like a Medici. But I must be able to see the flame, the flaring up, the dying down, the quiver of it! I want to see it, even if to make me see it you have to lash the whole tradition since Raphael and Rubens into rags!”

“You are an audacious person,” Weikhardt said, in his dry way. “But have patience with us, and restrain your admiration for your particular century. I do not let the age overwhelm me to the point of folly. I do not share the reverential awe of speed and machinery that has seized upon many young men like a new form of epilepsy. I haven’t any attitude of adoration toward seven-league boots, express trains, dreadnoughts, and inflated impressionism. I seek my gods elsewhere. I don’t believe I’m the painter you’re looking for. Where were you? You’ve been travelling again?”

“I’m always on some road,” Felix Imhof replied. “It’s a crazy sort of life. Let me tell you how I spent the last five days. Monday night I went to Leipzig. Tuesday morning at nine I had a conference with some literary people in regard to the founding of a new review. Splendid fellows—keen critics and intellectual Jacobins, every one of them. Then I went to an exhibition of majolicas. Bought some charming things. At noon I left for Hamburg. On the train I read two manuscripts and a drama, all by a young genius who’ll startle the world. That evening attended a meeting of the directorate of the East African Development Corporation. Festivities till late that night. Slept two hours, then proceeded to Oldenburg to a reunion of the retired officers of my old regiment. Talked, drank, and even danced, though the party was stag. Six o’clock in the morning rushed to Quackenbruck, a shabby little country town on the moors, where the officers had arranged for a little horse race. My beast was beaten by a head. Drove to the station and took a train for Berlin. Attended to business next morning in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, interviewed agents, witnessed a curious operation in the clinic, made a flying-trip to Johannisthal, where a new aeroplane was tried out; went to the Deutsches Theater that evening, and saw a marvellous performance of ‘Peer Gynt.’ Drank the night away with the actors. Next morning Dresden. Conference with two American friends. Home to-day. Next week won’t be very different, nor the one after that. I ought to sleep more; that’s the only thing.” He waved his thick bamboo cane in air.

“It is enough to frighten any one,” said Weikhardt, who took more comfort in the contrast between his own phlegm and his companion’s excitement. “How about your wife? What does she say to your life? She was pointed out to me recently. She doesn’t look as if she would let herself be pushed aside.”

Imhof stopped again. He stood there, with his legs far apart and his trunk bent forward, and rested on his cane. “My wife!” he said. “What a sound that has! I have a wife. Ah, yes. I give you my word, my dear man, I should have clean forgotten it to-night, if you hadn’t reminded me. It’s not her fault, to be sure. She’s a born Wahnschaffe; that means something! But somehow.... God knows what it is—the damned rush and hurry, I suppose. You’re quite right. She’s not the sort to be neglected or pushed to the wall. She creates her own spaces, and within these”—he described great circles in the air with his cane—“she dwells, cool to her fingertips, tense as a wire of steel. A magnificent character—energetic, but with a strong sense for decorative effects. She’s to be respected, my dear man.”

Weikhardt had no answer ready for this outburst. Its mixture of boasting and irony, cynicism and ecstatic excitement disarmed and wearied him at once. They had reached a side street, which led to the Englischer Garten, and in which stood the painter’s little house. He wanted to say good-night. But Imhof, who seemed still unwilling to be alone, asked: “Are you working at anything?”

Weikhardt hesitated before answering. That was enough to make Imhof accompany him. The sky grew grey with dawn.

Felix Imhof recited softly to himself:

Weikhardt, who would not yield to Imhof in a knowledge or love of the poet Stefan George, continued the quotation in a caressing voice:

They entered the studio. Weikhardt lit the lamp, and let its glow fall upon a picture that was not quite completed. It was a Descent from the Cross.

“Rather old-fashioned, isn’t it?” Weikhardt asked, with a sly smile. He had grown pale.

Imhof looked. He was a connoisseur through and through. No other had his eye. The painters knew it.

The picture, which reminded one of the visionary power as well as of the brushwork of El Greco, was bizarre in composition, intense in movement, and filled with an ecstatic passion. The forms of an old master, through which the painter had expressed himself, were but an appearance. The vision had been flung upon the canvas with a burning splendour. The figures had nothing old-fashioned about them; there was no cliché; they were like clouds, and the clouds like architecture. There were no concrete things. There was a chaos, which drew meaning and order only from the concentrated perceptions of the beholder.

Felix Imhof folded his hands. “To have such power,” he murmured. “Great God, to have the power to project such things!”

Weikhardt lowered his head. He attributed little significance to these words. A few days before he had stood in front of his canvas, and he had imagined that a peasant was standing beside him—an old peasant or any other simple man of the people. And it had seemed to him that this peasant, this humble man, who knew nothing of art, had kneeled down to pray. Not from piety, but because what he saw had in its own character overwhelmed him.

Almost rudely Imhof turned to the painter and said: “The picture is mine. Under all circumstances. Mine. I must have it. Good-night.” With his top hat set at a crazy angle, and his sleepless, dissipated face, he was a vision to frighten one.

At last he went home.

Next day Crammon informed him of his arrival in Munich. He had come because Edgar Lorm was about to give a series of performances there.

III

Christian considered how he could convey money to Amadeus Voss without humiliating him. Since it was agreed that they travel together, it was necessary for Voss to have the proper outfit; and he possessed nothing but what he had on.

Amadeus Voss understood the situation. The social abyss yawned between them. Both men gazed helplessly into it, one on each shore.

In his own heart Voss mocked at the other’s weakness, and at the same time loved him for his noble shame—loved him with that emotional self that had been humiliated, estranged from the world, stamped on and affronted from his youth on. He shuddered at the prospect of sitting in the forester’s house again with perished hopes and empty hands, and letting his soul bleed to death from the wounds of unattainable lures. He brooded, regarding Christian almost with hatred. What will he do? How will he conquer the difficulty?

Time passed. The matter was urgent.

On the last afternoon Christian said: “The hours crawl. Let us play cards.” He took a pack of French cards from a drawer.

“I haven’t touched a card in my life,” Voss said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Christian replied. “All you need do is to tell red from black. I’ll keep the bank. Bet on a colour. If you’ve bet on red and I turn up red, you’ve won. How much will you risk? Let us start with one taler.”

“Very well, here it is,” said Voss, and put the silver coin on the table. Christian shuffled the cards and drew one. It was red.

“Risk your two talers now,” Christian advised. “Novices have luck.”

Voss won the two talers. The betting continued. Once or twice he lost. But finally he had won thirty talers.

“Now you take the bank,” Christian proposed. He was secretly pleased that his ruse was working so well.

He bet ten talers and lost. Then fifteen, then twenty, then thirty, and lost again. He risked a hundred marks, two hundred, five hundred, more and more, and still lost. Voss’s cheeks turned hectic red, then white as chalk: his hands trembled, his teeth rattled. He was seized by a terror that his luck would change, but he was incapable of speech or of asking for an end of the game. The bank notes were piled up in front of him. In half an hour he had won over four thousand marks.

Christian had previously marked the cards in a manner that no inexperienced eye could detect. He knew exactly which colour Voss would find. But the curious thing was that, though he forgot occasionally to watch the markings, Voss still won.

Christian got up. “We’re in a hurry,” he said. “You must get ready for our journey, Amadeus.”

Voss was overwhelmed by the change which had come over his life within a few minutes. If a spark of suspicion glowed in his soul, he turned away from it, and plunged into rich dreams.

The motor took them to Wiesbaden, and there, with Christian’s help, Amadeus bought garments and linen, boots, hats, gloves, cravats, a razor, a manicure set, and a trunk.

At ten o’clock that evening they sat in the sleeper. “Who am I now?” asked Amadeus Voss. He looked about him with a curious and violent glance, and pushed the blond hair from his forehead. “What do I represent now? Give me an office and a title, Christian Wahnschaffe, in order that I may know who I am.”

Christian watched the other’s excitement with quiet eyes. “Why should you think yourself another to-night or changed from yesterday?” he asked in surprise.

IV

Eva Sorel passed through the countries of Europe—a comet leaving radiance in its wake.

Her day was thickly peopled. It needed the flexibility of an experienced practitioner to test and grant the many-sided demands upon her. Monsieur Chinard, her impresario, served admirably in this capacity. Only Susan Rappard treated the man morosely. She called him a Figaro pris à la retraite.

In addition, the dancer employed a courier and a secretary.

Several of her adorers had been following her from city to city for months. They were Prince Wiguniewski, a middle-aged American, named Bradshaw, the Marquis Vicente Tavera, of the Spanish legation at Petrograd, Herr Distelberg, a Jewish manufacturer of Vienna, and Botho von Thüngen, a very young Hanoverian, a student in his second year.

These, as well as others who drifted with the group from time to time, neglected their callings, friends, and families. They needed the air that Eva breathed in order to breathe themselves. They had the patience of petitioners and the optimism of children. They were envious of one another’s advantage, knowledge, and witticisms. Each noted with malicious delight if another blundered. They vied zealously for the friendship of Susan, and made her costly presents, in order that she might tell them what her mistress had said and done, how she had slept, in what mood she had awakened, and when she would receive.

Since Count Maidanoff had joined Eva’s circle they had all been profoundly depressed. They knew, everybody knew, who was concealed behind this pseudonym. Against him—mighty and greatly feared—no one hoped to prevail.

Eva consoled them with a smile. They counted for nothing in her eyes. “How are my chamberlains?” she asked Susan, “how do my time-killers kill their time?”

But she was not quite as light and serene of soul as she had once been.

V

She had made the acquaintance of Count Maidanoff in Trouville. She had been presented to him on the promenade, and a far-flung circle of fashionables had looked on. Careful murmurs had blended with the thunder of the sea.

She came home and grasped Susan by the shoulders. “Don’t let me go out again,” she said, pale and breathing heavily. “I don’t want to look into those eyes again. I must not meet that man any more.”

Susan exhausted herself promising this. She did not know who had awakened such horror in her mistress. “Elle est un peu folle,” she said to M. Labourdemont, the secretary, “mais ce grain de folie est le meilleur de l’art.”

The next day Count Maidanoff announced his formal call, and had to be received.

The conventional act of homage, to which he was entitled by his birth, he repaid with a personal and sincere one.

His speech was heavy and slow. He seemed to despise the words, the use of which caused him such exertion. Sometimes he stopped in the middle of a sentence and frowned in annoyance. Between his eyebrows there were two straight, deep lines that made his face permanently sombre. His smile began with an upward curl of the lips, and quivered down into his thin, colourless beard, like the effect of a muscular paralysis.

He went straight and without circumlocution toward his purpose. It was commonly the office of his creatures to clear the road toward his amatory adventures. By doing the wooing himself in this instance he desired to single out its object by an act of especial graciousness.

The cool timidity of the dancer had pleased him at first. Fear was to him the most appealing quality in men. But Eva’s repressed chill in the face of his courteous proposals confused him. His eyes became empty, he looked bored, and asked for permission to light a cigarette.

He talked of Paris, of a singer at the Grand Opera there. Then he became silent, and sat there like some one who has all eternity ahead of him. When he arose and took his leave, he looked as though he were really asleep.

With arms crossed Eva walked about the room till evening. During the night she picked up books which she did not read, thought of things that were indifferent to her, called Susan only to torment her, wrote a letter to Ivan Becker and tore it up again. Finally, in spite of the driving rain, she wrapped herself in a cloak and went out on the terrace.

Maidanoff repeated his visit. At the inevitable point Eva conveyed to him with great delicacy that his expectations were doomed to disappointment. He looked at her with slothful, oblique glances, and condescended to smile. What nonsense, his morose frown seemed thereupon to say.

Suddenly he opened his eyes very wide. The effect was uncanny. Eva bent her head forward in expectation, and spread out her fingers.

He said: “You have the most beautiful hands I have ever seen. To have seen them is to desire to know their touch.”

Three hours later she left Trouville, accompanied by Susan and by M. Labourdemont, and travelled to Brussels, where Ivan Becker was staying.

VI

Becker lived in the suburbs, in a lonely house that stood in a neglected garden. He received her in a tumbled room that was as big as a public hall. Two candles burned on the table.

He looked emaciated, and moved about restlessly, even after he had bidden Eva welcome.

She told him with some haste of her engagement in Russia, which she was about to fulfil, and asked whether he had any commissions to give her. He said that he had not.

“The Grand Duke was attentive to me,” she said, and looked at him expectantly.

He nodded. After a little he sat down and said: “I must tell you a dream I had; or, rather, a hallucination, for I lay with my eyes wide open. Listen!

“About a richly laid board there sat five or six young women. They were in evening dress, with very deep décolletage, and laughed wildly and drank champagne. With frivolous plays on words and seductive gestures, they turned to one who sat at the head of the table. But that one had no form: he was like a lump of dough or clay. The footmen trembled when they approached him, and the women grew pale under their rouge when he addressed them. In the middle of the gleaming cloth there lay, unnoticed by any one, a corpse. It was covered with fruits, and from its breast, between the peaches and the grapes, projected the handle of a dagger. Blood trickled through the joints of the table and tapped in dull drops on the carpet.

“The meal came to an end. All were in a wildly exuberant mood. Then that formless one arose, grasped one of the women, drew her close to him, and demanded music. And while the thunderous music resounded, that lump expanded and grew, and a skull appeared on it, and eyes within that skull, and these eyes blazed in a measureless avidity. The woman that he held became paler and paler, and sought to free herself from his embrace. But long, thin arms grew out of his trunk. And with these he pressed her so silently and so cruelly that she began to moan and turn blue. And her body snapped in two in the middle. Lifeless she lay in his arms, and nothing seemed left of her but her dress. Then the corpse, that lay with pierced breast amid the fruit and sweets, raised its head, and said with closed eyes: ‘Give her back to me.’

“Suddenly many people streamed into that room—peasants and factory workers, soldiers and ragged women, Jews and Jewesses. An old man with a white beard said to the formless one: ‘Give me back my daughter.’ Others who stood behind screamed frantically: ‘Give us our daughters, our brides, our sisters.’ Then peasants pressed forward, and bent to the earth their melancholy faces, and said: ‘Give us our lands and our forests.’ Over all rose the piercing voices of mothers: ‘Give us our sons, our sons.’ The formless one receded step by step into empty space. But even as he receded he assumed a more clearly defined shape. The face, the hands, and the garments were brown as though encrusted with rust or dried slime. The features of the face gave not the least notion of that being’s character, and precisely this circumstance heightened the despair of all beyond endurance. They cried without ceasing: ‘Our brothers! Our sons! Our sisters! Our lands! Our forests, O thou accursed unto all eternity!’”

Eva said no word.

Ivan Becker rested his head upon his hand. “One thing is certain. He has caused so many tears to be shed, that were they gathered into one lake, that lake were deeper than the Kremlin is tall; the blood that he has caused to flow would be a sea in which all Moscow could be drowned.”

He walked to and fro a few times. Then he sat down again and continued: “He is the creator and instigator of an incomparable reign of terror. Our living souls are his victims. Wherever there is a living soul among us, it becomes his prey. Six thousand intellectuals were deported during the past year. Where he sets his foot, there is death. Ruins and fields full of murdered men mark his path. These expressions are not to be taken metaphorically but quite, quite literally. It was he who created the organization of the united nobility, which holds the country in subjection, and is a modern instrument of torture on the hugest scale. The pogroms, the murderous Finnish expedition, the torturing of the imprisoned, the atrocities of the Black Hundreds—all these are his work. He wastes untold millions from the public treasury; he pardons the guilty and condemns the innocent. He throttles the spirit of man and extinguishes all light. He is all-powerful. He is God’s living adversary. I bow before him.”

Eva looked up in astonishment. But Becker did not observe her.

“There is no one who knows him. No one is able to see through him. I believe he is satiated. Nothing affects him any longer except some stimulus of the epidermis. The story is told that sometimes he has two beautiful naked women fight in his presence. They have daggers and must lacerate each other. One must bow down before that.”

“I do not understand,” Eva whispered wide-eyed. “Why bow?”

Becker shook his head warningly, and his monotonous voice filled the room once more. “He has found everything between heaven and earth to be for sale—friendship, love, the patience of a people, justice, the Church, peace and war. First he commands or uses force; that goes without saying. What these cannot conquer he buys. It seems, to be sure, that pressure and force can accomplish things that would defy and wreck ordinary mortals. While hunting bears in the Caucasus his greatest favourite, Prince Szilaghin, fell ill. His fever was high and he was carried into the hut of some Circassians. Szilaghin, by the way, is a creature of incredible corruption—only twenty years old and of astonishing though effeminate beauty. To win a bet he once disguised himself as a cocotte, and spent a night in the streets and amusement resorts of Petrograd. In the morning he brought back a handful of jewels, including a magnificent bracelet of emeralds, that had been given him as tributes to his mere beauty. It was he who fell ill in the mountains. A mounted messenger was sent to the nearest village, and dragged back with him an old, ignorant country doctor. The Grand Duke pointed to his favourite writhing in delirium, and said to the old man: ‘If he dies, you die too.’ Every hour the physician administered a draught to the sick man. In the intervals he kneeled trembling by the bed and prayed. As fate would have it, Szilaghin recovered consciousness toward morning, and gradually became well. The Grand Duke was convinced that the inexorable alternative which he had offered the old physician had released mysterious forces in him and worked something like a miracle. Thus he does not feel nature as a barrier to his power.”

A swift vividness came into Eva’s features. She got up and walked to the window and opened it. A storm was shaking the trees. The ragged clouds in the sky, feebly illuminated by moonlight and arching the darkness, were like a picture of Ruysdael. Without turning she said: “You say no one can penetrate him. There is nothing to penetrate. There is an abyss, dark and open.”

“It may be that you are right and that he is like an abyss,” Ivan Becker answered softly, “but who will have the courage to descend into it?”

Another silence fell upon them. “Speak, Ivan, speak out at last the thought in your mind!” Eva cried out into the night. And every fibre of her, from the tips of her hair to the hem of her gown, was tense with listening.

But Becker did not answer. Only a terrible pallor came over his face.

Eva turned around. “Shall I throw myself into his arms in order to create a new condition in the world?” she asked proudly and calmly. “Shall I increase his opinion of the things that can be bought among men by the measure of my worth? Or do you think that I could persuade him to exchange the scaffold for the confessional and the hangman’s axe for a flute?”

“I have not spoken of such a thing; I shall not speak of it,” said Ivan Michailovitch with solemnly raised hand.

“A woman can do many things,” Eva continued. “She can give herself away, she can throw herself away, she can sell herself, she can conceal indifference and deny her hatred. But against horror she is powerless; that tears the heart in two. Show me a way; make me insensitive to the horror of it; and I shall chain your tiger.”

“I know of no way,” answered Ivan Michailovitch. “I know none, for horror is upon me too. May God, the Eternal, enlighten you.”

The loneliness of the room, of the house, of the storm-ploughed garden, became as the thunder of falling boulders.

VII

Her friends awaited developments in suspense. None expected her to offer Maidanoff any serious resistance. When she seemed to hold out, her subtlety was admired. Paris predicted a radiant future for her. Much public curiosity centred upon her, and many newspaper columns were devoted to her.

When she arrived in Russia it was clear that the authorities and officials had received special instructions. No queen could have been treated with more subtle courtesy. Palatial rooms in a hotel were in readiness and adorned. A slavish humility surrounded her.

When the Grand Duke called, she begged him to rescind the orders that made her his debtor. He devoured her words with a frosty and lurking expression, but remained inactive. She was indignant at this slothfulness of a rigid will, this deaf ear that listened so greedily.

His contempt of mankind had something devastating in it. His slow eyes seemed to say: Man, thou slimy worm, grovel and die!

In his presence Eva felt her thoughts to be so loud at times that she feared he would perceive them.

She ventured to oppose and judge him. A young girl, Vera Cheskov, had shot the governor of Petrograd. Eva had the courage to praise that deed. The Grand Duke’s answer was smooth, and he left quite unruffled. She challenged him more vigorously. Her infinitely expressive body vibrated in rhythms of bitterness and outrage. She melted in grief, rage, and sympathy.

He watched her as one would watch a noble beast at its graceful antics and said: “You are extraordinary, Madame. I cannot tell what wish of yours I would leave ungranted for the reward of winning your love.” He said that in a deep voice, which was hoarse. He had also a higher voice, which had a grinding sound like that of rusty hinges.

Eva’s shoulders quivered. His iron self-sufficiency reflected no image of her or her influence. Against it all forces were shattered.

Twice she saw him change countenance and give a start. The first time was when she told him of her German descent. An inbred hatred against all Germans and everything German filled him. An evil mockery glared in his face. He determined not to believe her and dropped the subject.

And the second time was when she spoke of Ivan Michailovitch Becker. She could not help it; she had to bring that name to the light. It was her symbol and talisman.

A glance like a whip’s lash leaped out of those slothful eyes. The two deep grooves between the eyebrows stretched like the antennæ of an insect. A diagonal groove appeared and formed with the others a menacing cross. The face became ashen.

Susan was impatient. She urged her on and lured her on. “Why do you hesitate?” she said to her mistress one evening. “So near the peak one cannot go back. Remember our dreams in Toledo! We thought they were insolent then. Reality puts us to shame. Take what is given you. Never will your sweet, little dancing feet win a greater prize.”

Eva walked in a circle about the rug. “Be quiet,” she said thoughtfully and threateningly, “You don’t know what you are advising me to do.”

Crouching near the fire-place, Susan’s lightless, plum-like eyes followed her mistress. “Are you afraid?” she asked with a frown.

“I believe I am afraid,” Eva replied.

“Do you remember the sculptor whom we visited in Meudon last winter? He showed us his work, and you two talked art. He said: ‘I mustn’t be afraid of the marble; the marble must be afraid of me.’ You almost kissed him in gratitude for those words. Don’t be afraid now. You are the stronger.”

Eva stood still, and sighed: “Cette maladie, qu’on appelle la sagesse!”

Then Susan went to the piano-forte, and with her fluttering angularity of movement began to play a Polonaise of Chopin. Eva listened for a while. Then she went up to Susan from behind, tapped her shoulder, and said, as the playing ceased, with a dark, strange cooing in her voice:

“If it must be, I shall first live one summer of love, the like of which has not been seen on earth. Do not speak, Susan. Play on, and do not speak.”

Susan looked up, and shook her puzzled head.

VIII

On the day of Eva’s last appearance in Petrograd, a well laid high explosive mine blew up the central building of the Agricultural Exposition.

The plot had been aimed at the person of the Grand Duke. His visit had been expected, the order in which he would inspect the buildings had been carefully mapped out. A slight maladjustment in the machinery of his car delayed him and his train a few minutes beyond the precisely fixed hour.

At the very moment when he put his foot on the first step of the building, a terrific crash resounded. The sky disappeared behind fume and fragments. Several manufacturers and bureaucrats, who had officiously hurried ahead, as well as ten or twelve workingmen, were killed. The air pressure smashed the window panes in all the houses within a mile of the spot.

For a while the Grand Duke stood quite still. Without curiosity or fear, but with an indescribably sombre look, he surveyed the devastation. When he turned to go, the great crowds who had streamed thither melted back silently at his approach. They left him a broad path through which his abnormally long legs, accompanied by the clinking of his sword, strode with the steps of a sower.

For her final performance Eva had selected the rôle of the fettered and then liberated Echo, in the pantomime called The Awakening of Pan. It had always created enthusiasm; but this time she celebrated an unparalleled triumph.

She danced a dance of freedom and redemption, that affected with complete immediacy the nerves of the thronging audiences, and released the tensions of the day of their lives. There was a present and significant eloquence in the barbaric defiance, the fiery terror of the pursued. Then came her sudden rallying, her heroic determination, her grief over a first defeat, her toying with the torch of vengeance, her jubilant welcome of a rising dawn.

The curtain dropped, and the twenty-five hundred people sat as though turned to stone. Innumerable glances sought the box of the Grand Duke and found those slothful, unseeing eyes of his. They saw the slightness and disproportionate length of his body, the sinewy, bird-like neck above the round collar of his uniform, the thin beard, the bumpy forehead, and felt the atmosphere that rolled silently out from him and dwelled in his track—the atmosphere of a million-atomed death. And in the midst of these were those slothful eyes.

Then the applause broke out. Distinguished ladies contorted their bodies, toothless old men yelled like boys, sophisticated experts of the theatre climbed on their seats and waved. When Eva appeared the noise died down. For ten seconds nothing was heard but the sound of breathing and the rustle of garments.

She looked into that gleaming sea of faces. The folds of her white Greek garment were still as marble. Then the storm of applause burst out anew. Over the balustrade of the gallery a girl bent and stretched out her arms, and cried with a sob in her voice, that rose above all the plaudits: “You have understood us, little soul!”

Eva did not understand the Russian words. But it was not necessary. She looked up, and their sense was clear to her.

IX

At midnight she appeared, as she had consented to do, in the palace of Prince Fyodor Szilaghin.

So soon as she was seen, a respectful murmur and then a silence surrounded her. Bearers of the most ancient names were assembled, the most beautiful women of society and of the court, and the representatives of foreign powers. Several gentlemen had already formed a group about her, when Fyodor Szilaghin approached, kissed her hand reverently, and drew her skilfully from the group.

She passed through several rooms at his side. He did his best to fascinate her and succeeded in holding her attention.

There was not a touch of banality about him. His gestures and words were calculated to produce a desired effect with the utmost coolness and subtlety. When he spoke he lowered his eyes a little. The ease and fullness of speech that is characteristic of all Russians had something iridescent in his case. An arrogant and almost cynical consciousness of the fact that he was handsome, witty, aloof, mysterious, and much desired never left him. His eyebrows had been touched with kohl, his lips with rouge. The dull blackness of his hair threw into striking relief the transparent pallor of his beardless face.

“I find it most remarkable, Madame,” he said in a voice of unfathomable falseness, “that your art has not to us Slavs the oversophistication that is characteristic of most Western artists. It is identical with nature. It would be instructive to know the paths by which, from so different a direction, you reached the very laws and forms on which our national dances as well as our modern orchestral innovations are based. Undoubtedly you are acquainted with both.”

“I am,” Eva answered, “and what I have seen is most uncommon. It has power and character and enthusiasm.”

“Enthusiasm and perhaps something more—wild ecstasy,” said the prince, with a significant smile. “Without that there is no great creation in the world. Do you not believe that Christ shared such ecstasy? As for me, I cannot be satisfied with the commonly accepted figure of a gentle and gently harmonious Christ.”

“It is a new point of view. It is worth thinking about,” Eva said with kindly tolerance.

“However that may be,” Szilaghin went on, “among us all things are still in the process of becoming—the dance as well as religion. I do not hesitate to name these two in one breath. They are related as a red rose is to a white. When I say that we are still becoming, I mean that we have yet discovered no limits either of good or evil. A Russian is capable of committing the most cruel murder, and of shedding tears, within the next hour, at the sound of a melancholy song. He is capable of all wildness, excess, and horror, but also of magnanimity and self-abnegation. No transformation is swifter or more terrible than his, from hate to love, love to hate, happiness to despair, faithfulness to treachery, fear to temerity. If you trust him and yield yourself to him, you will find him pliant, high-souled, and infinitely tender. Disappoint and maltreat him—he will plunge into darkness and be lost in the darkness. He can give, give, give, without end or reflection, to the point of fanatical selflessness. Not until he is hurled to the uttermost depths of hopelessness, does the beast in him awaken and crash into destruction all that is about him.” The prince suddenly stood still. “Is it indiscreet to ask, Madame, where you will pass the month of May? I am told you intend to go to the sea-shore.” He had said these words in a changed tone, and regarded Eva expectantly.

The question came to her like an attack from ambush.

Insensibly they had left the rooms destined for the guests and passed into the extensive conservatories. Labyrinthine paths, threading innumerable flowers and shrubs, led in all directions. A dim light reigned, and where they stood in a somewhat theatrical isolation, thousands of ghostly orchids exhaled a breathless fragrance.

Skilfully and equivocally chosen as they were, the sense and purport of Szilaghin’s words were very clear to Eva. Yet she was tempted to oppose her own flexibility to his eel-like smoothness of mind, despite the hidden threat of the situation. She assumed a smile, as impenetrable as Szilaghin’s forehead and large pupils, and answered: “Yes; I am going to Heyst. I must rest. Life in this land of hidden madmen has wearied me. It is too bad that I must be deprived, dear Prince, of a mentor and sage like yourself.”

Suddenly Szilaghin dropped on one knee, and said softly: “My master and friend beseeches you through me for the favour of being near you wherever you may elect to go. He insists on no exact time, but awaits your summons. I know neither the degree nor the cause of your hesitation, dear lady, but what pledge do you demand, what surety, for the sincerity of a feeling that avoids no test and stops at no sacrifice?”

“Please rise, prince,” Eva commanded him. She stepped back a pace and stretched out her arms in a delicate gesture of unwilling intimacy. “You are a spendthrift of yourself at this moment. Please rise.”

“Not until you assure me that I shall be the bearer of good news. Your decision is a grave one. Clouds are gathering and awaiting a wind that may disperse them. Processions are on the roads praying to avert an evil fate. I am but a single, but a chance messenger. May I rise now?”

Eva folded her arms across her bosom, and retreated to the very wall of hanging flowers. She became aware of the mighty and naked seriousness of fate. “Rise,” she said, with lowered head, and twice did fire and pallor alternate on her cheeks.

Szilaghin arose and smiled, swiftly breathing. Again, in silent reverence, he carried her hand to his lips. Then he led her, subtly chatting as before, back among the other guests.

It was twelve hours after this that Christian received the telegram which called him to Berlin.

X

Edgar Lorm played to crowded houses in Munich. His popularity was such that he had to prolong his stay.

It pleased Crammon enormously and puffed him up. He walked about as though he were the sole nurse of all this glory.

One day he was at a tea given by a literary lady. In a corner arose laughter that was obviously directed at him. He was amused when he discovered that the whispering group gathered there believed firmly that he was copying Lorm’s impersonation of the Misanthrope.

Felix Imhof writhed in laughter when he heard the story. “There’s something very attractive in the notion to people who don’t really know you,” he said to Crammon. “It’s far more likely that it’s the other way around, and that Lorm created his impersonation by copying you.”

This interpretation was very flattering. Crammon smiled in appreciation of it. Unconsciously he deepened the lines of misanthropy in his chubby ecclesiastical face. When Lorm had his picture taken as Alceste, Crammon took up his stand behind the camera, and gazed steadily at the ripe statuesqueness of the actor’s appearance.

It was his intention to learn. The rôle which had been assigned him in the play of the actor’s life—the play that lasted from nine o’clock every morning until eleven at night—began to arouse his dissatisfaction. He desired it to be less episodic. It seemed to him that Lorm, the director of this particular play, should be persuaded to change the cast. He told Lorm so quite frankly. For the actor was no longer to him, as in the days of his youth, the crown and glory of human existence and the vessel of noblest emotions, but a means to an end. Nowadays one was forced to learn of Lorm, to conceal one’s true feelings impenetrably, to gather all one’s energy for the moment of one’s cue, to be thrifty of one’s self, bravely to wear a credible mask, and thus to assure each situation of a happy ending.

So Crammon said: “I’ve always had rather pleasant relations with my partners. I can truly say that I’m an obliging colleague and have always stolen away into the background when it was their turn to have their monologues or great scenes in the centre of the stage. But two of them, the young lover and the heroine, have undoubtedly abused my good nature. They’ve gradually shoved me out of the play entirely. To their own hurt, too. The action promised to be splendid. Since I’ve been shoved into the wings, it threatens to be lost in the sand. It annoys me.”

Edgar Lorm smiled. “It seems to me rather that the playwright is at fault than those two,” he answered. “And no doubt it’s a mistake in construction. No experienced man of the theatre would dispense with a character like yourself.”

“Prosit,” said Crammon, and lifted his glass. They were sitting late in the Ratskeller.

“One must await developments,” Lorm continued. The whole charade amused him immensely. “In the works of good authors you sometimes find unexpected turns of the action. You mustn’t scold till the final curtain.”

Crammon murmured morosely. “It’s taking a long time. Some day soon I’m going to mount the stage and find out in which act we are. I may make an extempore insertion.”

“For what particular line have you been engaged anyhow?” Lorm inquired. “Man of the world, character parts, or heavy father?”

Crammon shrugged his shoulders. The two men looked seriously at each other. A pleasant mood gleamed about the actor’s narrow lips. “How long is it since we’ve seen each other, old boy?” he said, and threw his arm affectionately over Crammon’s shoulder. “It must be years. Until recently I had a secretary who, whenever a letter came from you, would lay it on my pillow at night. He meant that action to express something like this: Look, Lorm, people aren’t the filthy scamps you always call them. Well, he was an idealist who had been brought up on chicory, potatoes, and herring. You find that sort once in a while. As for you, my dear Crammon, you’ve put on flesh. You’re comfortable and compact in that nice tight skin of yours. I’m still lean and feed on my own blood.”

“My fat is only a stage property,” said Crammon sadly. “The inner me is untouched.”

XI

Whenever Lorm played, Judith Imhof was in the theatre. But she went neither with her husband nor with Crammon. They broke in upon her mood. She cared very little for Crammon at any time. Unless he was very jocular, he seemed to her insufferable.

She sat in the stalls, and in the entr’actes waved graciously and calmly to Felix and Crammon in their box. She was careless of the amazement of her acquaintances. If any one had the temerity to ask why she sat alone, she answered, “Imhof is annoyed when another is not pleased with something that arouses his enthusiasm. So we go on different paths.”

Inevitably the curious person would ask next: “Then you don’t care for Lorm?” Whereupon she would reply: “Not greatly. He forces me to take a certain interest; but I resent that. I think he’s terribly overrated.”

One day a lady of her acquaintance asked her whether she was happy in her marriage. “I don’t know,” she answered, and laughed. “I haven’t any exact conception of what people mean by happiness.” Her friend then asked her why she had married. “Very simply,” she replied, “because being a young girl got to be such an undelightful situation that I sought to escape from it as soon as possible.” The lady wanted to know whether she didn’t, then, love her husband. “My dear woman,” Judith said, “love! There’s nothing so mischievous as the loose way in which people use that word. Most people, I believe, pretend quite shamelessly when they talk about it, and defend it simply because they don’t want to admit that they’ve been taken in. It’s exactly like the king’s new clothes in the old fable. Every one acts mightily important and enthusiastic, and won’t admit that the poor king is naked to the winds.”

Another time she was asked whether she didn’t yearn to have a child. “A child!” she cried out. “Horrors! Shall I bring forth more food for the worms?”

Once, in company, the conversation turned to the question of one’s sensitiveness to pain. Judith asserted that she could bear any bodily torment without moving a muscle. She was not believed. She procured a long, golden needle, and bade one of the gentlemen pierce her whole arm with it. When he refused in horror, she asked another of stronger nerves who obeyed her. And really she did not twitch a muscle. The blood gathered in a little pool. She smiled.

Felix Imhof could weep at the least excuse. When he had a sick headache he wept. She despised this in him.

The actor took hold of her. She resisted in vain. The spell he cast over her grew ever firmer, more indissoluble. She brooded over it. Was it his transformations that attracted her so?

Although he was forty, his body was as elegant and flexible as polished steel. And like the ringing of steel was his voice. The words were sparks. Under his tread the wooden stage became a palæstra. Nothing clung or whined or crept. Everything was tension, progression, verve, the rhythm of storms. There was no inner weight or weariness. Bugles soared. She agreed with Felix when he said: “There is more of the true content of our age in this man than in all the papers, editorials, pamphlets, and plethoric three-deckers that the press has spewed forth within the past twenty years. He has crowned the living word and made it our king.”

She was impatient to make the personal acquaintance of Lorm. Crammon became the intermediary, and brought the actor to her house. She was amazed at the homeliness of the man’s face. She resented his insignificant, tilted nose and his mediocre forehead. But the spell was not broken. She desired to overlook these details and succeeded. They represented but another transformation of that self which she believed to be so infinitely varied.

He revealed himself as an epicure, with remnants of that greed which marks the man who has risen from humble things. The delights of the table induced in him outbursts of noisy merriment. Over the oysters and the champagne he discussed his worst enemies with benevolence.

He was so changeable of mood that it was exhausting to associate with him. No one opposed him, and this lack of opposition had produced an empty space about him that had almost the guise of loneliness. He himself took it for the solitariness of the soul, and cherished it with a proud pain.

He discoursed only in monologues. He listened only to himself. But he did all that with the innocence of a savage. When others spoke he disappeared in an inner absorption, his eyes assumed a stony look. The part of him that remained conscious was undeviatingly courteous, but this courtesy often had an automatic air. When he came to speak again, he delighted his hearers by his wit, his paradoxes, and his masterly rendition of anecdotes.

He avoided conversation with women. Beauty and coquetry made no impression on him. When women became enthusiastic over him, his expression was one of merely courteous attention, and his thoughts were contemptuous. He had no adventures, and his name occurred in no racy stories. Once out of the theatre, he lived the life of a private gentleman of simple habits.

With cool but delicate perceptivity Judith examined the conformation of his character. She who was utterly without swift aspiration, whose dry nature perceived only the utilitarian, only the expedient, who had been stifled in mere forms from her girlhood, and esteemed nothing in others but the external, garments, jewels, display, title, name—she was like one possessed and charged with an electric fluid within three days. She was fascinated primarily by external things: his eye, his voice, his fame. But there was one deeper thing: the illusion of his art.

She knew what she was doing. Her steps were scrupulously calculated.

One day Lorm complained of the disorganization in his life, the frightful waste of his substance. It was at table, and he was answered by empty phrases. But Judith, when she succeeded in having him to herself later, took up the subject again. She persuaded him to describe the persons whom he held responsible, and expressed doubts of their trustworthiness. She disapproved of arrangements that he had made, gave him advice that he found excellent, and reproached him with the neglect of which he confessed himself guilty. “I wade in money and suffocate in debt,” he sighed. “In twenty years I’ll be an old man and a poor devil.”

Her practical insight filled him with naïve admiration. He said to her: “I’ve been told once in a while that there are such women in the world as you, but I never believed in their existence. All I’ve ever seen were full of empty exactions and florid emotions.”

“You’re unjust,” she replied and smiled. “Every woman has some field in which she has character and firmness, but the world pays no attention. Then, too, our relation to the world is usually a false one.”

“That is a wise remark,” said Lorm in a satisfied voice. He was a miser of praise.

From now on he loved to have her draw him into talk concerning his little needs and worries. She examined him in detail, and he was glad to submit. He brought her the bills rendered him by his tradespeople. “They capitalize your inexperience, and cheat you,” was Judith’s judgment of the situation. It made him feel ashamed.

“Have you been lending money?” she asked. It appeared that he had. For years and years he had loaned considerable sums to numerous parasites. Judith shrugged her shoulders. “You might just as well have thrown the money away.”

Lorm answered: “It’s such a bother when they come and beg, and their faces are so unappetizing. I give them what they ask just to be rid of them.”

In this wise their conversations moved wholly within the circle of the prosaic things of daily life. But it was precisely this that Edgar Lorm had missed and needed. It was as new and as moving to him, as the discovery of a rapt and ecstatic soul to a bourgeois becoming aware of poetry and passion.

Judith had a dream. She lay quite naked beside a slippery, icy fish. And she lay with it from choice, and snuggled close to its cold body. But suddenly she began to beat it, for its cool, damp, slippery scales, which had a gleam of silver and were opaline along its back, suddenly inspired in her a witch-like fury. She beat and beat the creature, until she lost consciousness and awoke exhausted.

An excursion into the valley of the Isar was arranged. Crammon went, and Felix, a young friend of the latter, Lorm and Judith. They took their coffee in the garden of an inn, and on the way back, which led through woods, they went in couples, Lorm and Judith being the last. “I’ve lost my gold cigarette case,” Lorm announced suddenly, examining his pocket, “I’ve got to go back the last part of the way. I know I had it when we were in the village.” It was an object precious in itself, and to which he attached a great value because it had been given him by a king who had been devoted to him in an enthusiastic friendship in his youth, and so it was irreplaceable.

Judith nodded. “I’ll wait here,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m too tired to cover the distance three times.”

He walked back and left Judith standing there, leaning her head against a tree and reflecting. Her forehead wrinkled and her eyes assumed a piercing look. It was silent in the wood; no breeze stirred, no bird cried, no animal rustled in the bushes. Time passed. Driven not at all by impatience, but by her thoughts, which were both violent and decisive, she finally left her place, and walked in the direction from which Lorm would have to come. When she had been walking for a while, she saw something golden gleaming in the moss. It was the cigarette case, which she picked up calmly.

Lorm came back sorely vexed. He was silent, and as he walked beside her, she quietly presented the case on her flat hand. He made a gesture of joyous surprise, and she had to tell him how she had found it.

For a while he seemed to be struggling with himself. Suddenly he said: “How much easier life would be with you.”

Judith answered with a smile: “You talk of it as of something unattainable.”

“I believe it to be so,” he murmured, with lowered head.

“If you’re thinking of my marriage,” Judith said, still smiling, “I consider your expression exaggerated. The way out would be simple.”

“I wasn’t thinking of your marriage, but of your wealth.”

“Will you tell me your meaning more clearly.”

“At once.” He looked about him, and went up to a tree. “Do you see that little beetle? Look how busily he works to climb the height before him. He has probably worked his way up a considerable distance to-day. No doubt he started before dawn. When he’s on top, he will have accomplished something. But if I take him between my fingers now and place him at the top, then the very path which his own labour has dug becomes a thing of no value to him. That’s the way it is with beetles and also with men.”

Judith considered. “Comparisons must halt. That’s their prerogative, you know.” She spoke with gentle mockery. “I don’t understand why one should reject another, simply because that other doesn’t come with empty hands. It’s a funny notion.”

“Between a hand that is empty, and one that commands immeasurable treasures, there is a fatal difference,” Lorm said with deep earnestness. “I have worked my way up from poverty. You have no faintest notion of the meaning of that word. All that I am and have, I owe to the immediate exertions of my body and my brains. By your birth you have been accustomed all your life to buy the bodies and the brains of others. And though you had a thousand times more instinct and vision for practical things and for the necessities of a sane life than you have, yet you do not and could not comprehend the profoundly moral and rightly revered relation of accomplishment to reward. Your adventitious advantages have constantly made it possible for you to ignore this relation, and to substitute for it an arbitrary will. To me your wealth would be paralysis, a mockery and a spectre.”

He looked at her with head thrown back.

“And so you think our case hopeless?” Judith asked, pale and defiant.

“Since I cannot and dare not expect you to abandon your millions and share the fate of a play-actor, it does indeed seem hopeless.”

Judith’s face was quite colourless. “Let us go,” she said; “the others will remark our absence, and I dislike being gossiped about.”

Swiftly and silently they walked on. They came to a clearing and saw beneath a black rampart of clouds the throbbing, crimson disc of the sun. Judith stared into it with raging fury. For the first time her will had encountered a still stronger will. It was rage that filled her eyes with tears, rage that wrung from her discordant laughter. When Lorm looked at her in pained surprise, she turned away and bit her lip.

“I’m capable of doing it,” she said to herself in her rage. And the impulse hardened into a stubborn determination: “I will! I will!”

XII

When Christian arrived in Berlin with Amadeus Voss he found, quite as he had expected, many people and a great tumult about Eva. He could scarcely get to her. “I am tired, Eidolon,” she cried out, when she caught sight of him. “Take me away from everything.”

And again, when she had escaped the oppressive host of admirers, she said: “How good it is that you are here, Eidolon. I have waited for you with an ache in my heart. We’ll leave to-morrow.”

But the journey was postponed from day to day. They planned to live alone and in retirement at the Dutch watering place that was their immediate goal, but Christian had already met a dozen people who had ordered accommodations there, and so he doubted the seriousness of Eva’s intentions. People had become indispensable to her. When she was silent she wanted, at least, to hear the voices of others; when she was quiet she wanted movement about her.

When he stood before her the fragrance of her body penetrated him like a great fear. His blood flowed in such violent waves that his pulses lost the rhythm of their beating.

He had forgotten her face, the inimitable veracity of her gestures, her power of feeling and inspiring ecstasy, her whole powerful, delicate, flowerlike, radiant being. Everything seemed to yield to her, even the elements. When she appeared in the street, the sun shone more purely and the air was more temperate; and thus the wild turmoil about her was transformed into a steady and obedient tide.

Susan said to Christian: “We are to dance here, and have offers. But we don’t like the Prussians. They seem an arid folk, who save their money for soldiers and barracks. I haven’t seen a real face. All men and all women look alike. They may be worthy, no doubt they are; but they seem machine-made.”

“Eva herself is a German,” Christian rebuked the woman’s spiteful words.

“Bah, if a genius is cast forth from heaven and tumbles on the earth, it is blind and cannot choose its place. Where is Herr von Crammon?” she interrupted herself. “Why doesn’t he come to see us? And whom have you brought in his stead?” She poked out her chin toward Amadeus Voss, who stood timidly in a corner, and whose large spectacles made him look like an owl. “Who is that?”

Who is that? The same question appeared in the astonished faces of Wiguniewski and of the Marquis of Tavera. Amadeus was new to the world with a vengeance. The fixed expression on his features had something so silly at times, that Christian was ashamed of him and the others laughed.

Voss wandered about the streets, pushed himself into crowds, surveyed the exhibits behind the plate-glass windows of shops, stared into coffee-houses, bought newspapers and pamphlets, but found no way of calming his soul. All he could see was the face of the dancer, and the gestures with which she cut a fruit or greeted a friend or bowed or sat down in a chair or arose or smelled a flower, or the motions of her lids and lips and neck and shoulders and hips and legs. And he found all these things in her provocative and affected, and yet they had bitten into his brain as acid bites into metal.

One evening he entered Christian’s room, and his face was the colour of dust.

“Who really is Eva Sorel?” he asked, with a bitter rancour. “Where does she come from? To whom does she belong? What are we doing here with her? Tell me something about her. Enlighten me.” He threw himself into a chair, and stared at Christian.

When Christian, unprepared for this tempest of questions, made no answer, he went on: “You’ve put me into a new skin, but the old Adam writhes in it still. Is this a masquerade? If so, tell me at least what the masks represent. I seem to be disguised too, but badly. I expect you to improve my disguise.”

“You aren’t disguised any worse than the others,” Christian said, with a soothing smile.

Voss rested his head on his two hands. “So she’s a dancer, a dancer,” he murmured thoughtfully. “To my way of feeling there has always been something lewd about that word and what it means. How can it help arousing images that bring the blush to one’s cheek?” Suddenly he looked up, and asked with a piercing glance: “Is she your mistress?”

The blood left Christian’s face. “I think I understand what disturbs you so,” he said. “But now that you’ve gone with me, you must bear with me. I don’t know how long we shall stay with this crowd, and I can’t myself tell exactly why we are here. But you must not ask me about Eva Sorel. We must not discuss her either for praise or blame.”

Voss was silenced.

XIII

Christian, Amadeus, Bradshaw, Tavera, and Wiguniewski went by motor. Eva used the train.

But this way of travelling agreed with her as ill as any other. All night she lay sleepless in her crumpled silks, her head buried among pillows. Susan crouched by her, giving her perfume or a book or a glass of cold lemonade. There was a prickling in her limbs that would not let her rest, a weight on her bosom, an alternation of thought and fancy, of willing and the weariness of willing in her mind. The hum of the wheels on the rails cut into her nerves; the sable landscape, as it glided by, irritated her like a delusion that forever changed and melted. Malignity seemed to lurk in the fields; treacherous forests seemed to block the way; she saw haunted houses and terror-stricken men.

“What a torturer time is!” she whispered. “Oh, that it stood before me, and I could have it whipped.”

Susan bent nearer, and gazed at her attentively.

Suddenly she whispered tenderly: “What do you expect of him? What is the purpose of this new game? He’s the most banal of them all. I never heard him make a polished or a witty remark. Does he realize what you are? Not in his wildest dreams. His head is empty. Your art means about as much to him as the acrobatics of a circus dancer to some dreary shop-keeper. Nations are at your feet, and he grants you a supercilious smile. You have given the world a new kind of delight, and this German know-it-all is untouched and unchanged by it.”

Eva said: “If the North Sea is too sinister, we must seek a coast in the South.”

Susan grew excited: “One would like to yell into his ears: ‘Get on your knees! Pray!’ But he wouldn’t be shaken any more than the pillar of Vendôme. Is he ever shaken by anything? I described to him how we were adored in Russia, the ecstasy, the festivities, the outbursts of enthusiasm. He acted as if he were hearing a moderately interesting bit of daily news. I told him about the Grand Duke. No, don’t frown. I had to, or I would have choked. I described that chained barbarian, that iron soul dissolved! It’s certainly uncommon; it would make any heart beat faster. I tried to make him visualize the situation: fifty millions of trembling slaves and all, through his power, at your bidding. No poet could have been more impressive than I was. If you had heard me trying to penetrate his mind, you would have been astonished at my talent for sewing golden threads on sack cloth. It was all in vain. His breath came as regularly as the ticking of a clock. Once or twice he seemed to be startled. But it was due to a breeze or a mosquito.”

“I wonder whether the gowns from Paris have arrived at Heyst,” Eva said. The long oval of her face seemed to grow a trifle longer; her lips curled a little, and her teeth showed like pallid, freshly peeled almonds.

“Why did you refuse yourself to him?” Susan went on. “What we possess is part of our past, but a joy put off is a burden. Men are to be the rungs of your ladder—no more. Let them give you magical nights, but send them packing when the cock crows. How has he deserved a higher office? You’ve yielded to a whim, and made a grinning idol of him. Why did you summon him? I’m afraid you’re going to commit a folly.”

Eva did not answer. The tip of her tongue appeared between her lips, and she closed her eyes cunningly. Susan thought she understood those gestures, and said: “It’s true, he has the marvellous diamond for which you cried. But you have but to command, and they’ll trim your very shoes with such baubles.”

“When did you ever see me cry for a diamond?” Eva, asked indifferently. She raised herself up, and in her transparent, wavering, blossomy wrappings seemed like a spirit emerging from the dimness. “When did you ever see me cry for a diamond?” she asked again, and touched Susan’s shoulder.

“You told me so yourself.”

“Have you no better proof?” Eva laughed, and her laughter was her most sensuous form of expression, as her smile was her most spiritual.

Susan folded her hands and said resignedly: “Volvedme del otro lado, que de esto ya estoy tostado!” It is a Spanish ejaculation, and means: Lay me on the other side, for I have been toasted enough on this.

XIV

The house that Eva had taken was not very far from the beach. It was an old manor, which William of Orange had built, and which had belonged to the late Duchess of Leuchtenberg until a few years ago.

The rooms, built of mighty blocks of stone, soothed Eva. By day and night she heard the long-drawn thunder of the waves. Whenever she picked up a book, she dropped it again soon and listened.

She walked through those rooms, full of ancient furniture and dark portraits, glad to possess herself, and to await without torment him who came to her. She greeted him with half-closed eyes, and with the smile of one who has yielded herself wholly.

Susan practised on a piano with muted strings. When she had finished her task, she slunk away and remained hidden.

Christian and Amadeus Voss had taken lodgings in a neighbouring villa—Voss on the ground floor, Christian above. Since Christian neither asked questions nor detained him, Voss went out in the morning and returned in the evening or even late at night. He did not say where he had been, or what he had seen or experienced.

At breakfast on the third morning, he said to Christian: “It’s a thankless task to unchain a fellow like me. I breathe a different breath and sleep a different sleep. Somewhere my soul is ranging about, and I’m chasing it. I’ve got to catch it first, before I know how things are with me.”

Christian did not look up. “We’re invited to dine with Eva Sorel to-night,” he said.

Voss bowed ironically. “That invitation looks damnably like charity,” he said harshly. “I feel the resistance of those people to me, and their strangeness, in my very bones. What a superfluous comedy! What shall I do there? Nearly all of them talk French. I’m a provincial, a villager, and ridiculous. And that’s worse than being a murderer or thief. I may make up my mind to commit arson or murder, so as not to be ridiculous any more.” He opened his mouth as though to laugh, but uttered no sound.

“I’m surprised, Amadeus, that your thoughts always cling to that one point,” Christian said. “Do you really believe it to be of such decisive importance? No one cares whether you’re poor or rich. Since you appear in my company, no one questions your equality, or would be so vulgar as to question it. The feelings that you express originate in yourself, and you seem to take a kind of perverse joy in them. You like to torment yourself, and then revenge yourself on others. I hope you won’t take my frankness amiss.”

Amadeus Voss grinned. “Sometimes, Christian Wahnschaffe, I’d like to pat your head, as though I were your teacher, and say: You did that very well. Yes, it was wonderfully well done. And yet your little arrow went astray. To hit me, you must take better aim. It is true that the morbidness is deep in my soul, far too deep to be eradicated by a few inexpensive aphorisms. When this Russian prince or this Spanish legate shake hands with me, I feel as though I had forged cheques and would be discovered in a minute. When this lady passes by me, with her indescribable fragrance and the rustling of her garments, I grow dizzy, as though I dangled high over an abyss, and my whole soul writhes in its own humiliation and slavishness. It writhes and writhes, and I can’t help it. I was born that way. This is not my world, and cannot become mine. The under dogs must bleed to death, for the upper dogs consider that the order of the world. I belong to that lower kind. My place is with those who have the odour of decayed flesh, whom all avoid, who go about with an eternally festering wound. The law of my being ranges me with them. I have no power to change that, nor has any pleasant agreement. This is not my world, Wahnschaffe; and if you don’t want me to lose my reason and do some mischief, you had better take me out of it so soon as possible, or else send me away.”

Christian passed the tips of his fingers over his forehead. “Have patience, Amadeus. I believe it is not my world any longer. Give me but a little more time in which to straighten out my own thoughts.”

Voss’s eyes clung to Christian’s hands and lips. The words had been quietly, almost coolly uttered, yet there was a deep conflict in them and an expression that had power over Voss. “I cannot imagine a man leaving this woman, if once he has her favour,” he said, with a hovering malice on his lips, “unless she withdraws her favour.”

Christian could not restrain a gesture of aversion. “We’ll meet to-night then,” he said, and arose.

An hour later Amadeus Voss saw him and Eva on the beach. He was coming down the dunes, and saw them on the flat sands by the foam of the waves. He stopped, shaded his eyes with his hands, and gazed out over the ocean as though watching for a sail. The other two did not see him. They walked along in a rhythmic unity, as of bodies that have tested the harmony of their vibrations. After a while they, too, stopped and stood close together, and were defined like two dark, slender shafts against the iron grey of air and water.

Voss threw himself into the sparse, stiff grass, and buried his forehead in the moist sand. Thus he lay many hours.

Evening came. Its great event was to be the appearance of Eva with the diamond Ignifer in her hair. She wore it in an exquisitely wrought setting of platinum, and it shone above her head, radiant and solitary, like a ghostly flame.

She felt its presence in every throb of her heart. It was a part of her, at once her justification and her crown. It was no longer an adornment but a blazing and convincing symbol of herself.

For a while there was an almost awestruck silence. The lovely Beatrix Vanleer, a Belgian sculptress, cried out in her astonishment and admiration.

The smile of gentle intoxication faded from Eva’s face, and her eyes turned far in their sockets, and she saw Amadeus Voss, whose face was of a bluish pallor.

His mouth was half open like an imbecile’s, his head thrust brutally forward, his hanging arms twitched. He approached slowly, with eyes staring at the ineffable glow of the jewel. Those who stood on either side of him were frightened and made way. Eva turned her face aside, and stepped back two paces. Susan emerged beside her, and laid protective arms about her. At the same moment Christian went up to Voss, grasped his hand, and drew the quite obedient man aside.

Christian’s attitude and expression had something that calmed every one. As though nothing had happened, a vivid and twittering conversation arose.

Voss and Christian stood on the balcony of stone. Voss drank the salt sea air deep into his lungs. He asked hoarsely: “Was that Ignifer?”

Christian nodded. He listened to the sea. The waves thundered like falling fragments of rock.

“I have grasped the whole secret of your race,” Amadeus murmured, and the convulsion in his face melted under the influence of Christian’s presence. “I have understood both man and woman. In this diamond are frozen your tears and your shudderings, your voluptuousness and your darkness too. It is a bribe and an accursed delusion, a terrible fetish! How keenly aware am I now of your days and nights, Wahnschaffe, of all that is between you and her, since I have seen the gleam of this mineral which the Lord created out of the slime, even as He created me and you and her. That stone is without pain—earthly, and utterly without pain, burned pure and merciless. My God, my God, and think of me, of me!”

Christian did not understand this outburst, but it shook him to the soul. Its power swept aside the vexation which Voss’s shameless eloquence had aroused. He listened to the sea.

Voss pulled himself together. He went up to the balustrade, and said with unnatural self-control, “You counselled patience to-day. What was your purpose? It sounded as equivocal and as general as all you say to me. It is convenient to talk of patience. It is a luxury like any other luxury at your command, only less costly. There is no word, however, worthier of hatred or contempt. It is always false. Closely looked upon, it means cowardice and sloth. What have you in mind?”

Christian did not answer. Or, rather, he assumed having answered; and after a long while, and out of deep meditation, he asked: “Do you believe that it is of any use?”

“I don’t understand,” said Voss, and looked at him helplessly. “Use? To what end or how?”

Christian, however, did not enlighten him further.

Voss wanted to go home, but Christian begged him to stay, and so they went in and joined the others at dinner.

XV

When the dinner was over, the company returned to the drawing-room. The conversation began in French, but in deference to Mr. Bradshaw, who did not understand that language, changed to German.

The American directed the conversation toward the dying races of the New World, and the tragedy of their disappearance. Eva encouraged him, and he told of an experience he had had among the Navaho Indians.

The Navaho tribe had offered the longest resistance to Christianity and to its civilization. To subdue them the United States Government forbade the practice of the immemorial Yabe Chi dance, the most solemn ritual of their cult. The commissioner who was to convey this order, and on whose staff Mr. Bradshaw had been, yielded to the passionate entreaty of the tribal chief, and gave permission for a final celebration of the dance. At midnight, by the light of campfires and of pine torches, the brilliantly feathered and tattooed dancers and singers appeared. The singers sang songs which told of the fates of three heroes, who had been captured by a hostile tribe and freed by the god Ya. He taught them to ride the lightning; they fled into the cave of the Grizzly Bear, and thence into the realm of butterflies. The dances gave a plastic representation of these adventures. While the craggy mountains re-echoed the songs, and the contorted dances in the tawny glow rose to an ecstasy of despair, a terrific storm broke. Cascades of water poured from the sky and filled the dried river-beds with roaring torrents; the fires were extinguished; the medicine men prayed with uplifted arms; the dancers and singers, certain now that they had incurred the anger of their god, whose sacred ceremony they had consented to betray, hurled themselves in their wild pain into the turbulent waters, which carried their bodies far down into the plain.

When Mr. Bradshaw had ended, Eva said: “The gods are vengeful; even the gentlest will defend their seats.”

“That is a heathen view,” said Amadeus, in a sharp and challenging voice. “There are no gods. There are idols, to be sure, and these must be broken.” He looked defiantly about him, and added in a dragging tone: “For the Lord saith, no man can look upon me and live.”

Smiles met his outburst. Tavera had not understood, and turned to Wiguniewski, who whispered an explanation in French. Then the Spaniard smiled too, compassionately and maliciously.

Voss arose with a tormented look on his face. The merriment in those faces was like a bodily chastisement to him. From behind his glittering eye-glasses he directed a venomous glance toward Eva, and said in troubled tones: “In the same context of Scripture the Lord bids Israel hurl aside its adornments that He may see what He will do with them. The meaning is clear.”

“He cannot expiate the lust of the eye,” Christian thought, and avoided Eva’s glance.

Amadeus Voss left the company and the house. On the street he ran as though pursued, clasping his hands to his temples. He had pushed his derby hat far back. When he reached his room, he opened his box and drew out a package of letters. They were the stolen letters of the unknown woman F. He sat down by his lamp, and read with tense absorption and a burning forehead. It was not the first night that he had passed thus.

When Eva was alone with Christian, she asked: “Why did you bring that man with you?”

He laughed, and lifted her up in his arms, and carried her through many flights of rooms and out of light into darkness.

“The sea cries!” her lips said at his ear.

He prayed that all sounds might die out of the world except the thunder of the sea and that young voice at his ear. He prayed that those two might silence the disquiet that overcame him in her very embraces and made him, at the end of every ecstasy, yearn for its renewal.

That slender, passionate body throbbed toward him. Yet he heard the lamentation of an alien voice: What shall we do?

“Why did you bring this man?” Eva asked him far in the night, between sleep and sleep. “I cannot bear him. There is always sweat on his forehead. He comes from a sinister world.”

There was a bluish twilight in the room that came from the blue flame of a blue lamp, and a bluish darkness lay beyond the windows.

“Why don’t you answer me?” she urged, and raised herself, showing the pale face amid its wilderness of brown hair.

He had no answer for her. He feared the insufficiency of any explanation, as well as the replies that she would find.

“What is the meaning of it all? What ails you, dearest?” Eva drew him toward her, and clung to him, and kissed his eyes thirstily.

“I’ll ask him to avoid your presence,” said Christian. And suddenly he saw himself and Voss in the farm yard of Nettersheim, saw the kneeling men and maid servants, the old rusty lantern, the dead woman, and the carpenter who was measuring her for her coffin.

“Tell me what he means to you,” whispered Eva. “It seems to me suddenly as though you were gone. Where are you really? Tell me, dear friend.”

“You should have let me love you in those old days in Paris,” said Christian gently, and softly rested his cheek against her bosom, “in those days when Crammon and I came to you.”

“Speak, only speak,” Eva breathed, seeking to hide the fright in her heart.

Her eyes gleamed, and her skin was like luminous white satin. In the darkness her face had a spiritualized thinness; the restrained charm of her gestures mastered the hour, and her smile was deep and intricate of meaning, and everything about her was play and mirroring and raptness and unexpected magic. Christian looked upon her.

“Do you remember words that you once spoke to me?” he asked. “You said: ‘Love is an art like poetry or music, and he who does not understand that, finds no grace in love’s sight.’ Were not those your words?”

“Yes, they were. Speak to me, my darling!”

He held her in his arms, and the life of her body, its warmth, its blood that was conscious of him, and its vibration that was toward him, made speech a little easier. “You see,” he said thoughtfully, and caressed her hand, “I have only enjoyed women. Nothing more. I have been ignorant of that love which is an art. It was so easy. They adored me, and I took no pains. They put no hindrances on my path, and so my foot passed over them. Not one demanded a fulfilment of me. They were happy enough if I was but contented. But you, Eva, you’re not satisfied with me. You look at me searchingly and watch me; and your vigil continues even at those moments when one floats beyond thought and knowledge. And it is because you are not satisfied with me. Or is that an error, a deception?”

“It is so very late,” said Eva, and, leaning her head back upon the pillows, she closed her eyes. She listened to the perished echo of her own voice, and the oppression of her heart almost robbed her of breath.

XVI

It was in another night. They had been jesting and telling each other amusing stories, and at last they had grown weary.

Suddenly in the darkness outside of the window Christian had a vision of his father and of the dog Freia; and his father had the tread of a lonely man. Never had Christian seen loneliness so visibly embodied. The dog was his only companion. He had sought for another friend, but there had been none to go with him.

“How is that possible?” Christian thought.

His senses were lost in a strange drowsiness, even while he held Eva’s beautiful body, which was as smooth and cool as ivory. And in this drowsiness visions emerged of his brother, his sister, his mother, and about each of them was that great loneliness and desolation.

“How is that possible?” Christian thought. “Their lives are thronged with people.”

But he answered himself, and said: “Is not your own life likewise thronged with people to suffocation, and do you not also feel that same loneliness and desolateness?”