RUTH AND JOHANNA (continued 2)

Suddenly Heinzen dropped the raised arm. He seemed confused. He moved his head and shoulders, and said wearily: “I can do nothing to-day. There’s somebody here who takes my power from me. I can do nothing.”

His words made a deep impression, and all eyes sought the disturber. They glided from one to another. Heads turned and pupils shifted. Before a minute had passed the eyes of all the people in the room were fixed on Christian. Even Mother Heinzen had stopped paring the potatoes and had arisen and was staring at him.

Christian had heard Heinzen’s words. What did those glances demand of him? What was their meaning? What did they desire? Were they angry? Was there something in him or about him that affronted or disturbed them? Yet they seemed timid and wondering rather than hostile. That old seal of his silence, his equivocal little smile, hovered about his lips. He looked up as though asking for help, and his eyes met Ruth’s; and in her eyes he saw that radiant understanding, that silvery, spiritual love that animated her wholly and at all times.

The mother of the child uttered a cry. “How do you mean—takes your power? Pull yourself together, old man, for God’s sake!”

“I can’t say nothing different,” murmured Heinzen. “There’s somebody here that takes my power away.”

“And has he got the power?” the Salvationist cried shrilly.

“I don’t know,” Heinzen answered, in an oppressed manner. “Maybe, but I don’t know.”

Slowly Christian went up to Ruth, who was still holding the child in her arms, and bent over and gazed at the apparently lifeless form. At once the epileptic rigour relaxed, flecks of foam appeared on the child’s lips, and it began to weep softly.

The emotion that passed through the room was like a great sigh.

But noises from without broke in upon the silence here. Laughter and curses had been heard a while before. Now the sounds came nearer, and Niels Heinrich and Red Hetty appeared in the doorway.

He tugged the woman into the room. She reeled drunkenly, waved her arms, and laughed shrilly. Pushed forward by Niels Heinrich, she stretched out her fingers for some support; but the people whom she touched drew back in vexation. Niels Heinrich caught her by the shoulders, and shoved her at Joachim Heinzen. He chuckled as he did so, and the noise he made was like the clucking of a hen. Joachim was scared, and gazed stupidly and angrily at the wild looking creature. She wound her arms about his neck and clung to him and babbled drunkenly. Her black, wide-brimmed hat, with its huge green feather, slipped grotesquely to the back of her head. Joachim tried to shake her off, fixing his half-crazed eyes on Ruth. But as the woman clung the more tenaciously, he struck her a blow full in the breast, so that she fell to the floor with a moan and lay there in an absurd posture.

People hurried to and fro protesting. A few bent over the drunken woman, who at once began to hiccough and babble again. Others threatened Joachim with their fists. Mother Heinzen tried to calm the tumult, Ruth sought refuge near Christian and took his hand. Then an uncanny thing happened. Joachim Heinzen grasped her arm, and pulled her roughly toward him. Perhaps it was a weak-minded jealousy that impelled him, or else a brutal and stupid attempt to convince her that he cared nothing for Red Hetty and was guiltless of the incident. With glassy eyes he stared at Ruth; a vicious grin was on his face. Ruth gave a soft cry, held up her hand to shield herself, and struggled gently. Her lids were lowered. Her attitude went to Christian’s heart. He went up to the fellow, and said very quietly: “Let her go.” Joachim hesitated. “Let her go,” Christian repeated, without raising his voice. Joachim obeyed and snorted.

Niels Heinrich seemed to be immensely entertained by it all. He urged those about him to watch what was going on, laughed his clucking laugh, and sought to encourage the simpleton. “Go ahead, Joachim,” he cried. “You got to take what you want!” But while he laughed and goaded Joachim on, his brows remained knit, and the upper part of his face seemed rigid with some horror. He had recently grown a little, pointed, goat-like beard which had a reddish colour. When he spoke or laughed it moved stiffly up and down, and gave his head the appearance of a marionette’s.

When he saw that Christian had restrained Joachim’s impudent roughness, he came and stood before him, and said in an insolent, knife-like voice: “Mornin’. I should think you’d know me.”

“I do,” Christian answered courteously.

“An’ I said good mornin’ to you!” Niels Heinrich said, with an unconcealed jeer. His little beard twitched. The horror seemed to spread over his whole face.

“Good evening,” said Christian courteously.

Niels Heinrich gritted his teeth. “Mornin’!” he yelled, livid with rage. All those present gave a start and became silent.

Christian looked at him quietly. Then he turned quite deliberately to Ruth, and said: “Let us go, little Ruth.” With the bow of a man of the world he let her precede him. He also bowed courteously to those about him. He might have been leaving a drawing-room.

Niels Heinrich, bent far forward, stared after him. He clenched his fist, and went through the pantomime of pulling a cork-screw out of a bottle.

XI

“Were you frightened?” Christian asked, when they were in the street.

“A little,” Ruth answered. She smiled, but she was still trembling.

They did not turn homeward. They walked in the opposite direction and passed through many streets. Christian walked swiftly, and Ruth had difficulty in keeping up with him. A sharp wind blew, and her shabby little cloak fluttered.

“Are you cold?” Christian asked. She said “No.” A cloud of yellow leaves whirled up in front of them; and Christian strode on and on.

“The stars are coming out,” he said, and looked fleetingly at the sky.

They came to a wide, desolate street. A line of arc-lamps seemed to stretch into infinity, but the houses looked empty.

They walked on and on.

“Say something,” Ruth begged. “Tell me something about yourself. Just this once. Just to-day.”

“There’s little good to be told about myself,” he said into the wind.

“Whether it’s good or not, I’d like to know it.”

“But what?”

“Anything.”

“I must think. I have a poor memory for my own experiences.” But even as he spoke there emerged the memory of a night which he had thought quite faded. What had happened then seemed menacing now, and seemed in some mysterious way related to Ruth; and the need of confession came upon him like hunger.

“Don’t search in your mind,” said Ruth. “Tell what happens to occur to you.”

He walked more slowly. Poor in words as he was, he strove first to gather the bare facts in his mind.

Ruth smiled and urged him. “Just start. The first word is the hardest.”

“Yes, that is true,” he agreed.

“Did the thing you’re thinking of happen long ago?”

“You are right,” he said. “I am thinking of something definite. You have clear perceptions.” He was surprised. “It’s four years ago. I was motoring with two friends in the south of Italy.” He hesitated. The words were so lame. But the lovely compulsion of Ruth’s glances drew them from their hiding-places, and they gradually came forth more willingly.

On a beautiful day of May he and his friends had reached the city of Acquapendente in the Abruzzi. They had really intended to proceed to Viterbo, but the little mountain town pleased his friends, and they persuaded him to stay. He stopped in his story. “I seemed always to want to race from one spot to another,” he said. His friends kept on urging him, but when they stopped in front of the inn, it seemed so dirty that he hated to think of passing the night there. At that moment there came down the steps of the near-by church a girl of such majestic loveliness as he had never seen before; and that vision determined him to stay. The innkeeper, when he was asked who the girl was, pronounced her name full of respect. She was the daughter of a stone-mason named Pratti. Christian bade the innkeeper get ready a supper and invite Angiolina Pratti to it. The innkeeper refused. Thereupon Christian bade him invite the girl’s father, and this the man agreed to do. His friends sought to dissuade Christian, telling him that the women of this land were shy and proud, and that their favours were not easily won. He would, at least, have to go about the business more delicately than he was doing. Christian laughed at them. They reasoned and argued, so that finally he grew stubborn, and declared to them that he would bring about what they held to be quite impossible—that he would accomplish it without artfulness or adroitness or exertion, but simply through his knowledge of the character of these people.

The girl’s father came to wait upon the foreign gentlemen. He had white hair and a white beard and a noble demeanour. Christian approached and addressed him. He said that it would give him and his friends pleasure if the Signorina Pratti would sup with them. Pratti wrinkled his forehead and expressed his astonishment. He had not, he said, the honour of the gentleman’s acquaintance. Christian looked sharply into his eyes, and asked for how much money he would, that evening at eight, conduct his daughter Angiolina naked into their room and to their table. Pratti stepped back and gasped. His eyes rolled in his head, and Christian’s friends were frightened. Christian said to the old man: “We are perfectly decent. You may depend on our discretion. We desire merely to admire the girl’s beauty.” With wildly raised arms Pratti started to rush at him. But he was prepared for that, and said: “Will five thousand suffice?” The Italian stopped. “Or ten thousand?” And he took ten bank notes of a thousand lire each out of his wallet. The Italian grew pale and tottered. “Twelve thousand?” Christian asked. He saw that the sum represented an inconceivable treasure to the old man; in a long life of toil he had never had so much. The perception increased Christian’s madness, and he offered fifteen thousand. Pratti opened his lips, and sighed: “Oh, Signore.” The sound should have touched him, Christian said to Ruth. But nothing touched him in those days; all that he cared for was to have his will. The man took the money, and went away falteringly.

That evening the young men took their places at the charmingly arranged table in some suspense. The innkeeper had brought forth old silver vessels and cut-glass goblets. Roses were placed in vases of copper, and thick candles had been lit. The room was like one in a castle. Eight o’clock came, and then a quarter past eight. The conversation lagged; they gazed at the door. Christian had commanded the innkeeper not to appear until he was summoned, so that the promised discretion should be observed. At last, at half-past eight, old Pratti appeared carrying his daughter in his arms. He had wrapped her in a cloak. He beckoned the young men to close the doors. When they had done so, he pulled the cloak away and they beheld the naked body of the beautiful girl. Her hands and feet were fettered. Her father placed her on the empty chair beside Christian. Her eyes were closed; she was asleep. But it was no natural sleep; she had been drugged, probably with the juice of poppies. Pratti bowed and left.

The three friends looked at that lovely form, the gently inclined head, the rosy face, the streaming hair. But their triumph and arrogant delight had died within them. One went into the bed-room, fetched a coverlet, and covered the girl with it; and Christian was grateful to him for the action. Hastily they ate a few bites; the wine remained untouched. Then they went down, paid their reckoning, summoned their chauffeur, and drove through the night along the road to Rome. No one spoke during the drive; none of them ever mentioned Angiolina Pratti later. But Christian found it difficult to escape the picture in his mind—the fettered, drugged girl alone in the room with the roses and the yellow candle-light. But at last he forgot, for so many other images crowded the old one out. “But just now,” he said, “as we left the house, that image was as clear to me as it was that day in Acquapendente. I had to keep thinking of it, I don’t know why.”

“How strange,” Ruth whispered.

They walked on and on.

“Where are we going?” Ruth asked.

Christian looked at her. “What is so strange? That I told you about it? It really seemed superfluous, quite as though you knew it without being told.”

“Yes,” she admitted shyly. “I often seem to stand within your soul as within a flame.”

“It is brave of you to say a thing like that.” He disliked swelling words, but this thing moved him.

“You must not be so ashamed,” she whispered.

He answered: “If I could talk like other people, much would be spared me.”

“Spared you? Would you be a niggard of yourself? Then it would no longer be you. That’s not the question. One should be a spendthrift of oneself—give oneself without stint or measure.”

“Where have you learned to make such judgments, Ruth? To see and feel and know, and to have the courage of your vision?”

“I’d like to tell you about something too,” said Ruth.

“Yes, tell me something about yourself.”

“About myself? I don’t think I can do that. But I will tell you about some one to whom I felt very close. It was a sister; no bodily sister, for I haven’t one. The reason I said ‘strange’ just now was because this Angiolina Pratti seemed like a sister to me too. Suddenly there seemed to be three sisters: Angiolina and I and the one I shall tell you about. It is a rather sad story. At least, it is at first. Afterwards it is no longer quite so sad. Oh, life is so wonderful and so deeply moving and so rich and so full of power!”

“Ruth, little Ruth,” said Christian.

Then she told her story. “There was a little girl, a child. She lived with her parents at Slonsk, far in the eastern part of the country. Five years have gone since it all happened. Her father was very poor; he was assistant bookkeeper in a cotton mill, but he was so poorly paid that he could hardly scrape together the rent of their wretched dwelling. His wife had been ailing for long. Sorrow over their failure and suffering had robbed her of strength, and in the winter she died. These people were the only Jews in Slonsk, and in order to bury the body they had to take it to the nearest Jewish cemetery at Inowraztlaw. Since no railroad connects the towns, they had to use a wagon. So at seven o’clock in the morning—it was toward the end of December—the wagon came, and the coffin with the mother’s body was lifted on it. The father and the brother and the little girl followed on foot. The girl was eleven years old and the boy eight and a half. Thick flakes of snow fell, and soon the road had disappeared, and you could tell it only from the line of trees on either hand.

“It was still dark when they started, and even when day came there was only a murky twilight. The girl was unbearably sad, and her sadness increased at every step. When day had fully come, a dim, misty day, the crows flew thither from all directions. It may be that the body in the coffin brought them. But the girl had never seen so many; they seemed to pour from the sky. On great black wings they flew back and forth, and croaked uncannily through the icy, murky silence. And the girl’s sadness became so great that she wished to die. She lagged behind a little, and neither her father nor her brother noticed it in the snow-flurries, nor yet the man who led the horses. So she crossed a field to a wood, and there she sat down and made up her mind to die. Soon her senses were numbed.

“But an old peasant, who had been gathering wood, came from among the trees, and when he saw her and perceived that she did not move and was asleep, he first looked at her a while, and then he started to strip her body of all she had, her cloak, her shoes, her dress, her stockings, and even her shift; for the peasants are very poor thereabouts. She could not resist. She felt what was happening only as from the depth of a dream. So the peasant made a little bundle of her things, and left her naked body there as dead and limped away. He marched along for a while, and came upon the wagon with the coffin and the two men and the boy. The wagon had stopped, for the child had been missed. On the edge of the road a crucifix had been set up, and that was the first thing that gave the peasant pause. It did not seem to him to be chance that Christ was standing there beside the wagon with the coffin. He confessed that later. Also he saw the hundreds of crows that croaked wildly and hungrily, and he was frightened. Then he saw how desperate the father was, and that he was preparing to turn back and gazed in all directions and tried to halloo through the mist.

“The peasant’s conscience began to burn. He fell on his knees before the cross and prayed. The father asked him whether he had seen the child. He pointed and wanted to run away, and he did run across the fields. But something within him forced him to run to the very spot where he had robbed and abandoned the girl. He lifted her in his arms, wrapped his coat about her, and held her to his breast. The father had followed and received the child, and did not ask why she was naked and bare. They rubbed her skin so long with snow till she was warm and opened her eyes. Then the peasant kissed her forehead, and made the sign of the cross over the Jewish child. The father rebuked him for that, but the peasant said: ‘Forgive me, brother,’ and he kissed his hand. From that time on no sadness of the old kind ever came to the girl again. She had only a very faint recollection of the moment when the peasant wrapped her in his coat and held her to his breast. But I believe that she was born again in that moment, born better and stronger than she had been before.”

“Ruth, little Ruth,” said Christian.

“And perhaps Angiolina, that other sister of mine, also awakened to a happier life from that hour of dimness and of death.”

Christian did not answer. He felt as though a light were walking by his side.

At a corner of that desolate street they came upon a very brilliant show-window. They went up to it and stopped as by a common impulse. The shop had long been closed, but in the window was draped a magnificent coat of Russian sable, a symbol of wealth and warmth and adornment. Christian turned to Ruth, and saw the threadbare little cloak in which she shivered. And he saw that she was poor. Then it came into his mind that he too was poor, poor like her, and irrevocably so. He smiled, for the fact seemed significant to him, and he felt a joy that was secret and almost ecstatic.

XII

Johanna Schöntag’s first visit to Voss passed off in a very commonplace manner. Trying to let him forget that she was a young lady made her more and more conventional. To hide her embarrassment, she was half capricious and half critical in mood. It amused her that there was a rocking-chair in the room. “It reminds one of one’s grandmother,” she said, “and gives one an anachronistic and homelike feeling.” Then she sat down in it and rocked, took candied fruits from her little beaded bag and crushed them on her tongue, which gave her a comical and pouting expression.

On the table there was a tea-urn, two cups, and plates with pastry. Voss’s demeanour seemed to say that narrow means did not prevent one from entertaining properly. It amused Johanna. She thought to herself: “If he brings out a photograph album with pictures of himself as a child, I shall giggle right into his face.” And at the same time her heart throbbed with quite other fears.

Voss spoke of his loneliness. He alluded to experiences of his own that had made him shy. There were people, he said, who seemed fated to suffer shipwreck in all matters where their hearts were involved. They had to grow calluses of the soul. He was busy doing that. He had never had a friend, though the illusion of friendship often enough. To realize the futility of some great longing was bitterer than to discover the insufficiency of a human being.

Johanna’s secret fears grew as she heard him wax sentimental. She said: “This rocking-chair is the nicest thing I’ve come across for long. It gives me a queer, pleasant little sea-sickness. Are you sure the people under you won’t believe that you’ve become a father and are rocking your offspring to sleep?” She laughed and left the chair. Then she drank tea and nibbled at a piece of pastry, and quite suddenly said good-bye and left him.

Voss gritted his teeth. His hand was as empty as before. He took a piece of soft cake, formed it into the rude image of a girl, and pierced it with the pin that Christian had given him. The room still held the faint aroma of a woman’s body and garments and clothes and hair. He rocked the empty chair, and talked to an invisible person who was leaning back in it and coquettishly withdrew from his glance. For a while he worked. Then his work wearied him, and his thoughts were busy laying snares.

All he did and thought showed the sincerity of his feeling of loneliness. His soul exuded poisonous fumes.

He opened a drawer of his desk, and took out the letters of the unknown lady who had signed herself F. He read them through, and then took pen and paper and began to copy them. He copied them word for word, but whenever Christian’s name occurred he substituted dots for it. There were twenty-three of these letters, and when he had finished dawn was rising.

He slept a few hours, and then wrote to Johanna as follows: “I propose this riddle to you: Who is F. and who is the thief and robber who took French leave with such a treasure of enthusiasm and devotion? Perhaps it is only a product of my fancy or a by-product of my morbid imagination. I leave you to guess. Has there been an attempt here to substitute a magnificent invention for the unromantic sobriety of real life, or did this rare and miraculous thing really form a part of human experience? It seems to me that something in the modulation and tone-colour, something subtle but unmistakable, points to the latter conclusion. Where is the man who could invent such pain and such delight? Who would have the courage to represent the life of the senses as so blended of shamelessness and of a primal innocence? Compared to such an one our most vaunted poets would be the merest tyros. I have, of course, never admired poets inordinately. They falsify appearances, and, in the last analysis, they are but rationalists in whose hands our dreams become transparent and two-dimensional. There is a verbal veraciousness which is as penetrating as the glow of living flesh. Here is an example of it. It is a miracle to be adored, a thing of envy to all hungry souls. It is life itself, and since it is life, where are the living two that begot it? She, the marvellous author of the letters, is probably dead—consumed in the glow of her own soul. Her very shadow bears the stigmata of doom. But her ecstatic pen paints the picture of him whom she loved. I know him, we both know him. He stands at the gate of the penitents, and offers for old debts a payment that no one wants. To love as she loved is like worship; to be so loved and not to value it, to let its evidence rot in the dust of a library—that is a sin which nothing can wipe out. If one whom God himself pampered spews the food of angels out of his mouth, nothing but carrion remains for the step-children of fate. And yet we know: not wholly hopeless is the cry of the blood’s need. Come to me soon; I have much to ask you and to say to you. I was like stone yesterday; the happiness of your presence drugged me. I shall be waiting for you. Each day I shall be at home at five o’clock and wait for you for three hours. Is there not some compulsion in that? When would you like to see Wahnschaffe? I shall tell him and arrange the meeting.”

Johanna felt the same consternation this time that she had felt months before when Voss had written her in Christian’s stead. First she thought he had perpetrated a hoax. But when she read the letters she was convinced of their authenticity and deeply moved. Voss’s indications left no doubt as to their origin; again he had stolen another’s secret in order to make use of it. His motives seemed inexplicable to her. But she promised herself not to see him again, whatever happened. The very thought of him made her freeze. The morbid and heated hatred of Christian which he always manifested made her reconsider. At moments she nursed the flattering delusion that she might be the means of saving Christian from a great danger. And yet, somehow, the man himself exerted the stronger lure. There was a will in him! A strange temptation—to feel the compulsion of an alien will! Whither would it lead?

Thus when, against her determination and her better instinct, she entered the house on Ansbacher Street once more, she said to herself: “O Rumpelstiltzkin, I’m afraid you’re rushing into destruction. But run on and be destroyed. Then, at least, something will have happened.”

She carried the letters back to him. She asked coldly what had been his intention in sending them. She feigned not to hear his answer that his letter had explained his intention. She refused to sit down. Voss tried to find a subject of conversation; he walked up and down before her like a sentinel. In her mind she passed caustic comments on him; she observed the negligence of his clothes, and thought his way of swinging on his heel and suddenly rubbing his hands absurd. Everything about him seemed silly and comical to her. She mocked at him to herself: “A schoolmaster who has gone a little crazy.”

He told her he had made up his mind to move to Zehlendorf. Out there he had found a peaceful attic room in a villa. He felt the need of trees and fields, at least of their odour. In the morning he would ride in to attend lectures and in the afternoon return. Even if this plan could not be carried out daily, yet he would have the consolation of knowing that he had a refuge beyond this stony pandemonium which tasted of maltreated minds and of ink. He would move in two weeks.

“All the better.” The words slipped out before Johanna was aware.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, with a cattish look. Then he laughed, and his laughter sounded like the clashing of shards. “Ah,” he said, and stopped, “do you really think the distance will make any difference? You will come to me, I assure you; and you will come not only when I summon you, but of your own impulse. So please don’t cling to a delusive hope.”

Johanna had no answer ready. His insolence shook her self-control. Voss laughed again, and took no notice of the impression made by his words. He spoke of the progress of his studies: he had worked for two semesters, and was as far advanced as others at the end of six. The professors were saying excellent things of him. He considered all that part of medical knowledge that could be directly acquired mere child’s play. No man of normal mind and decent industry should need more than eighteen months to master it. After that, to be sure, the paths divided. On one were artisans, dilettanti, mere professionals, and charlatans; on the other were great brains and spirits, pioneers and illustrious discoverers. At first surgery had attracted him, but that attraction had been brief. It was the merest butchery. He would refuse to depend wholly on knife and saw, and at all crucial moments of practice to submit to the dictates of a professional diagnostician, with nothing left him but whether the butcher would turn out to be an executioner or not. What attracted him inordinately was psychiatry. In it mystery was heaped on mystery. Unexplored and undiscovered countries stretched out there—great epidemics of the soul, illnesses of the sexes, deep-rooted maladies of whole nations, a ghostly chase between heaven and earth, new proofs of psychical bonds that stretched from millennium to millennium as well as from man to man, the discovery of whose nature would make the whole structure of science totter.

Johanna was repelled. One couldn’t go much further in the way of boasting. His voice, which constantly passed from falsetto to bass, like a young bird thudding awkwardly between two walls, gave her a physical pain. She murmured a polite formula of agreement, and gave him her hand in farewell. Even this she hated to do.

“Stay!” he said commandingly.

She threw back her head and looked at him in astonishment.

Now he begged. “Do stay! You always leave in such a mood that the minute you are outside I’m tempted to hang myself.”

Johanna changed colour and wrinkled her childlike forehead. “Will you kindly tell me what you want of me?”

“That is a question of remarkably—shall we call it innocent frankness? What I want would seem to be sufficiently clear. Or can you accuse me of a lack of plain speaking? Am I a very deft and crafty wooer? I should rather expect you to reprove me for my impetuousness; that would be reasonable. But I cannot play at games; I have no skill in sinuous approaches. I cannot symbolize my feelings through flowers, nor have I learned to set springs of words or feign a bait upon the waters or make sweetish speeches. If I could do these things I might be more certain of reaching my goal. But I have no time; my time is limited, Fräulein Johanna. My life is crystallizing to a catastrophic point. Its great decision is at hand!”

“Your frankness leaves nothing to be desired,” Johanna replied, and looked coolly and firmly into his eyes. She waited for a few seconds; then she asked, with a forced smile, concealing both her dread and her curiosity: “And why am I the arbiter in that great decision? What qualities have attracted your attention toward me? To what virtue or to what vice do I owe such an honour?” Awaiting his reply, she all but closed her eyes; and that gave her face a melting charm. She knew the danger of such coquettishness, but the abysses lured her.

But to Amadeus Voss she was exactly what she seemed to be. He gazed ecstatically at her face, and asked: “May I be frank?”

“You frighten me. Can one be more so than you have already been?”

“You see—it is your race. It is, I do not deny it, the same race which I have always.... Well, it’s speaking mildly to say that I’ve always hated the Jews. Merely to scent a Jew was always to me like having an explosive stuck into my nerves. An immemorial crime is symbolized there, an ancient guilt; the Crucified One sighs across lands and ages to my ear. My blood rebels against the noblest of your race. It may be that I am the tool of an age-long lie; it may be that he who lacks the love that makes a priest acquires the stupidity and intolerance that mark the parson; it may be that our apparent enemies shall prove at last to be our brothers, and that Cain and Abel will clasp hands on Judgment Day. But it is part of my very being to nourish hatred when the roots of my life under the earth beyond my reach are crippled by the insolent growth of alien seedlings. And when one proposes to be my comrade and my neighbour, and yet meets me with the reserve of an alien soul—am I not to feel it and not to pay him back in the same coin? That is the way I’ve always felt. I never before knew a Jewish woman; and I cannot say that my feeling has undergone any essential change. Had it done so, I should suffer less. Oh, you are quite right to despise me on account of what I am saying; and, indeed, I am prepared to hear your contempt often. That is a part of my suffering. The first time I saw you I thought at once of Jephtha’s daughter. She was, you remember, sacrificed by her father, because she happened to be the first to welcome him on his return home; for he had made a vow, and his daughter came to meet him with cymbals and with dancing. It is a profound notion—that notion of sacrificing the first one who comes to bid you welcome. And she must have been sweet and dainty—the daughter of Jephtha. She is to-day—experienced in dreams; rash where it is a matter of mere dreams; spoiled, incapable of any deed, submerging all enthusiasm and initiative in an exquisite yearning. The long wealth gathered by her ancestors has made her faint-hearted. She loves music and all that flatters the senses—delicate textures and beautiful words. She loves also the things that arouse and sting, but they must neither burden nor bind her. She loves the shiver of fear and of small intoxications; she loves to be tempted, to challenge fate, to put her little hand into the tiger’s cage. But everything within her is delicate and in transition toward something—blossoming or decay. She is sensitive, without resistance, weary, and so full of subtle knowledge and various gropings that each desire in her negates another. Inbreeding has curdled her blood, and even when she laughs her face is touched with pain. And one day her father Jephtha, Judge in Israel, returns, home and sacrifices her. Oh, I am sure he went mad after that.”

Johanna’s face was as pale as death. “That, I suppose, was a lesson in your admired science of psychiatry?” She forced herself to mockery.

Voss did not answer.

“Good-bye, you learned man.” She walked to the door.

Voss followed her. “When are you coming again?” he asked softly.

She shook her head.

“When are you coming again?”

“Don’t torment me.”

“Wahnschaffe will be here the day after to-morrow. Will you come?”

“I don’t know.”

“Johanna, will you come?” He stood before her with uplifted hands, and the muscles of his cheeks and temples twitched.

“I don’t know.” She went out.

But he knew that she would come.

XIII

Between the acts of a dress rehearsal Lorm and Emanuel Herbst walked up and down in the foyer, discussing Lorm’s rôle. “Hold yourself a little more in reserve.” Herbst talked slightly through his nose. “And at the climax of the second act I expected a somewhat stronger emphasis. There’s nothing else to criticize.”

“Very well,” said Lorm drily. “I’ll stick on a little more grease-paint.”

Many of the invited guests also walked through the curved passage way. Admiring glances followed Lorm. A girl approached him determinedly. She had evidently struggled with herself. She handed him a bunch of carnations, and silently withdrew, frightened by her own temerity.

“How nice of you!” Lorm exclaimed with kindliness, and stuck his nose into the flowers.

“Well, you old reveller, do the broken hearts taste as well as ever?” Herbst asked mockingly. “One is served at breakfast, too, isn’t it? Or more than one? It makes an old codger like me feel sad.”

“You can get too much of a good thing,” said Lorm. “The poor dears go to excesses. Yes, early in the morning one will be trying to bribe the house attendants. When my chauffeur appears they flutter about him. Many of them know how I’ve planned my day and turn up at unexpected places—in an art dealer’s shop, at my photographer’s studio. I’ve been told of one poor girl who spent nights promenading in front of the house. When I was on tour there was one who followed me from town to town. And then there are all those unhappy letters. The amount of feeling that goes to waste, the confessions that are made, the intricate problems that are presented—you would be astonished. And all make the same naïve presumptions. I shouldn’t care very greatly if this whole business didn’t have its serious aspect. All these young creatures put their capital into an undertaking doomed to failure. It’s bound to revenge itself. Clever people say that it doesn’t matter what the young are enthusiastic about, if only they’re enthusiastic about something. It isn’t true. Decent young people shouldn’t rave about an actor. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to belittle our profession; it has its definite merits. I don’t want to display any false modesty about myself either. I know precisely what I am. The point is that those young people do not. They want me to be what I only represent. That is the height of absurdity. No, decent young people shouldn’t adore an actor who is only a caricature of a hero.”

“Well, well, well,” said Emanuel Herbst, in a tone of soothing irony. “You’re too severe and too pessimistic. I know a few rather authoritative persons who sincerely assign to you quite a high position among mortals. I’ll not mention immortals in deference to your mood. And in your really lucid moments you’re proud of your position, which is quite as it should be. What attitude does your wife take to your attacks of hypochondria? Doesn’t she scold you?”

“It seems to me,” Lorm said impassively, “that Judith has arrived on the other shore of her disillusion. In this dispute she would hardly take your side. My convictions have fallen on fertile ground in her case.”

Emanuel Herbst rocked his head from side to side and protruded his nether lip. Lorm’s tone made him anxious. “How is she anyhow?” he asked. “I haven’t seen her for a long time. I heard she was ill.”

“It’s hard to say how she is,” Lorm answered. “Ill? No, she wasn’t ill, although she did spend a great deal of time in bed. There are a few middle-class women who’ve formed a kind of court about her. They give her all their time, and she’s trained them marvellously. She says she’s losing her slenderness, so she got a fashionable physician to prescribe a hunger cure. She follows the directions religiously. But my house is in splendid condition. Tip-top. Why shouldn’t it be? It’s cleaned to the last corner twice a week. The cuisine is excellent, and I’ve got some rather nice things in my cellar. You must come and try them.”

“All right, old man, you can count on me,” said Emanuel Herbst. But his anxiety for his friend had grown with each word that Lorm had uttered. He knew that coldness which hid the most quivering sensitiveness, that princely smoothness beneath which great wounds were bleeding, that indeterminate element which was half spiritual malady, half an ascetic impulse. He was afraid of the destruction wrought by a worm in a noble fruit.

The signal sounded. A new act began. From the stage that voice of steel exerted its compelling resonance once more.

XIV

Johanna did come.

She had waited until it was quite late, in order to avoid waiting for Christian alone with Voss. When, after, all, she found only Voss, she could not conceal her contempt. Her vexation made her face look old and peaked.

The weather was cold and wet. She sat down near the oven and put her hands against the tiles. She did not take off her coat. It was an ample, fur-trimmed garment with large buttons. She looked in it like a thin and hiding child. Nor did she raise her veil, which extended rather tautly from her wide-brimmed hat to her chin and accentuated the whiteness of her skin.

“You lied to me,” she said harshly. “It was mere bait. You knew he wouldn’t be here.”

Voss answered: “What you have just said relegates me pretty clearly to a mere means to an end. What do you expect of a meeting with him anyhow? What is it to serve? Is it to revive memories or give the opportunity for an explanation? No, I know you’re not fond of explanations. You like tension, provided your way of escape is ready for you. Very clever. I am to be at once the opportunity and the way of escape. Very clever. But why don’t you simply go to him? Because, of course, you don’t want to assume the psychical obligation implied in such a step. It might look as though you meant something; you are not sure how it would be interpreted. Your cowardice is almost funny. When it’s convenient, you’re a sensitive plant; when it’s not, you’re quite capable of putting your heel on some defenceless neck.”

“This is intolerable,” Johanna cried, and arose. “Don’t you know that my being here compromises me more, especially in my own eyes, than anything else I could do?”

Voss was frightened. “Calm yourself,” he said, and touched her arm. Recoiling from his touch she sank back into her chair. “Calm yourself,” Voss repeated. “He promised definitely to be here; but he has many errands nowadays and has to meet many people and is constantly on the way from one place to another.”

Johanna tormented herself. She was an experienced expert at it. She was glad when things went ill with her, when her hopes failed, when she was insulted or misunderstood. She was glad when the silk stocking into which she slipped her foot tore, when ink dropped on her paper, when she missed a train or found something for which she had paid generously prove worthless. It was a bitter, mischievous gladness, such as one feels at the absurd downfall of a hated rival.

It was this feeling that made her smile now. “I’m a charming creature, am I not?” she said, with a bizarre look and gesture.

Voss was disconcerted.

“Tell me about him,” she said, half-defiantly, half-resignedly, and again pressed her hands against the tiles.

Amadeus looked upon her hands, which were bluish with cold. “You are cold,” he murmured. “You are always cold.”

“Yes, I’m always cold. There’s not enough sunshine for me.”

“People say that foundlings never get really warm; but you are no foundling. I imagine, on the contrary, that your childhood was a hotbed of carefulness. Undoubtedly the rooms were overheated, and hot-water bottles were put into your bed at night, and tonics were prescribed. Yet your soul froze all the more as the attempt was made to reach it through material things. You are no foundling in the body; your bourgeois descent is clear. But your soul is probably a foundling soul. There are such souls. They flutter yearningly up and down in space between heaven and hell, and their fate depends on whether an angel or a demon assigns them their earthly tabernacle. Most of them get into the wrong bodies. They are so anxious for a mortal form that they usually fall into the hands of a demon to whom they are tributary all their lives. Such are the foundling souls.”

“Fantastic nonsense!” Johanna said. “You had better tell me something about him.”

“About him? As I told you before, he is concerned in many different things. The woman Karen is ill, and will probably not get better. It is her rightful reward; vice demands the payment of its debt. You can find the sword foretold for such in Scripture. Well, he nurses her; he watches with her at night. Then there is a Jewish girl who lives in the house. He goes about with her to all sorts of people—a kind of suburban saint. Only he doesn’t preach; preaching is not among his gifts. He is dumb, and that is a blessing. I have never sat so near to a woman,” he went on in precisely the same tone, so as to prevent her interrupting him, “never at least to one who makes me feel that her very existence is a good. And one is so damnably in need of something pure, so filled with terrible longing for a human eye—to know none other regards you as she does. Almighty God, to lose for once the curse of my isolation! What is it that I ask? It is so little! Only not to sicken of my rage and famish of my thirst; once to lay my head into a woman’s lap and feel nothing but the beloved night; and when the silence falls, to feel a hand in my hair and hear a word, a breath, and so to be redeemed!” His voice had grown softer and softer, and at last sank to a whisper.

“Don’t ... don’t ... don’t,” Johanna implored him, almost as softly. “Tell me about him,” she went on hastily. “Does he really live in complete poverty? One hears so many things. Last week I was invited by some people, and the company talked of nothing else. Impudent and stupid as these parvenus of yesterday always are, they fairly outdid themselves. They joked about him and pitied his family, or even suggested that the whole thing was an imposture. My gorge rose. But I ask you this one thing: Why haven’t I heard from you a single cordial word about him? Why nothing but venom and slander? You must know him. It is unthinkable that you really entertain the opinion of him by which you try to add to your self-importance in my eyes, and no doubt in the eyes of others. I assure you that there isn’t the remotest chance of our really becoming friends, unless you’re candid with me on this point.”

For a long time Voss was silent. First he passed his handkerchief across his damp forehead. Then, bending far forward, he leaned his chin upon his folded hands, and looked upward through his glasses as though he were listening. “Friendship,” he murmured in a sarcastic tone. “Friendship. I call that pouring water into the wine before the grapes have gone to the winepress.” After a pause he spoke again. “I am not called to be his judge. At the beginning of our acquaintance it was given me to behold him with astonishment upon his pedestal. I kneeled in the mud and lifted my eyes as to a demigod. Then I kindled a little fire, and there was considerable smoke. But I would be a liar to assert that he did not stir me to the innermost soul. At times he so mastered my evil and common instincts that when I was left alone I cast myself down and wept. But love surrounded him and hate surrounded me. Wherever he appeared love burst into bloom; whatever I touched turned upon me in hatred. Light and beauty and open hearts were about him; blackness and humiliation and blocked paths were my portion. All good spirits guarded him; I was fighting Satan, and out of my darkness crying to God, who cast me off. Ay, cast me off and rejected me, and set a mark of shame upon me, and pursued me ever more cruelly, as my self-humiliation deepened and my penitence grew tenser and my roots emerged more energetically from the earth. Then it came to pass that he recognized a brother in me. We passed an unforgettable night, and unforgettable words were exchanged between us. But love remained about him, and about me hate. He took my flame from me, and carried it to men; and love was about him, and about me was hate. He made a beggar of me, and gave me hundreds of thousands; and love was about him, and about me was hate. Do you think me so dull that I cannot measure his deeds or their heavy weight and cost? The consciousness of them steals into my sleep, and makes it terrible as an open wound, so that I lie as among stinging nettles without heaven or aspiration. Who would be so accursed a traitor to himself that he would neither hear nor see the truth when it roars like a flame of fire? But how about that brother in the dust? The contrast was easier to bear while he dwelt amid the splendours of the world. Now he goes and renounces, lives amid want and stench, nurses a woman of the streets and mingles with outcasts; and what is the result? Love grows about him like a mountain. It is necessary to have experienced and to have seen it. He comes into rooms out there, and all glances cling to him and touch him tenderly; and each creature seems fairer and better to itself while he is there. Is it magic? But that mountain of love crushes me where I lie.”

Again he dried his forehead. Johanna observed him attentively; at last an insight into his nature dawned in her.

“It is they who take the last step who are the chosen,” Amadeus Voss continued. “Those like myself stop at the step before the last, and that is our purgatory. Perhaps Judas Iscariot could have done what the Master did, but the Master preceded him, and that doomed him to crime. He was alone. That is the solution of his mystery: he was alone. Just now, before you came, I was reading in a book the story of the marriage of Saint Francis to the Lady Poverty. Do you know it? ‘Woe to him who is alone,’ it says there. ‘When he falls, he has no one to lift him up.’”

The book lay on the table. He took it up, and said: “Saint Francis had left the city, and met two old men. He asked them whether they could tell him the abode of Lady Poverty. Let me read you what the two old men answered.”

He read aloud: “We have been here for a long time, and we have often seen her passing along this road. Sometimes she was accompanied by many, and often she returned alone without any companions, naked, devoid of dress and adornment, and surrounded only by a little cloud. And she wept very bitterly, and said: ‘The sons of my mother have fought against me.’ And we made answer: ‘Have patience, for those who are good love thee.’ And now we say to thee: Climb that high mountain among the holy hills which God has given her as a dwelling-place because He loves it more than all the dwelling-places of Jacob. The giants cannot approach its paths nor the eagles reach its peak. If thou wouldst go to her, strip off thy costly garments, and lay down every burden and every occasion of sin. For if thou art not stripped of these things, thou wilt never rise to her who dwells upon so great a height. But since she is kind of heart, they who love her see her without trouble, and they who seek her find her with ease. Think of her, brother, for they who yield themselves to her are safe. But take with thee faithful companions, with whom thou mayest take counsel when thou climbest the mountain, and who may be thy helpers. For woe to him who is alone. When he falls he has no one to lift him up.”

His manner of reading tormented Johanna. There was a fanaticism in it from which her soul, attuned to semitones, shrank.

“Woe to him who is alone,” said Voss. He kneeled down before Johanna. All his limbs trembled. “Johanna,” he implored her, “give me your hand, only your hand, and have pity on me.”

Her will failed her. More in consternation than obedience, she gave him her hand, which he kissed with a devouring passion. What he did seemed blasphemous and desperate after his words and his reading; but she dared not withdraw her hand.

Her watchful ear caught a noise. “Some one is coming,” she whispered faintly. Voss arose. There was a knock at the door, and Christian entered.

He greeted them in a friendly way. His calm contrasted almost resonantly with Amadeus’s wild distraction, for Voss could not control himself wholly. While Christian sat down at the table with the lamplight full upon his face, and looked now at Johanna, now at Voss, the latter walked excitedly up and down, and said: “We have been talking about Saint Francis, Fräulein Johanna and I.”

Christian looked his surprise.

“I know nothing of him,” he said. “All I remember is that once in Paris, at Eva Sorel’s, some verses about him were read. Every one was delighted, but I didn’t like the poem. I have forgotten why, but I recall that Eva was very angry.” He smiled. “Why did you two talk about Saint Francis?”

“We were talking of his poverty,” replied Voss, “and of his marriage to the Lady Poverty, as the legend has it. And we agreed that such things must not be translated into actual life, for the result would be falsehood and misunderstanding....”

“We agreed about nothing,” Johanna interrupted him drily. “I am no support for any one’s opinions.”

“Never mind,” said Voss, somewhat depressed. “It is a vision, a vision born of the sufferings of religious souls. That poverty, that sacred poverty is unthinkable except upon a Christian foundation. Whoever would dare to attempt it, and to turn backward the overwhelming stream of life in a distorted world, amid distorted conditions, where poverty means dirt and crime and degradation—such an one would only create evil and challenge humanity itself.”

“That may be correct,” said Christian. “But one must do what one considers right.”

“It’s cheap enough to take refuge in the purely personal when general questions are discussed,” Voss said rancorously.

Johanna rose to say good-bye, and Christian prepared himself to follow her, since it was on her account that he had come. Voss said he would walk with them as far as Nollendorf Square. There he left them.

“It is hard for us to talk,” said Christian. “There is much for which I should ask you to forgive me, dear Johanna.”

“Oh,” said Johanna, “it doesn’t matter about me. I’ve conquered that. Unless I probe too deeply, even the pain is gone.”

“And how do you live?”

“As best I can.”

“You don’t mind my calling you Johanna still, do you? Won’t you come to see me some day? I’m usually at home in the evening. Then we could sit together and talk.”

“Yes, I’ll come,” said Johanna, who felt her own embarrassment yielding before Christian’s frank and simple tone.

While she was walking beside him and hearing and answering his direct and simple questions, all that had happened in the past seemed a matter of course, and the present seemed harmonious enough. But when she was alone again she was as vexed with herself as ever; the nearest goal seemed as irrational as the farthest, and the world and life shut in by dreariness.

Two days later she went to Christian’s dwelling. The wife of the night watchman Gisevius ushered her into Christian’s room. Shivering and oppressed by the room, in which she could not imagine him, she waited for over an hour. Frau Gisevius advised her to look in at Karen Engelschall’s or the Hofmanns’ flat. To this she could not make up her mind. “I’ll come again,” she said.

When she stepped out into the street she saw Amadeus Voss. He greeted her without words, and his expression seemed to take it for granted that they had agreed to meet here. He walked on at her side.

“I love you, Johanna,” he said.

She did not answer, nor turn her eyes toward him. She walked more swiftly, then more slowly, then more swiftly again.

“I love you, Johanna,” said Amadeus Voss, and his teeth rattled.

XV

On the alabaster mantelshelf candles were burning in the silver Renaissance candlesticks. The more salient light of the burning logs reached only far enough to envelop the figures of Eva and of Cornelius Ermelang in its glow. It did not penetrate as far as the porphyry columns or the gold of the ceiling. A dim, red flicker danced in the tall mirrors, and the purple damask curtains before the huge windows, which shut in the room more solemnly than the great doors, absorbed the remnants of light without reflection.

The tea-gown of white lace which the dancer wore—experts declared each square inch of it to have the value of a provincial governor’s annual pay—was vivid as a fantastic pastel on the side turned to the fire.

“You have been very kind to me,” said Eva. “After you had been here so many times in vain, I was afraid you would leave without having seen me. But Susan probably told you how my days are spent. Men and happenings whirl through them so that I find it hard to retain a consciousness of my own self. Thus friends become estranged, and the faces about me change and I hardly notice it. A mad life!”

“Yet you summoned me in spite of that,” Ermelang whispered, “and I have the happiness of being with you at last. Now I have attained everything that my stay in Russia promised. How shall I thank you? I have only my poor words.” He looked at her with emotion, with a kind of ecstasy in his watery blue eyes. He had a habit of repeating the formula concerning his poor words; but despite the artifices of his speech, his feeling was genuine. Indeed, there was always a trifle too much feeling, too much soulfulness in his speech. Sometimes the impression arose that he was in reality not quite so deeply stirred, and that, if necessary, he could well limit his emotional expansion.

“What would one not do to please a poet?” Eva said with a courteous gesture. “It is pure selfishness too. I would have the image of me made perpetual in your mind. Both ancient and modern tyrants assure us that the only man whom they strove to please is the poet.”

Ermelang said: “A being like you exists in so elemental a fashion that any image is as negligible in comparison as the shadow of a thing when the sun is at its zenith.”

“You are subtle. Yet images persist. I have so great a faith in your vision that I should like you to tell me whether I am really so changed as those friends assert who knew me in my Parisian days. I laugh at them; but in my laughter there is a little rebellion of my vanity and a little fear of withering and fading. Don’t say anything; a contradiction would be trivial. Tell me, above all, how you came to be travelling in Russia, and what you have seen and heard and experienced.”

“I have experienced very little. The total impression has been so unforgettable that details have faded into insignificance. Various difficulties made Paris unpleasant to me, and the Princess Valuyeff offered me a refuge on her estate near Petrograd. Now I must return to the West—to Europe, as the Russians mockingly say. And they are right. For I must leave my spiritual home-land, and people who were close to me, although I did not know them, and a loneliness full of melody and presage, and return to senseless noise and confusion and isolation. I have spoken to Tolstoi and to Pobiedonostzev; I have been to the fair at Nijni-Novgorod, and been driven across the steppe in a troika. And about all—the people and the landscape—there is a breath of innocence and of the times to come, of mystery and of power.”

Eva had not listened very attentively. The hymns to Russia, intoned by wayfaring literary men and observers, began seriously to bore her. She made a faintly wry mouth. “Yes,” she said, “it’s a world all its own,” and held out her lovely hands toward the warmth of the fire.

It seemed to Ermelang that she had never, in the old days, let some one to whom she was talking thus drift out of the circle of her mind. He felt that his words had had no friendly reception. He became diffident and silent. Guardedly he observed her with his inner eye, which was truly austere. He saw the change of which she had spoken, and recorded the image as she had demanded.

The oval of her face had acquired a line hardened as by the will. Nothing was left of goodness in it, little of serenity. An almost harsh determination was about her mouth. There were losses, too. Shadows lay on her temples and under her lids. Her body still betrayed her lordship over it, precisely in its flowing ease, its expansion and repose, such as one sees in wildcats. Ermelang had heard that she toiled unceasingly, spending six to seven hours a day in practice, as in the years of her apprenticeship. The result was evident in the satiation with rhythm and grace which her limbs and joints showed and her perfect control of them.

Yet nothing gracious, nothing of freedom came from her. Ermelang thought of the rumours that accused her of an unquenchable lust after power, of dangerous political plotting, fatal conspiracies, and a definite influence upon certain secret treaties that threatened to disquiet the nations, and of not being guiltless of journalistic campaigns that in their blended brutality and subtlety menaced the peace of Europe. It had seemed as though great coal deposits in the depth of the earth were on fire; but the men above still lived and breathed without suspicion.

Those who distrusted her declared her to be a secret agent of Germany, yet she enjoyed the friendship of French and British diplomatists. Her defenders asserted that she was used without her knowledge to cover the plans and guile of the Grand Duke Cyril. Those who believed in her wholly declared that she really crossed his plans and only feigned to be his tool. The nobility disliked her; the court feared her; the common people, goaded by priests and sectaries, saw in her the embodied misfortune of their country. At a rebellion in Ivanova she had been publicly proclaimed a witch, and her name had been pronounced accursed with solemn rites. Not later than the day before, a deputation of peasants from Mohilev, whom he had met in the fish market, had told him that they had seen the Tsar at Tsarskoye Selo, and in their complaints concerning the famine in their province had, in their stubborn superstition, pointed out the wicked splendour of the foreign dancer’s life. It had become proverbial among them. The Tsar, they said, had been unable to give an answer, and had gazed at the floor.

All these things were incontrovertible parts of her life and fate. He looked upon her lovely hands, rosy in the glow of the flames, and felt a dread for her.

“Is it true,” he asked, with a shy smile, “that you entered the forbidden fortress thrice in succession?”

“It is true. Has it been taken amiss?”

“It has certainly aroused amazement. No stranger has ever before crossed that threshold, nor any Russian unless he entered as a prisoner. No one seems able to fathom your impulse. Many suppose that you merely wanted to see Dmitri Sheltov, who fired at the Grand Duke. Tell me your motive; I should like to have a reply to the gossips.”

“They need no reply,” Eva said. “I do not fear them, and need no defence. I don’t know why I went. Perhaps I did want to see Sheltov. He had insulted me; he even took the trouble to publish a broadside against me. Five of his friends were sent to Siberia for that—boys of sixteen and seventeen. The mother of one of the boys wrote me a letter imploring me to save him. I tried but failed. Perhaps I really wanted to see Dmitri Sheltov. They say that he has vowed to kill Ivan Becker.”

“Sheltov is one of the purest characters in the world,” Ermelang said very softly. “To force a confession from him, they beat him with whips.”

Eva was silent.

“With whips,” Ermelang repeated. “This man! And men still dare to laugh and speak, and the sun to shine.”

“Perhaps I wanted to see a man writhing under the blows of the knout,” Eva said. “Perhaps it meant much to me as a stimulus. I must be nourished somehow, and the uncommon is my nourishment. A strange twitching, an original posture in crouching—such things satisfy my imagination. But as a matter of fact”—her voice grew sombre, and she stared fixedly at a spot on the wall—“I did not see him at all. But I saw others who have spent ten, twelve, fifteen years in dark cells of stone. Once they moved about in the great world and busied their minds with noble things; now they cower in their rags, and blink at the light of a little lantern. They have forgotten how to look, to walk, to speak. An odour of decomposition was about them, and all their gestures were full of a gentle madness. But it was not for their sake either that I went. I went for the sake of the imprisoned women, who, on account of an intellectual conviction, have been torn from love and life and motherhood and devotion, and condemned to death by slow torture. Many of them had never been condemned by any tribunal. They had merely been forgotten—simply forgotten; and if their friends were to demand a trial, the same fate would threaten them. I saw one who had been brought in when she was a girl; now she was an aged woman and near her death. I saw Natalie Elkan, who was violated by a colonel of gendarmes at Kiev, and killed the monster with his own sword. I saw Sophie Fleming, who put out her own eyes with a piece of steel wire, because they had hanged her brother in her presence. Do you know what she said when I entered her cell? She lifted her blind face, and said: ‘That’s the way a lady smells.’ Ah, that taught me something concerning women. I put my arms about her and kissed her, and whispered in her ear, asking whether I should smuggle some poison to her; but she refused.”

Eva arose and walked up and down. “Yes,” she said, “and still men speak and laugh, and still the sun shines. This room is filled with precious things. Lackeys stand on the stairs. Fifty feet from here is the bed of state in which I sleep. It is all mine. What I touch is mine, what I glance at is mine. They would give me the round earth itself if they had it to give and I asked it. And I would cast it like a billiard-ball into a noisome puddle, so that it might no longer defile the home of stars with its filth and its torments. I am so full of hate! I no longer know where to hide it or how to be redeemed from it! I no longer believe in anything—neither in art, nor in poets, nor in myself. I only hate and destroy. I am a lost soul!”

Ermelang folded his hands. “Wonderful as you are, you should remember all you have given and to how many.”

Eva stood still. “I am a lost soul. I feel it.”

“Why lost? You are playing a sad game with yourself.”

She shook her head and whispered the verses of the Inferno:

Thoughtfully Ermelang added:

“What is that I hear?” Eva asked, and listened. Raucous and angry voices were heard from the street, and yells and hisses. Ermelang listened too. Then he went to the window, pushed the draperies aside, and looked out.

On the snow-covered street in front of the palace fifty or sixty mujiks had assembled. One could clearly distinguish their sheepskin caps and their long coats. They stood there silently and gazed up at the windows. They had attracted a great crowd of people, men and women, and these gesticulated, full of hatred, and seemed to urge the mujiks on.

“I believe those are the Mohilev peasants,” Ermelang said nervously. “I saw them march through the city yesterday.”

Eva joined him for a moment at the window, and glanced out; then she returned to the middle of the room. Her smile was contemptuous. At that moment Susan Rappard came in, badly frightened. “There are people downstairs. Pierre went out to ask them what they wanted. They want to talk to you; they beg humbly to be admitted to your presence. What are we to answer such riffraff? I’ve telephoned police headquarters. Good heavens, what a country, what an abominable country!”

Eva lowered her eyes. “They are very poor people, Susan,” she said. “Give them money. Give them all the money that is in the house.”

“Nonsense!” Susan cried, horrified. “Then the next time they’ll break down the door and rob us.”

“Do as I tell you,” Eva replied. “Go to M. Labourdemont and tell him to let you have all available cash. Then go out and take it to them. No, you had better send some one who can speak to them, and let him say that I have gone to bed and cannot receive them. And telephone the police at once and assure them that we have no need of protection. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Susan and went out.

The crowd had increased, the noise grew, and drunken men yelled. Only the peasants remained silent. The oldest of them had come to the edge of the sidewalk. A little white lump of snow lay on his cap, and to his beard clung snow and ice. Pierre, the doorkeeper, in his livery set with silver tresses, was facing him arrogantly. The old peasant bowed low while the lackey spoke.

Eva turned to Ermelang. “Good-bye, dear friend. I am tired. Guard this hour in your memory, but forget it when you speak of me to others. The innermost things are revealed to but one. Good night.”

When Ermelang reached the door of the palace, he saw a troop of mounted police appear at the other end of the street. The crowd melted away with an agility that showed long experience. It took but a minute. Only the peasants remained. Ermelang did not know whether money had been given them as Eva had commanded. He did not care to witness the play of crude force that was sure to occur on the arrival of the armed men.

XVI

Ruth hurried home. Every Sunday afternoon her father was accustomed to spend a few hours with her. She was surprised not to find him in the flat. A letter lay on the table addressed: “To my children.”

The letter read: “Dear daughter and dear son: I must leave you, and only Almighty God knows when I shall see you again. I have hesitated, and I have fought against my decision, but it is made at last. I am no longer equal to the struggle of existence under the circumstances which obtain. To get ahead in Berlin a man needs iron fists and an iron forehead. I am no longer young enough to push all obstacles brutally out of the way, so utter destitution threatens us. Instead of being your protector and provider, I am faced by the terrible possibility of becoming a burden to you, Ruth, and your exertions are even now superhuman. I have often been attracted by the thought of putting an end to my life; but my religion as well as my concern for my children’s memory of me has kept me alive. I have found a friend, a fellow Jew, who has persuaded me to emigrate to America. He is advancing the money for the voyage, and is hopeful of our success. Perhaps fate will relent to me at last. Perhaps my terrible sacrifice in leaving you two in uncertainty and want will move it to pity. I see no other way of saving myself from certain destruction. Only because I know your strength of soul, dear Ruth, only because I have the firm faith that some kind angel watches over you, do I venture upon this difficult and bitter step. I must not and dare not think. You are so young, both of you, and without protection or friends or kinsmen. Perhaps God will forgive me and protect you. I could bear no farewell but this. If I have anything good to report I shall write. Then you, too, must let me hear. I am inclosing fifty marks for your immediate needs; I cannot spare more. The rent for November is paid. Six marks and fifty pfennigs are due to the shoemaker Rösicke. With all my heart I embrace you both. Your unhappy Father.”

Ruth wept.

She had been sitting still for a whole hour, when she heard a knocking at the door. She thought it was Michael. She was a little afraid of his coming, and in her need of a confidant she hoped deeply that it was Christian Wahnschaffe.

It was neither. She opened the door, and saw a ragged girl accompanied by a dog, a butcher’s dog, big as a calf, with a horribly smooth, gleaming, black and white skin.

Ruth kept her hand on the door-knob while she asked the girl, who might have been anything from twelve to twenty, what she wanted. The dog had an evil glare.

The girl quietly handed her a piece of paper. It was greasy and covered with the writing of some illiterate. Ruth was frightened, and thought: “All bad news comes in writing to-day.” She had not yet read the writing on the paper, but she felt that it boded some evil.

For a moment she looked out through the hall window that framed a group of black chimneys. The uncanny dog growled.

The writing on the paper was difficult to decipher. She read: “You must plese come rite away to somebody what is terrible bad of. He has took poisen it is killing him and he has got to tel you something before he dis. He is in the back room of Adeles Rest a wine room Prenzlaur Alley 112 in the yard to the left. Plese come rite away with the girl and god wil reward you. Plese for gods sake do come.”

“What is the matter? What can I do?” Ruth whispered.

The girl shrugged her shoulders. As though she were dumb, she pointed to the piece of paper.

She was full of foreboding and of an inner warning, full of pain over the letter and the flight of her father, and full of horror of the butcher’s dog. She was undecided, looked at the paper, and stammered: “I don’t know.... I ought to wait for Michael.... Who is it.... He should have given his name.”

The girl shrugged her shoulders.

It seemed to Ruth that it would be wrong to disregard this cry for help. The bloodshot eyes of the dog were fixed upon her. Never had she seen an animal that seemed so naked. She put her hand over her forehead and tried to gather her troubled thoughts. She went back into the room and looked about. It seemed very lonely and bare. She slipped into her little coat and put on her hat. A faint smile gleamed for a moment on her face, as though she were glad to have come to a decision. She ran her eyes over the writing once more. “Plese for gods sake do come.” One’s duty seemed quite clear.

For a little she held her father’s letter uncertainly in her hand. Then she folded it again, and laid it on the table beside her slightly disordered books and writing utensils. She closed the books that were open, and made a little pile of them. The dog had noiselessly followed her into the room. It followed her as she left. On the door there hung by a string a little slate and a slate pencil. Ruth wrote: “I’ll be back soon. Have gone to Prenzlauer Alley. Wait for me. I must talk to you about something important.” She locked the door and hid the key under the door-mat of straw.

The strange girl preserved her sleepy indifference.

On the stairs Ruth bethought herself, and knocked at Karen’s door. If Christian were there, she could say a few words to him; but no one opened. She thought that Karen was asleep, and did not ring. As she descended the stairs behind the girl and the naked dog the new responsibilities and problems of her life came into her mind. But in Ruth’s young and intrepid heart, confusions grew clear and difficult things lost their terror.

In the lower hall she hesitated for a last time. She wanted to stop at Gisevius’s to see if Christian were there. But two old women were reviling each other loudly and filthily in the yard, and she went on.

It was raining. It was Sunday afternoon, a time of ghastly dreariness in Stolpische Street. There was quiet under the grey November sky, save for a hum from the public houses. The pale street-lamps flickered in the twilight.

“Let us go, then,” Ruth said to the girl.

The naked dog trotted between them on the wet pavement.

XVII

Crammon had written as follows to the Countess Brainitz: “Since I have pledged my word, of course I shall come. But I beg you to have the kindness to prepare Letitia in some appropriate way. As the fatal moment approaches I feel more and more uncomfortable. It is a very difficult act of expiation that you demand of me. I would rather make a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat and become a hermit there for a few years and seek for the remains of Noah’s ark. I grant you that I have always enjoyed the delights that came to me without scruple; but it does not seem to me that I have deserved this. It is too much.”

The countess replied that she would do her utmost to mitigate the painfulness of the meeting. She had no objection to the dear child’s weeping on her bosom, before facing a father who admitted his fatherhood with so many hesitations and fears. “And so, Herr von Crammon,” she wrote at the end of her letter, “we are expecting you. Letitia has returned from Paris more enchanting than ever. All the world is at her feet. I trust you will not be an exception.”

“The devil take her!” Crammon growled, as he packed his bags.

When he arrived at the countess’s country-house, which was called the Villa Ophelia, he was told that the ladies had gone to the theatre. He was taken to the room that had been prepared for him. He washed, dressed for dinner, strolled back to the drawing-room, stuck his hands deep into his pockets like a shivering tramp, and dropped morosely into an easy chair. He heard the rain plash, and from another room the crying of an infant. “Aha,” he thought, in his vexation, “that is my grandchild, one of the twins. How do I know that some misguided creature won’t put it on my knee, and ask me to admire and pet and even kiss it? Who, I say, will protect me from a bourgeois idyl of that sort? You might expect anything of a woman like the countess. These sentimental actresses who refuse to grow old are capable of anything. Is there anything more annoying in the world than a baby? It is neither a human being nor an animal; it smells of cow-udders and scented powder, and makes an insufferable and repulsive noise. It pokes its limbs into the faces of older persons; and if there are two of them, and all these horrors assail one doubly, one is apt to be quite defenceless, and may fairly inquire: ‘What have you, Bernard Crammon, whose interest in the propagation of the race has always been strictly negative—what have you to do with such things?’”

Crammon ended his reflections with a smile of self-mockery. At that moment he heard cheerful voices, and Letitia and the countess entered.

He arose with exquisite chivalry. He was most friendly and most polished.

He did not conceal his astonishment over Letitia’s appearance. His Austrian delight in feminine charm and his impulse to do homage to it scattered the fog of his egotistical vexation. Either, he thought, his memory was playing him false, or else Letitia had undergone a marvellous development since the days at Wahnschaffe Castle. Crude young girls had never, to be sure, attracted him. The women whom he admired and courted had to be rich in knowledge and responsible, for that eased his own responsibility.

After the first greetings the countess spoke. “Dear people,” she said, with her North German readiness to meet all occasions, “I must leave you for half an hour now. A theatre is a grimy place. I must wash my hands. Everything about it is grimy—the seats, the spectators, the actors, and the play. It always gives me a yearning for soap and water. You can use the time to chat a bit. Afterwards we’ll have supper.”

She rustled out, not without having cast a severe glance at Crammon.

Crammon asked thoughtfully: “I wonder why she called this building the Villa Ophelia. There are many inexplicable things in life. This is one of them.”

Letitia laughed. She regarded him with a mixture of irony and shyness. But as she stood before him in her frock of soft, pale yellow silk, her neck and bosom radiating an ivory shimmer, Crammon found it difficult to sustain his self-pity. Letitia approached him, and said archly yet with feeling: “So you are my papa. Who would have thought it? It must have been quite unpleasant for you to have an old, forgotten sin suddenly transformed into a great girl.”

Crammon chuckled, although a shadow still lay on his face. He took her hand into both of his and pressed it warmly. “I see that we understand each other,” he said, “and that consoles me. What I feared was an outburst and tears and the emotional display that is considered fitting. It is so nice of you to be sensible. But let us sacrifice something to the ceremonial tradition of the emotions. I shall imprint a paternal kiss upon your brow.”

Letitia inclined her head, and he kissed her. She said: “We share a delightful secret now. How shall I call you in company—Uncle, or Uncle Crammon, or Uncle Bernard, or simply Bernard?”

“Simply Bernard, I’m sure,” Crammon replied. “I need not remind you, of course, that you are legally the daughter of the late Herr von Febronius and of his late wife. Our situation demands of us both the most delicate tactfulness.”

“Certainly,” Letitia agreed, and sat down. “But just fancy the dangers that lurk in this world. Suppose I hadn’t known anything and had fallen in love with you. How horrible! And I must tell you at once that I don’t seem to revere you a bit. My feeling is rather sisterly, and I’m sure that I like you very, very much. Will you be satisfied with that, or is it terribly unfilial?”

“It quite suffices,” said Crammon. “I can’t indeed impress on you too strongly the wisdom of emotional frugality. Most people carry their feelings about the way the Ashanti women do their glass beads. They rattle them in public, and never realize what very ordinary stuff they are. But that is by the way. For our relations we must have a very special programme. This is important in order to ward off the intrusion of outsiders. I am—it goes without saying—at your service at any time and in any way. You may rely wholly upon my friendship, upon my ... let us use the odious word—paternal friendship.”

Letitia was immensely amused at his grave and anxious zeal to gain what easements the situation permitted. She was quite worthy of him in the capacity for a certain hypocrisy. Beneath her charming expression and her innocent appearance of pliability, she hid a good deal of mockery and not a little self-will. She answered: “There’s no reason why we should limit each other’s freedom. We shall not stand in each other’s way, nor become unduly indebted to each other. Each has the right to assume the other’s confidence, and thus to preserve his freedom of action. I hope that that suits you.”

“You are a very determined little person, and I took you to be foolishly enthusiastic and fanciful. Did the cattle drivers in the land of fire sharpen your wits? Yes, it suits me; it suits me admirably.”

“There is so much ahead of me,” Letitia continued, and her eyes glowed with desires and dreams, “I hardly know how I shall get through it all—people, countries, cities, works of art. I’ve lost so much time and I’m nearly twenty-one. Auntie wants me to stay with her, but that’s impossible. I’m expected in Munich on the first of December and in Meran on the tenth. In Paris it was divine. The people were perfectly charming to me. Every one wanted me at once.”

“I quite believe it, quite,” said Crammon, and rubbed his chin. “But tell me, how did that adventure with the vicomte end that the countess told me about?”

“Oh, did she tell you about it?” Letitia blushed. “That wasn’t very discreet.” For a moment her face showed an expression of sorrow and of embarrassment. But unhappy experiences, even when they made their way into her consciousness, could not really darken it. In a moment her eyes were again full of laughter. All dark memories had fled. “Take me on a motor drive to-morrow, won’t you, Bernard,” she urged him, and stretched out her hands impulsively. “And you must invite the little Baron Rehmer who lives in the Grand Hotel. He’s Stanislaus Rehmer, the Polish sculptor. He’s going to model me and teach me Polish. He’s a charming person.”

Crammon interrupted her: “Explain one thing to me! Tell me what is happening in the Argentine. Hasn’t that blue-skinned bandit in whom you once saw the essence of all manly virtues taken any steps against you? You don’t imagine, do you, that he will simply stand by while you take French leave with his double offspring? As for me, I wouldn’t have shared the same board with him, far less the same bed. But that was not your opinion, and the law doesn’t consider fluctuations of taste.”

“He’s brought a suit for divorce against me, and I’ve entered a countersuit,” Letitia said. “I’ve seen mountains of documents. The children are mine, since he forced me to flight by his extreme cruelty. I’m not worried about it a bit.”

“Does he pay you an income?”

“Not a penny so far.”

“Then how do you live? You’re obviously not retrenching. Where does the money come from? Who pays for all these luxuries? Or is it all a sham with a background of debts?”

Letitia shrugged her shoulders. “I hardly know,” she answered, with some embarrassment. “Sometimes I have money and sometimes I haven’t any. Poor auntie sold a few old Dutch pictures that she had. One can’t spend one’s life reckoning like a shopkeeper. Why do you talk of such horrid things?” There was such sincere pain and reproachfulness in her voice that Crammon felt like a sinner. He looked aside. Held by her charm, he lost the courage to burden her farther with coarse realities. And now, too, the countess appeared in the room. She had put on gloves of gleaming white, and her face glowed like freshly scrubbed porcelain. In her arms she carried Puck, the little Pekingese, who had grown old and slept much.

“My dears, supper is served,” she cried, with the slightly stagy cheeriness of her youth.

XVIII

Karen believed that, in his own mind, Christian expected her to pay some attention to her child. She had secretly written to her mother, but no answer had come.

Christian had never mentioned the child. He did not expect to find any softening in Karen. Her behaviour gave no sign of any.

But brooding in her bed she wondered both what Christian expected of her and what had become of her child. Occasionally a glassy clinking could be heard. It came from the pearls. She would reach for them to assure herself of their presence. When she felt them, a smile of mysterious well-being appeared on her face.

For three days Christian had not been out of his clothes. He fell asleep in a corner of the sofa. Since morning a formless disquietude had possessed him.

Isolde Schirmacher, noisily bringing in Karen’s soup, wakened him. He put the chairs in their places, cleared the table of his books, put the checked cover on it, and opened the window. “It’s Sunday,” he said.

“I don’t want soup,” Karen grumbled.

“And I went and made it for you extry,” Isolde whined, “and a pork fricassee and all. You never want nothing.”

“Eat the stuff yourself,” Karen said spitefully.

Isolde carried the soup out again.

“Can’t you close the window?” Karen whined. “Why do you always have to open it? A person can freeze to death.”

Christian closed the window.

“I’d like to know why she carried the soup out again,” Karen said after a while. “That’d suit her, to gorge herself on what’s meant for me. I’m hungry.”

Christian went to the kitchen and brought in the soup. He sat down beside her bed, and held the plate in both hands while she laboriously ate the soup. “It’s hot,” she moaned, and pressed her head against the pillows. “Open the window so’s I can get a bit of air.”

He opened the window. Karen looked at him with a dull wonder in her eyes. His patience was unfathomable to her. She wanted to get him to the point of scolding and showing her her place.

During the night she would make twenty demands and then reverse them with embittered impatience. His kindliness remained uniform. It enraged her; she wanted to scream. She cried out to him: “What kind of a man are you, for God’s sake?” She shook her fists.

Christian did not know what to answer.

At two o’clock Dr. Voltolini arrived. The clinical assistant who had examined Karen at Ruth’s request had no time to make regular visits, so Ruth had suggested that Voltolini, whom she knew, be permitted to continue the treatment.

Karen refused to answer nearly all his questions. Her hatred of physicians dated from her experiences on the streets.

“I hardly know what attitude to take,” Dr. Voltolini said to Christian, who accompanied him to the stairs. “There’s an incomprehensible stubbornness in her. If I didn’t want to accommodate you, I would have given up the case long ago.” He had been deeply charmed by Christian, and often observed him tensely. Christian did not notice this.

He reproached Karen for her behaviour.

“Never mind,” she said curtly. “These doctors are swindlers and thieves. They speculate on people’s foolishness. I don’t want him to lay his hand on me. I don’t want him to listen to my heart so I can smell his bald head, or tap me all over and look like an executioner. I don’t need him if I’m going to live, and less if I’ve got to die.”

Christian did not answer.

Karen crouched in her bed. She suffered from pain to-day. A saw seemed to be drawn up and down between her ribs. She went on: “I’d like to know why you bother to study medicine. Tell me that. I’ve never asked you anything, but I’d like to know. What attracts you about being a saw-bones? What good will you get out of it?”

Christian was surprised at her insistent tone and at the glitter in her eyes. He tried to tell her, arguing clumsily. He talked to her as to an equal, with respect and courtesy. She did not wholly understand the sense of his words, but she thrust her head far forward, and listened breathlessly.

Christian said that it was not the study itself that had attracted him, but the constant contact with human beings into which it brought you. Then, too, there was the natural temptation to choose a study the length of which could be shortened by bits of knowledge that he already had. When he first determined to take it up, he had also thought of its practical usefulness to him. That thought he had now abandoned. He had believed that he might earn his livelihood by practising medicine; but he had been forced to the conclusion that he was morally incapable of earning money by any means. He had reached this conclusion not long since. He had gone to visit the student Jacoby and found him out. Just then a child of the landlady had fallen from a ladder and become unconscious. He had carried the child into the room, rubbed it with alcohol, listened to its heart, and stayed with it a while. When the child had quite recovered and he himself had been ready to go, the mother had pressed a two-mark piece into his hand. He had had the impulse to laugh into the woman’s face. He hadn’t been able to realize the cause of his shame, but the sense of it had been so strong as to make him dizzy. And that incident had taught him the impossibility of his taking money for services.