CONVERSATIONS IN THE NIGHT (continued 3)

“And he continued to help you? And you stayed with him?” Christian asked tensely.

Karen went on: “He was a painter, a real one, an artist. His home was in Jutland; he was lean and very fair. In those days my hair was just the colour of his. He had an aunt living in Königsberg, and he was glad to stay with her a while, because he was hard up. But when I was lying in the charity home to which they’d removed me, he got the news from Copenhagen that he’d been given a stipend by the state of two thousand talers for two years. He asked me if I wouldn’t like to go with him. He meant to go to Belgium to a famous painter who was living somewhere on the French frontier. He wanted to study with him, like others who were already there. Well, he said he was fond of me, and I said that was all very nice, and asked him if he knew the sort of woman I was. He said he didn’t want to know anything, and all I’d have to do was to have confidence in him. So I thought to myself, ‘Here’s one that’s got a heart,’ and I grew to be fond of him too. I’d never cared for any man yet; he was the first, and he was the last too. And so I went away with him. The great painter lived in a French village, and we moved to a little town called Wassigny not far from there. Larsen rented a little house. Every morning he’d ride over to the village on his bicycle; if the weather was bad he walked. It was half an hour’s walk. In the evening he’d come back, and we’d have a nice little dinner and tea and chat. And he’d get real enthusiastic, and tell me how he loved painting here—the trees and the fields and the peasants and the miners and the river and the sky, and I don’t know what all. I didn’t understand that, of course; but what I understood was that I felt as I’d never felt before in life. I couldn’t believe it when I woke up in the morning; I couldn’t believe it when the neighbours smiled at me. Near the village there was a pool with water lilies, and I used to go often and often and look at it. I’d never seen anything like that before, and I couldn’t rightly believe in it. I knew that couldn’t last; it wasn’t possible that it could last long. And sure enough, in August, Adam took to his bed one day. He had a fever, and it got worse and worse; and in six days he was dead. That was the end of everything. That was the end of everything.”

Her hands kept clutching her hair, and for the third time she said: “That was the end of everything.”

“And then?” Christian whispered.

She looked at him, and every muscle in her face quivered: “Then? Oh, the things that happened then ... then...!”

“Couldn’t you somehow find a way of life without ... without ...” Christian stammered, frightened by the blind, white rage in her face. She clenched her fists and cried so loud that her words re-echoed from the walls: “Oh, then! The things that happened then!”

Her whole body quivered. “Don’t touch me,” she said with a nervous start.

Christian had not touched her at all.

“Go on now,” she said. “I’m tired. I’ve got to sleep.” She got up.

He stood at one door, Karen at the opposite one. She lowered her head, and said in a toneless voice: “It’s crazy—me talking to you this way—so familiar and all.” And her face showed both hatred and fear.

When she was alone beside her bed, she lost herself in the contemplation of the picture of the woman with the pearls. Once she turned around, and looked wildly into the other room, to the spot where Christian had stood.

And Christian could not forget her words and the way she had said: “Oh, then....”

XXIX

Weikhardt had been working at his Descent from the Cross for two years, yet he could not finish the picture. No effort, no absorption, no lonely contemplation, no spiritual seeking would bring him the expression on the face of Christ.

He could not create that expression—the compassion and the pain.

He had scratched the face from the canvas a hundred times; he had tried many models; he had spent hours and days studying the old masters; he had made hundreds and hundreds of sketches; he had tried and tried. It was all in vain; he could not create it.

In the spring he had married Helen Falkenhaus, the girl of whom he had once spoken to Imhof. Their married life was a quiet one. Their means were small, and they had to be content with very little. Helen bore every privation with great sweetness. Her piety, which often had a touch of expectant passion, helped her to ease her husband of the consciousness of his burdens and responsibilities.

She had an understanding of art, a high and fine perception of its qualities. He showed her his sketches, and she thought many of them very beautiful. At times he seemed to her to have come near the vision of which she too had a glimpse; but she was forced to admit that he never quite embodied it. He attained compassion and pain, but not the compassion and the pain of Christ.

Just then there arrived in Munich the Polish countess for whom he had copied the cycle of Luini. One evening she gave an entertainment to which Weikhardt was invited, and among the crowd he caught sight of Sybil Scharnitzer. He had seen her years ago in the studio of a fashionable painter. She had been surrounded by admirers and flatterers, and he had carried away only a general impression of her beauty.

This time she inspired him with a strange and magical excitement. He knew at once that he needed her, that between her and his work there was some mystic bond. He approached her and held her by his vivid eloquence. Carefully he revealed his purpose. Absorbing her mien, her gesture, that look of hers that went to the very soul, he saw clearly what he expected of her and what she could give him. In this eye, when it was wide open, he saw that more than mortal look which had hitherto been but dim in his mind. He begged her to sit for him. She thought a little and consented.

She came. He asked her to bare her neck and shoulders, and to swathe her bust in a black shawl of Venetian lace. He stood at his easel, and for ten minutes he gazed at her steadily. Scarcely did his lids stir. Then he took a piece of charcoal, and drew the outlines of the head of Christ. Sybil was astonished. At the end of an hour he thanked her, and that was the first time he had spoken. He begged her to come again. Quite as amazed as she had been at first, she pointed at the canvas. But he smiled secretively, told her that his technical approach was a roundabout one, and asked her to have patience.

When she left, Helen came in. He had told her of his plan, and his confidence had prevailed over her doubts. She knew the history of Sybil Scharnitzer, and had observed her that evening at the countess’s with the cold scrutiny which one woman gives another. She looked at the charcoal sketch, and was silent for many minutes. At last, under his questioning look, casting down her own eyes, she asked: “Did any model ever appear so disguised?”

Weikhardt had recovered his usual, phlegmatic temper. “Very few people will understand my excursion behind the scenes—painters least of all. I can see them crossing themselves and making venomous comments.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Helen. “But what do you mean by an excursion behind the scenes?”

“I mean the scenes set by God.”

Helen thought this over, but his words hurt her. She said: “I could understand that perfectly if Sybil’s face were genuine; but you yourself have told me who and what she is. You know that it is a beautiful screen, with emptiness behind it. And in this vain deception you think you will find what is deepest in the world—the Saviour, your vision of the Saviour? Isn’t it as though you had delivered yourself into the power of falseness itself?”

“No,” Weikhardt answered, “it is not. You don’t see far enough. Things cohere together far more closely than you think. One body, one element, one stream—each is more interwoven with all things than you realize. The soulless emptiness in Sybil Scharnitzer’s breast is the reflection of some light, and to me personally it is a concrete thing. If a form deceives me, I am still grateful to it, for it forces me to create its content from within myself; and the creative dream is the greater thing. Can a blade of grass be a lie? Or a shell by the shore? And if I were strong enough and guiltless enough and devout enough, it would be given me to find in every blade and shell the compassion and the pain of Christ. There is an element of chance in these things, or else some dispensation.”

Helen did not contradict him.

XXX

That word of Karen’s, that desperate “then!” gave Christian no rest.

He had worked hard all day. He had not left the Physiological Institute until seven o’clock. Then he had eaten a frugal evening meal, and had gone home on foot. Thoroughly tired, he had thrown himself on the sofa, and fallen asleep.

When he woke up it was dark night. The house was quite silent. He lit a light, and looked at his watch; it pointed to half-past eleven. He considered for a little, and then determined to go across the courtyard to see Karen. He was sure to find her awake; sometimes she kept her lamp burning until two o’clock. For some time she had been doing embroidery work; she said she wanted to earn some money. So far she had not succeeded, but she had taken no great pains to sell her work.

He crossed the dark court, and mounted the dark stairs. He stopped at the open hall window of the third floor. The night was sultry. On one side, through a canyon between the black and lifeless brick walls of two houses, he saw smoke stacks project into the darkness. They came from the earth itself and overtopped the roofs. They were tipped with lightning-rods, and from some of them came thick fumes shot with the quiver of flames. Below was blackness, empty land hedged in by wooden fences, rough beams piled in heaps, low isolated huts, sand-pits and mortar-pits, and darkness and silence over all.

To the left of the stairs was the door to the Hofmanns’ flat. When he was letting himself into Karen’s rooms, he still gazed back at that door. He thought he was being called thither, but it was a delusion.

Karen was in bed. “Why, what do you want so late?” she grumbled. “I’d like a little quiet sometime.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said courteously. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I thought we might chat for a little while.”

“I’d like to know the good of all this talking, day and night.” She was annoyed, and even her laugh showed it.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You must tell me what happened to you after Adam Larsen’s death,” he said. “I can’t get rid of the impression of your words: the things that happened then.... Of course, I can imagine in a general way. I have insight enough into life now to make a guess....”

She interrupted him with a note of contempt in her voice. “No, you can’t guess nothing and you can’t imagine nothing. I’d bet my last rag on that.”

“That’s all the more reason why I’d like you to tell me about it,” he urged her. “You have never done so.”

There was an hostility in her silence, and it suddenly became clear to him that some stubborn instinct in her refused to initiate him wholly into her world. All that he had done for her had not sufficed to conquer the distrust of him and his kind that was bred into her very bone. The realization of this fact made him feel sad and helpless.

“I went to bed at seven to-day,” she said, blinking her eyes. “I wasn’t feeling a bit well. I believe I’m going to be sick.”

Christian looked at her, and he could not keep the disquietude and urgency out of his eyes.

Karen closed her lids. “Nothing but torment, torment, torment,” she moaned.

Christian was frightened. “No, no. Forgive me. I’ll go.”

“You might as well stay.” She laid her cheek on her folded hands, and drew up her limbs under the covers. A common but not disagreeable odour came from her hair and skin.

Wearily and idly she talked into the pillow. “It’s the common, ordinary thing, always the same. Women that tell you something else are liars. Of course, a good many will invent long romances to seem interesting, but I can’t do that. What do I care about it? No, it’s always the same story, common and horrible and filthy from A to Z. Oh, yes, you might as well stay now and sit down. I’ll tell you what I can. If you’ve just got to know, I might as well tell you, but it’s hard. I don’t know where to begin. There is no beginning. There’s nothing definite,—no romance nor nothing.”

Christian sat down again. “When Adam Larsen died,” he said, “was there no path for you? Was there no one among his friends or relatives who paid any attention to you or helped you?”

She laughed a sarcastic laugh. “Hell! You’re all off there. His friends didn’t hardly know about me. His brother came to the funeral, but I didn’t dare so much as speak to him. He was one of the righteous kind, with a golden watch-chain and a tip of five sous for the servants. And I was in a strange country, and didn’t know the language, and had to see about getting away. I had thirty francs in cash, and the question was: where could I go? I tried to get work once or twice. But what sort of work was I to do? I hadn’t learned nothing. Was I to go as a servant, and black boots and scrub floors? No, thank you! I was used to something different now, and I thought I could get along somehow. Anyhow I didn’t give a damn what became of me; I didn’t matter so much. In Aachen I took a job as a waitress. Nice occupation! I can’t give you an idea of that—the tiredness in your legs, the abuse you got to take! For food they give you the scraps; the bed ain’t fit for a dog. What they expect of you makes you crazy mad.

“Well, when you live that way you’re open to all sorts of swindling talk. I went into a house; stayed there four months, and then went into another. I had debts, too. Suddenly you’re in debt, you can’t figure out why. Board and lodging and clothes—they charge you three times over for everything: you got to pay for the air you breathe. All you think of is how to get out, or something awful will happen. Well, then maybe some fellow comes along in high feather, throws money out of the windows, pays for you, and gets you out. You go with him, and on the third morning somebody knocks at the door. Who’s there? Police! Your man’s a thief, and you have the devil’s own time clearing yourself of complicity. What now? You have to have a roof and a bed, and some one to talk to; you want a warm bite and a cool drink. You’ve got the mark of the trade on you, and no one trusts you. You’re shoved and you’re pulled, and you go down and down, day by day, step by step. You hardly notice it, and suddenly you’re at the bottom.”

She curled herself up more compactly under the covers, and continued in a blunter tone. “It’s easy to say that—at the bottom; but really there’s no such thing. There’s a lower depth under every depth; and there ain’t no words to tell you how it is down there. No one can imagine it who hasn’t been there. No seeing from the outside and no knowing will make people realize it. You live in a place for which they charge you five times as much as is fair and decent. You’re common property, and everybody gets out of you all he can. You don’t care if the place is elegant or like a pigsty. It gives you the horrors to open the door of it. It ain’t yours; it’s everybody’s. It’s the place where everybody sort of sheds his filth, and you know them all and remember them all. It does you no good to go to bed and try to sleep. Another day is bound to come. There are the same greasy public houses and the same faces, always the same crowd. And then there’s the street—what you call your territory. That’s where you go by night. You know every window and crossing and lantern: you stare and turn and ogle and grin, and open your umbrella if it rains, and walk and stand around and keep a sharp eye on the police, and make up to any man if he’s got torn shoes or sports a fur ulster. And then you promise him God knows what; and all the time you’d like to scratch his heart out if he walks off, or spit in his face if he condescends to you. There it is! That’s the main thing. Pain and worry—Lord, all people have them. But what you get to find out about men there—oh, I tell you!”

Her last words were a cry again, a great cry, such as that other cry which Christian had not been able to forget. He sat very straight, and looked past the lamp to a certain spot on the wall.

Karen seemed, as she went on, to be addressing the floor. “Then there’s the lodging-house keeper, who steals and cheats. There’s the owner of the house, who acts by daylight as if he wanted to kick you, and comes slinking to your door at twilight. There’s the shop-keeper, who overcharges you, and acts as if he was doing you a favour by giving you rotten stuff for your good money. There’s the policeman that grudges you every step you take. If you don’t slip him a bribe, he pulls you in and you go to jail. There’s the innkeeper; maybe you owe him a bit. He torments you if you got no brass, and wheedles and flatters when you have a little. I don’t mention your own man; but you got to have one if you want to or not, otherwise you’ve got no protection. When he’s sent to the penitentiary, you got to get another. They’re all handy with their knives, but Mesecke was the worst of the lot. But I tell you what’s hell—hell like nothing else in the whole, wide world—that’s your business and your customers. It don’t matter if they’re elegant or common, young or old, skinflints or spendthrifts—when they get to you they’re no better than carrion on a dung-heap. There you see what hypocrisy is and rascality; there you see the dirty souls as they are, with their terror and their lies and their lusts. Everything comes out. It comes out, I tell you, because they ain’t ashamed to let it. They don’t have to be. You get to see human beings without shame, and what you see is the miserable, hideous flesh. Would you like to know how it is? Drink of a cess-pool and you’ll know! It don’t matter if it’s a man that beats his wife when she’s with child, or lets his children starve, or a student or an officer that’s gone to the dogs, or a frightened parson, or a merchant with a huge belly—it’s the same, the same—man without shame and the hideous flesh.”

She laughed with tormented scorn, and went on: “I met Mesecke when I was discharged from the hospital. I had no one then. Before that I’d been in jail three weeks on account of a scamp named Max. He was bad enough, but he was a sweet innocent compared to Mesecke. A young man happened to turn up in the café, a college student or something like that. He treated us to one bottle of champagne after another, day in and day out. You knew right away that there was something rotten about it. And he always wanted me, just me, and he made the money fly. So one day Mesecke took him aside, and said to him right out: ‘That money comes out of your father’s safe. You stole it.’ The boy owned right up, and his knees just shook. So Mesecke got his claws into him, and showed him how to get more. And he and a skunk named Woldemar promised to take him to an opium den that was, they told him, just like heaven on earth. That night, when the boy was with me, he began to cry and whine like everything. I felt sorry for him, ’cause I knew he’d come to a bad end; and I told him so, and told him straight and rough. Then he emptied his pockets, and I’d never seen that much money in my life; and it was all stolen money. I got kind of dizzy, and told him to take it and put it back; but he wanted me to have it and buy myself something for it. I trembled all over, and told him for God’s sake to take it home; but he cried and fell on his knees and hugged me, and suddenly Mesecke was in the room. He’d been hidden and heard everything, and I hadn’t had an idea. But the boy’s face turned as grey as a piece of pumice stone; he looked at me and at Mesecke, and of course he thought it was a plot. I was glad when Mesecke crashed his fist into my temple, so that the air seemed to be full of fire and blood, and then kicked me into a corner. That must have made the boy see I was innocent. Then Mesecke took hold of Adalbert—that was his name—and went off with him. Adalbert said nothing, and just followed. He didn’t turn up the next day nor the next nor the day after that, so I asked Mesecke: ‘What did you do to Adalbert?’ And he said: ‘I put him on board a ship that was going overseas.’ Yes, I thought to myself, that’s a likely story. So I asked him again; and this time he said if I didn’t hold my tongue he’d scatter my bones for me. Well, I kept still. Maybe Adalbert did take passage on a ship; it’s possible. We didn’t ever hear no more about him. And I didn’t care so much, for there was something else every day. I had to be careful of my own skin, and get through the night somehow, and through the day. And it was always the same, always the same.”

She sat up, and took hold of Christian’s arm with an iron grip. Her eyes sparkled, and she hissed out through clenched teeth: “But I didn’t really know it. When you’re in the thick of it you don’t know. You don’t feel that it’s no life for a human being; and you don’t want to see, and you don’t dare to know that you’re damned and in a burning hell! Why did you take me out of it? Why did things have to happen this way?”

Christian did not answer. He heard the air roar past his ears.

After a while she let his arm go, or, rather, she thrust it from her, and he arose. She flung herself back on her pillows. Christian thought: “It has been in vain.” The dread that he had felt turned to despair. In vain! He heard the words in the air about him: “In vain, in vain, in vain!”

Then, in a clear voice that he had never heard her use before, Karen said: “I’d like to have your mother’s rope of pearls.”

“What?” Christian said. It seemed to him that he must have misunderstood her.

And in the same, almost childlike voice, Karen repeated: “Your mother’s pearls—that’s what I’d like.” She was talking nonsense, and she knew it. Not for a moment did she think it conceivable that her desire could be fulfilled.

Christian approached the bed. “What made you think of that?” he whispered. “What do you mean by that? What?”

“I’ve never wished for anything so much,” Karen said in the same clear voice. She was lying very still now. “Never, never. At least, I’d love to see them once—see how things like that look. I’d like to hold them, touch them, just once. They don’t seem real. Go to her and ask for them. Go and say: ‘Karen wants so much to see your pearls.’ Maybe she’ll lend them to you.” She laughed half madly. “Maybe she’d let you have them for a while. It seems to me that then”—she opened her eyes wide, and there was a new flame in them—“that then things might be different between us.”

“Who told you of them?” Christian asked as though in a dream. “Who spoke to you of my mother’s pearls?”

She opened the drawer of the little table beside her bed, and took out the photograph. Christian reached out for it eagerly, although she was going to give it to him. “Voss gave it to me,” she said.

Christian looked at the picture and quietly put it away.

“Yes, that’s what I’d like,” Karen said again; and there was a wildness in her face, and a childlikeness and a pathos and a greed, and a certain defiance which was also like a child’s. And her smile was wild, and her laughter. “Oh, there’s nothing else I’d want then. I would taste the pearls with my tongue and bury them in my flesh; and I’d let no one know and show them to no one. Yes, that’s what I want, only that—your mother’s pearls, even if it’s for just a little while.”

Nothing could so have pierced the soul of Christian as this wild stammering and this wild begging. He stood by the window, gazing into the night, and said slowly and reflectively: “Very well, you shall have them.”

Karen did not answer. She stretched herself out and closed her eyes. She didn’t take his words seriously. When he left her, there was a silent mockery in her mind—of him, of herself.

But the next morning Christian took the underground railway to the Anhalter Station, and bought a third-class ticket to Frankfort. In his hand he carried a small travelling bag.

XXXI

“Come on then, let’s see what you know!” Niels Heinrich said to his mother, the fortune-teller Engelschall.

They were in her inner sanctum. Attached to the ceiling by a black cord hung a stuffed bat with outstretched wings. Dark, glowing glass-beads had been set in its head. On the table, which was covered with cards, lay a death’s head.

It was Sunday night, and Niels Heinrich came from his favourite pub. He only stopped here on his way to a suburban dancing-hall. He wore a black suit and a blue and white linen waistcoat. He had pushed his derby hat so far to the back of his head that one saw the whole parting of his hair. In his left arm-pit he held a thin, little stick. He see-sawed on the chair on which he had slouched himself down.

“Come on now, trot out your tricks,” and he flung a five-mark piece on the table. In his dissipated eyes there was a shimmer as of some mineral and an indeterminate lustfulness.

The widow Engelschall was always afraid of him. She shuffled her cards. “You seem to be well fixed, my lad,” she fawned on him. “That’s right. Cut! And now let’s see what you let yourself in for.”

Niels Heinrich see-sawed on his chair. For many days his throat had been on fire. He was sick of his very teeth and hands. He wanted to grasp something, and hold it and crush it in his fist—something smooth and warm, something that had life and begged for life. He hated all things else, all hours, all ways.

“A ten and a ace o’ diamonds,” he heard his mother say, “the king o’ clubs and the jack o’ spades—that don’t mean nothing good. Then another ten and a grey woman”—consternation was on her face—“you ain’t going to do nothing awful, boy?”

“Aw, don’t get crazy, ol’ woman,” Niels Heinrich snarled at her. “You’d make a dog laugh.” He frowned, and said with assumed indifference, “Look and see if the cards say something about a Jew wench.”

The widow Engelschall shook her head in astonishment. “No, my boy, nothing like that.” She turned the cards again. “No. Another ten and a queen o’ hearts—that might mean a money order. Lord love us—three more queens. You always was a great one for the women. And that reminds me that red Hetty asked after you to-day. She wanted to know if you’d come to the Pit to-night.”

Niels Heinrich answered: “Gee, I just kicked her out a day or two ago. Her memory must be frozen. Gee!” He leaned back and see-sawed again. “Aw, well, if you can’t tell me nothing pleasant, I’ll take back my fiver.”

“It’s coming, my boy, it’s coming,” the old woman said soothingly. She shuffled the cards again. “Have patience. We’ll get that business with the Jew wench yet.”

Niels Heinrich stared into emptiness. Wherever he looked he had seen the same thing for days and days—a young, smooth neck, two young, smooth shoulders, two young, smooth breasts; and all these were strange, of a strange race, and filled with a strange sweet blood. And he felt that if he could not grasp these, grasp them and smell and taste, he would die the death of a dog. He got up and forced himself to a careless gesture. “You can stop,” he said. “It’s all a damn’ swindle. You can keep the tip too. I don’t give a damn.” He passed his stick across the cards, jumbled them together, and went out.

The widow Engelschall, left alone, shook her head. The ambition of her calling stirred in her. She shuffled and laid down the cards anew. “We’ll get it yet,” she murmured, “we’ll get it yet....”