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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
Months ago he had written to Christian, asking him to come home
and explain himself, to rescue his parents from the pressure of
anxiety and confusion, and especially his mother, who was suffering
beyond her strength. To this letter Christian had replied laconically
that there would be no purpose in his coming, and that there was no
ground for anxiety, that he was very well and in excellent spirits, and
that no one need suffer because he followed his own devices.
But what was the sense of his action? Was there any key to this
mystery? Was it possible in this age of science and enlightenment to
conceive of a mystic metamorphosis of personality?
He had a vision of Christian walking through the long streets,
especially at night, going into humble inns and eating poor food.
What was the meaning of it? And he could imagine meeting
Christian on such an occasion, and could see his son’s conventional
courtesy, the proud, cool eyes, the firm, white teeth which that
conventional smile revealed. And even to imagine such a meeting
filled him with fear.
But perhaps that was necessary. Perhaps he would have to go to
him. Perhaps all that had happened did not in reality have the
deadly seriousness which it seemed to have at a distance. Perhaps
there was some simple confusion that could be cleared and
disentangled easily enough.
The thought of Christian burrowed deep into his brain, and his fear
grew. If he sought release from that thought, it emerged to torment
him the more, in dreams, in sleepless nights, amid the tumult of
affairs, in conversation, in every place, at all times, through all the
weeks and months.
 V
The castle of the Wahnschaffes, built for delight and splendour, lay
desolate. The great reception halls and the guest-rooms were empty.
Some American friends had announced their arrival; but Frau
Wahnschaffe had begged to be excused.
Her husband sent her delicacies and flowers from the hothouses.
She cared for neither. In a lethargy she sat in an armchair or lay in
her bed of state. The curtains were drawn even by day. The electric
lamps were veiled.
Memories of Christian’s childhood were her refuge. She lived them
over in imagination: how Christian as a child of five had lain in bed
with her. Early in the morning the nurse had brought him in his loud
delight, still with the rosy warmth of sleep upon him. She recalled
the bird-like voice, the golden locks, the flexible hands, the radiant,
deep-blue eyes. He had stretched out his little hands after her ropes
of pearls, when she had come in evening dress into the nursery.
Once little maidens had placed a wreath of sweet peas on his head
and danced about him in innocent homage. He had raced through
the park with two dogs, and stopped with an admirable gesture of
astonishment before a statue of bronze. Later, when he was a youth,
at the carnival in Mainz he had stood amid lovely women in a
flowery chariot and raised a silver goblet toward the beholders.
Unforgettable to her were his gestures, his glances, his resilient
walk, the dark tones of his voice. Equally unforgettable were the
expectation of his coming, the delight of his presence, the
admiration that met him from the eyes of men. The world contained
him only.
She read the few letters that he had written her. She guarded them
like relics in a little ebony box. They were sober, dry notes, but to
her they were magical. There were ten or twelve lines from Paris or
San Sebastian, Rome, Viareggio, Corfu, or the Isle of Wight. Once
she had drunk all the beauty of earth from these places. Now that
he was no longer there, they faded and died to her.
She had loved her womb because it had borne him; she hated it
now because she had lost him. But how or why she had lost him—
that was a thing unfathomable. She brooded over it by day and
night.
No one could guide her. No thought revealed a gleam of light. She
stood before a wall and stared at it in despair. She listened, but no
voice reached her ear from the other side. All that people told her
seemed absurd and false.
In her bedroom hung a portrait of Christian painted in his twentieth
year. It had been done three years before by a Swedish painter. It
was very like him, and she adored it. One night she took it from the
wall and placed it on a table and lifted the shade from a lamp
nearby. She crouched in a chair, rested her head upon her hands,
and gazed at the picture steadily and with a questioning passion.
She asked the picture, but it gave no answer. She thrilled with a
desire to take that head into her hands. But the face on the canvas
smiled its equivocal and remote smile. If only she could have wept!
But tears were denied her: too hard and unmoved had she passed
through life.
When morning came her maid found her still sitting before
Christian’s picture. The painted face beside the burning lamp still
smiled its alien smile.
 VI
Johanna Schöntag wrote to Christian: “It is two months now since I
parted from you. In those two months misfortune has been very
busy with me and mine. My father committed suicide; that was why
I was summoned home so suddenly. Rash speculations complicated
his affairs beyond his power; he saw no way to prevent his being
reduced to beggary, and determined to leave the scene of his failure
thus abruptly. All obligations have been decently satisfied, and his
good name has been saved. We are also told, as if it were a
consolation, that he lost his head too soon, that things might have
turned out better than he feared. But we are in an unenviable
situation, and life is not showing us an admirable aspect. Such
sudden transformations should be confined to melodrama. I am still
badly confused; I hardly know what is happening to me. I envy
those who have an aim of some kind and also the vitality to pursue
it. I wonder whether you will write to me. Or have you already
forgotten me? Have I even the right to ask that?”
She sent this letter to Crammon with the request to forward it.
Crammon replied: “My dear Rumpelstilzkin:—I hope that your voice
will not die in the desert. Unhappy things have taken place. The man
to whom you are writing has denied himself and his own past and all
who love him. The Lord has darkened his soul; we are striving for
his salvation. May your assistance bear rich fruit.”
The words frightened her, and she did not know how to interpret
them. She had time to reflect, for weeks passed before she received
an answer to her letter; and this answer was worse than none at all.
It came not from Christian himself but from Amadeus Voss, and was
as follows:
“My dear Fräulein:—While arranging some documents which my
friend Christian Wahnschaffe left in the apartment which I have
taken off his hands, I found your letter among other things. Since he
has failed for some months, with very rare exceptions, to answer
any letters, I think I may take it for granted that you have not heard
from him. I can hardly dare hope to make up for his negligence.
Who am I? What am I to you? You may not even recall me. I, on the
contrary, remember you very exactly, and regret most constantly
that I did not succeed in making you more conscious of my devotion
and sympathy. But I am diffident by nature, and the fear of being
repulsed or having my feelings misunderstood has assumed morbid
intensity in my mind. Do not therefore, pray, regard it as a tactless
importunity if I venture to write you in Christian’s stead. The thought
of your uncertainty and fruitless waiting pained me, and I
determined to put an end to it so far as it lies in my power to do.
“I believe I can give you the assurance that Christian Wahnschaffe is
not as guilty, so far as you are concerned, as he may seem to be,
unless we agree that his guilt toward all who knew and loved him is
the same. To speak of his practising neglect or failing in a duty
would be unbecoming in me as well as incorrect in fact. He has
sloughed off his former skin, and the coin in which he pays to-day is
of another mintage. Whether its value is higher or lower than
formerly it is not my office to decide. He has, in the proverbial
expression, burned his bridges behind him. What he does may
arouse the horror of the morally immature; I, too, I confess, find the
motivation obscure and difficult. But one must have patience and
faith in a benevolent providence; for we all eat the bread of some
abyss and it is bitter on each man’s lips.
“It is in view of the uncommon circumstances that I beg you to
pardon my taking upon myself the part of an alter ego of our friend
and making his affairs, as it were, my own. I have done it only after
mature reflection; and what may at first seem to you sheer
forwardness, and an indelicate intrusion into secrets that are not my
own, has been prompted purely by a profound regard for your peace
of mind. In closing may I express to you my deep and sincere
sympathy? You have suffered from terrible visitations. God in His
goodness will assuredly brighten your path again.”
Johanna read this letter innumerable times, and each time with a
pang of intolerable shame, each time on the verge of tears. It made
her feel so exposed and affronted. And then she would burrow again
and again into the artifice of those stilted sentences. Frightened and
desperate, and yet with a stabbing curiosity, she asked: What could
have happened to make Christian, him whom she trusted
immeasurably, whom she knew to be the soul of delicacy and
reserve—what could have happened to make him callously expose
the most intimate things in life to the treachery and hypocrisy of this
man?
In her excitement she went to Crammon’s house, but he had left
Vienna long ago. She asked where he was, but received no certain
information. Aglaia named a Berlin hotel, Constantine the château of
Count Vitztum in the mountains of Saxony. Johanna wrote letters,
tore them up, reflected and brooded, was pursued by shame and
doubt, and finally determined to write to Amadeus Voss. She wrote a
brief note in her rigid, angular writing, her left hand clenched in
rage, her forehead wrinkled, her little teeth gnawing at her lip. With
a certain mockery of implication she thanked him for his trouble,
contemptuously ignored his indiscretion, controlled her profoundly
instinctive aversion, and finally, with an impatient turn of speech,
demanded some clear information concerning Christian
Wahnschaffe, since she had never been taught the reading of riddles
or the solving of mysteries. She admitted that she had no right to
make this demand, since her interest in Christian was merely a
friend’s. But as such it was strong and kind enough to justify her
inquiries.
Four days later Voss’s answer reached her. Her heart beat as she
held the letter. Unopened she hid it in a drawer. Not till evening,
when she had locked herself into her room, did she open and read
it.
“My dear Fräulein Schöntag:—I am surprised that you are unaware
of a rumour which the very sparrows twitter from the house-tops
here. Everybody whispers and peers and is astonished, and dares
not trust the evidence of his senses. Hence to spare you
unnecessary circumlocutions I shall proceed at once to the point.
You may remember that I left Hamburg a week before Christian
Wahnschaffe, and rented a comfortable apartment for us both in
Berlin. Since we had both determined to study medicine there, I had
every reason to suppose that as long as our relations were
harmonious we would have a common household. So I waited for
him, and he came at last; but he did not come alone. He brought a
woman with him. Here words fail me. I use the word woman
because my consideration for you forbids me the use of any other.
And yet how shall I convey the true state of affairs, if I shrink back
from the unchangeable facts? The truth cannot remain hidden. This
person’s name is Karen Engelschall. He rescued her in a state of
hopeless degradation from some harlots’ haunt near the harbour.
She is a characteristic outcast. Her appearance is coarse and her
manners repulsive. She expects to be confined shortly. She was in
the power of a ruffian who maltreated her and beat her; whenever
she thinks of him she shakes with terror and horror. She is between
thirty and thirty-two years old, but she looks older. One look at her
face suffices to convince one that she is familiar with every vice and
with every crime.
“My dear young lady, pray do not stop here as you would stop
listening were I saying these things to you. The words I have written
down are brutally frank, and your imagination, unaccustomed to
such images, may identify me with the horrors I am forced to evoke.
But I shall be patient, if it be so, until your impressions become
sufficiently clarified to do me justice. What I have said is only an
introduction, and I must proceed.
“He came with his cases and boxes, but he had discharged his valet.
Toward me he was of an extreme cordiality, and indeed he seemed
far more cheerful than he had been when I left him. Two rooms
were set aside for this woman—a bedroom and a sitting-room. There
remained three rooms for him and two for me. But I had not been
prepared for this additional companion and hardly knew what to say.
He gave me a superficial explanation of her presence, but he
withheld his real confidence. How repulsive is this smoothness of the
mere worldling, how indistinguishable from downright falseness! To
smile and be silent convinces no one, though it may serve to
deceive. We who are lowly born do not know such gestures, and
disdain to take refuge in polite irresponsibility. The woman appeared
at our meals. She sat there like a clod, played with the cloth, asked
foolish question, rattled the silver, and used her knife as a shovel.
Whenever Wahnschaffe glanced at her, she looked like a thief who
had been caught. I was confounded. He seemed to me out of his
senses. His entire behaviour toward her was marked by a
considerateness so exquisite that I was compelled to believe that her
influence over him had been gained in some supernatural way. But
what was its nature? I soon ascertained beyond a doubt that she
was not his mistress. Nor was such a thing conceivable; it was a
thought to be dismissed at once. What then was the source of her
power? It was in some devilish magic. Do not think that my mind is
wandering. In hours of spiritual insight I have looked deeply into the
secrets of creation. The human soul, poor and rich at once, has
endless capacities and powers of transformation. The stars gleam
over us and we know them not, neither their influence nor their
power. The fissures of the earth have been closed, and we know but
as through the memory of a dream that there are demons seeking to
rule us. I trust that in this matter we shall some day understand
each other when we meet. Accept this prophecy in proof of the truth
of my assertions.
“I must continue. I no longer felt at home in those handsome rooms.
At night I often stood alone in the darkness, and listened for sounds
from the rooms of the other two. I conquered my aversion, and
sought out the woman when she was alone. She was talkative in a
disagreeable way. I did not conceal my contempt. In his presence
she was dull. Superficially she seems to rule him through her own
servility. The sight of her complete degradation impressed an eye
satiated with the glories of this world. I tried to discover in her some
alluring quality, some trace of lost or ruined beauty, some charm,
however humble or even perverse. I hoped to discover her secret by
seeming to agree with her and appreciate the situation. I watched
for some sign of a change in her soul, some symptom of expiation or
conversion. I found instead a crude, stained, stubborn, bestial,
lumpish, unformed creature.
“I shuddered. All too near was the time when it had taken all my
passionate energy to save myself from the slime; too deeply had I
suffered among those from whom the Lord averts His countenance;
too many midnights lay behind me in which my soul hovered over
the abyss; too long had I been ground between the millstones of
sin; too accursed was this woman in my eyes, far too accursed for
me to see her glide calmly and sinuously to a point of sloth where
she could rest from past evil and prepare herself for more. I felt
impelled to flee. It was no spectacle for me. My spirit threatened to
become poisoned again and also my heart—that writhing thing that
made me a burden to myself and to mankind. I told Wahnschaffe
that he could have my rooms; but he urged me to stay, saying that
he felt uncomfortable in the house and would leave it. Aha, I
thought, he is lusting after palaces; this is too humble for him. But
to every one’s astonishment he sought far humbler quarters, stayed
but a week, sought others that were still meaner, and thus changed
his abode twice more until he moved with the woman to the reeking
and buzzing tenement house in the north end of the city where he is
now.
“If I did not know the facts and were told them, I should laugh
incredulously. The widow Engelschall, Karen’s mother, was furious
when she heard of it. I have met her too, and I cannot describe her
without physical nausea. Karen’s brother, a rogue and an outcast,
questioned Wahnschaffe and threatened him. He is surrounded by
the offscourings of the earth. Yet there he studies, sleeps in a dark
hole on a shabby sofa of leather—he the spoiled darling, the
expectancy and rose of his own class, the epicure and the allurer,
the Adonis and Crœsus! Does my voice seem to pierce your ears
even from the pallor of this written sheet? Is your inmost mind
petrified? Then pray come here and be a witness to this experiment
in monasticism, this modern hermitage, this sombre farce. Come, for
perhaps we need you as one of the hearts that once glowed for him.
Perhaps eyes from the world of his old delights will be the mirrors in
which he will see himself, and find and recover himself once more.
“Do I seem to triumph in his downfall? I should not wish to do so;
yet there may be a touch of grimness in my soul. For it is I who
prepared the way, I whom dreams of sin like a leprosy of the soul
condemn to this very day to an accursed disquietude. He throws
away what he has. Millions that breed new millions lie in the bank,
and he does not regard them. He lives without luxury or diversion or
agreeable company, without plays or cars or games or love or
flirtation, without being honoured or admired or spoiled. I await the
hour in which he will laugh and declare the period of forgetfulness to
be over. So long as the millions breed millions, and his father and
mother guard their strong-boxes for him in the background, there is
no room for serious fear. His clothes and linen, his cravats and
jewels and toilet articles are largely still here where I live alone. He
drops in at times to bathe and change his garments. His appearance
is what it always was; he looks as though he were going to a
luncheon with a minister of state or to a rendezvous with a duchess.
He is not melancholy or thoughtful or hollow-eyed. He is as
arrogant, as dry of soul, as insignificant, as princely as ever. But
there is a new lightness in his actions, a new decisiveness in his
speech. And he laughs oftener.
“Once he did not laugh, on that day in his castle when I told him of
darkness and of terror, before he went to meet the dancer. He
listened, listened day and night, and asked and listened again. But
was it compassion that stirred in his soul? By no means. He is not
even a Christian; no heavenly spark enlightens his soul; he knows
nothing of God, and is of those to whom the passage in Corinthians
applies: The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of
God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them,
because they are spiritually discerned. I had desired to awaken him.
I spoke as with tongues of flame out of the nethermost depths. But
he was the stronger: he lured me to his Saturnalia and drove me
into crime, and I forgot my eternal weal for the sake of the lusts of
this earth. He was like a shadow to me; now I am myself like a
shadow, and he insults the holy thing he mocks. What knows he of
the axe and the ring? I know of both. What knows he of the signs
and symbols that become torches in the darkness of the soul? To
him all things are concrete and finite;—the nail and the board, the
bell and the candle, the stone and the root, the trowel and the
hammer are but dead things to him, but not to me. Rome and
Galilee rise and battle. Torment proceeds from him; a torment drives
me to him. It is as though we were brothers and linked in the flesh
and had crept out of the same womb, and yet neither can find or
understand the other.
“Why does he live close to that woman? What does he expect of
her? He speaks of her in a tone of strange suspense. It is an
uncanny, rash, and insatiable curiosity that is in him. Once he lusted
after palaces, now he lusts after sties; once he desired counts and
artists, cavaliers and cocottes with ropes of pearls, now he seeks
drunkards and paupers, pimps and prostitutes. It is a lust that is in
him, and neither pilgrimage nor aspiration nor prayer—lust after the
nail and stone, the bell and candle, the stone and root, the trowel
and hammer, and all things wherein there is power and from which
proceed both suffering and knowledge. I have seen his eyes gleam
when I spoke of the death of an outcast, or of a deaf-mute’s
drowning himself, who was my own brother and died through his
fault; and likewise when I spoke of the self-inflicted death of another
which I caused in my downtrodden youth. I watched him well amid
his jewels and paintings and silver plate, and the flowers and costly
books of his houses, when these things began to satiate him, and
when he began to listen greedily for the wailing that comes from
prison houses, and when a sleep full of fear came over him. And
now he plays with the poor and the things of the poor, and wanders
by and collects these things and takes delight in them; he reaches
out after one and then after another, and desires to know what is in
each and what that signifies, and yet remains the man he was.
There is no salvation in this, for it is written: Eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things
which God hath prepared for them that love him.
“But why does the woman follow him? Why does she refuse the
monstrous sums which his family has offered her to leave him? Why
does she calmly return with him to her own underworld, when she
must be panting after his gold, his jewels, his houses and gardens,
his power and his freedom? What holds her? Why does she tarry?
What devil’s work is being done? It happened recently that I walked
home with him during a violent snow-storm. He had given me a
letter of his friend Crammon to read. It was a long and foolish
whine, such as one would rather expect from an elderly blue-
stocking than from a man of sense. We argued about the letter, that
is to say, he would not take it seriously, while I talked myself into a
rage over it.
“Then he told me that a certain Baron von Thüngen, one of his
former boon-companions, had visited him on the previous day. You
may remember him; he was one of those who danced attendance on
Eva Sorel—a reddish-blond, affected dandy. This man, Wahnschaffe
told me, had hunted for him long and had sat talking with him a
whole day. He had said that he was dissatisfied with his life and
longed for another way of living; that he did not know what to do,
but had become a prey to unbearable melancholy; that he had
always felt a deep sympathy for Wahnschaffe, but had not ventured
to approach him; and that all he asked now was the privilege of
sometimes spending an hour in his company. All this Wahnschaffe
told me half diffidently, half in surprise. But the matter was not clear
to me, and I said that Thüngen was probably merely one of those
half-crazy idlers who had lost his appetite, and whose palate lusts for
more sharply seasoned food. He did not take my rudeness amiss,
and only said that such a judgment was rash.
“When we had reached our goal I went upstairs with him to Karen
Engelschall’s rooms. I did not wish to leave him. I was angry
because he had again gotten the better of me by his icy sobriety.
When we had passed through the narrow hall-way, we heard Karen’s
screeching voice from the kitchen as well as the sound of wood
chopping. We opened the kitchen door. The pregnant woman was
kneeling by the hearth and splitting kindling wood. On a chair near
the wall Isolde Schirmacher, the young girl that waits on her, leaned
back with a yellowish pale face and closed eyes. An indisposition had
overtaken her; it seemed epileptic in character, for her limbs were
rigid and her head bent over backwards. She had evidently been at
this task before, and Karen had taken her place. The girl’s condition
seemed to have caused her no concern. She split the wood with her
hatchet, and, unconscious of our presence on the threshold, talked
bitterly and blasphemously concerning her pregnancy: she didn’t
want another brat; she had a horror of it; it ought to be throttled at
its first breath. Her talk was pure filth—impossible to report. Then
Wahnschaffe entered the room, and lifted Isolde Schirmacher from
her chair, and carried her, as though she were no burden at all, into
the next room, and laid her on the bed. Then he came back, and
said to the woman: ‘Let that be, Karen,’ and took the hatchet from
her hand and heaped up the wood that had been cut. The woman
was frightened. She obeyed him, and was silent, as though speech
had died within her. This thing I saw with my own eyes, and from
this picture you can see the nature of the woman and the relations
of Wahnschaffe and herself.
“No peace is left in me. From an invisible wound in the world’s body
the blood keeps flowing. I cry out for a vessel to receive it, but no
one brings me such a vessel. Or are the sickness and the wound
within myself? Is there such a thing as the yearning of the shadow
for its body? Is it conceivable that the unimaginable has come to
pass, and yet that he who yearned and sobbed and struggled and
prayed for it to come to pass cannot recognize it now? There is
some strange fatality in it all. I have learned now to tell fruit from
rottenness, the bitter from the sweet, the fragrant from the stinking,
the hurtful from the harmless. And I have also learned how limbs
swing from their sockets, how vertebra joins vertebra, how muscle is
intertwined with muscle, how ligament grows on ligament, how the
veins pulse and how the brain is stratified. I can open the magic
clockwork and put my hand into the mechanism that is forever rigid.
There are compensations; but always at the sombre gates of
existence must I pay my entrance fee to brighter regions. The other
day I had a vision: You stood with me beside the corpse of a young
person, and asked me to cut out the heart which had survived by a
little the death of its body and twitched under my knife.
“That one more thing I wanted to tell you. With it I close.”
Johanna sat over that letter all night until morning. A storm of March
swept about the house. Her virginal room, with its hangings of white
silk and the white enamelled furniture, seemed already bare and
rifled to her. For on the morrow she was to leave it forever.
 VII
Dead and wounded men lay on the red velvet sofas of the
restaurant. They had been carried here hurriedly, and people were
trying to help the living. Through the open doors there blew in an icy
blast mixed with snow. Random shots were still fired in the streets,
soldiers galloped up and down, an infantry squad appeared and
disappeared. Guests hovered at the windows. A German waiter said:
“They have mounted cannons on the Neva.” A gentleman in a fur-
coat entered hastily and said: “Kronstadt is in flames.”
In one of the halls which were used for exclusive banquets, there
was a brilliant company invited by Count Tutchkoff, one of the
friends of the Grand Duke Cyril. There were Lord and Lady Elmster,
the Earl of Somerset, Count and Countess Finkenrode, gentlemen
belonging to the German and Austrian embassies, the Marquis du
Caille, and the Princes Tolstoi, Trubetzkoi, Szilaghin, and their ladies.
The Grand Duke and Eva Sorel had come late. The dinner was over,
and the general conversation had ceased. The couples whispered.
The Duke, sitting between Lady Elmster and the Princess Trubetzkoi,
had fallen asleep. However animated the company, this would
happen from time to time; every one knew it, and had become
accustomed to it.
Though he slept, his pose remained erect and careful. From time to
time his lids twitched; the furrow on his forehead deepened so that
it seemed black; his colourless beard was like a fern on the bark of a
tree. One might have suspected that he feigned sleep in order to
listen; but there was a slackness in his features that showed the
uncontrolled muscles of sleep, and lent his face the appearance of a
lemur. On his excessively long, lean hand, which rested on the cloth,
and, like his lids, twitched at times, gleamed a solitaire diamond, the
size of a hazelnut.
A restlessness had stolen over the company. When the rifles outside
began to rattle again, the young Countess Finkenrode arose and
turned frightened glances toward the door. Szilaghin approached her,
and calmed her with a smile. An officer of the guards entered, and
whispered a report to Tutchkoff.
Eva and Wiguniewski sat a little aside, in front of a tall mirror that
reflected a pallid image of them and of a part of the room.
Wiguniewski said to her: “Unhappily the report is vouched for. No
one thought of such a thing.”
“I was told he was in Petrograd,” Eva answered. “In a German
newspaper, moreover, I read a report that he was arrested in
Moscow. And where are your proofs? To condemn Ivan Becker on
hearsay is almost as terrible as the crime of which he is accused.”
Wiguniewski took a letter from his pocket, looked about him
carefully, unfolded it, and said: “From Nice he wrote this to a friend
of his who is also my friend. I am afraid it puts an end to all doubt.”
Painfully, and with many hesitations, he translated the Russian words
into French. “I am no longer what I was. Your suppositions are not
groundless, and the rumours have not lied. Announce and confirm it
to all who have set their hopes on me and given me their trust on
definite conditions. A terrible time lies behind me. I could not go
farther on my old and chosen path. You have been deceived in me,
even as a phantom has misled me. In a case like mine it requires
greater courage and strength to confess sincerely, and to wound
those who had put their faith and trust in me, than to mount the
scaffold and give up one’s life. Gladly would I have suffered death
for the ideas to which all my thoughts and feelings have been
devoted hitherto. All of you know that. For I had already sacrificed to
them my possessions, my peace, my youth, my liberty. But now
when I have come to recognize these ideas as destructive errors, I
must not serve them for another hour. I fear neither your
accusations nor your contempt. I follow my inner light and the God
that is within. There are three truths that have guided me in that
searching of my soul which led to my conversion: It is a sin to resist;
it is a sin to persuade others to resistance; it is a sin to shed the
blood of man. I know all that threatens me; I know the isolation that
will be mine. I am prepared for all persecutions. Do what you must,
even as I do what I must.”
After a long silence Eva said: “That is he. That is his voice; that is
the bell whose chime none can resist. I believe him and I believe in
him.” She threw a sombre glance at the face of that sleeper beside
the radiant board.
Wiguniewski crushed the letter, and thrust forward his chin with a
bitter gesture. “His three truths,” he replied, “will be as effective
against our cause as three army divisions of Cossacks. They will
suffice to fill the dungeons on both sides of the Urals, to unman our
youth, to bury our hopes. Each one is a whip that will smite unto the
earth an hundred thousand awakened spirits. Crime? It is worse; it is
the tragedy of all this land. Three truths!” He laughed through his
compressed teeth. “Three truths, and a blood-bath I will begin that
will make those of Bethlehem and St. Bartholomew seem jests. You
may look at me. I do not weep; I laugh. Why should I weep? I shall
go home, summon the popes, and give them this rag; and let them
made amulets of it to distribute among those who wait for salvation.
Perhaps that will suffice them.”
Eva’s face grew hard. An evil fascination still drew her eyes toward
that sleeper’s face. Upon the edges of her lips hovered a morbid
smile; the skin of her cheek glimmered like an opal. “Why should he
not follow the command of his soul?” she asked, and for a moment
turned her diademed brow toward the prince. “Is it not better that a
man should express and embody himself completely than that many
hundreds of thousands be helped in the dreary mediocrity of their
rigid lives? He has said it in his own beautiful way: ‘I follow the inner
light and the God that is within.’ How many can do that? How many
dare? And now I understand something he once said”—more
penetratingly she looked into that sleeper’s face—“‘one must bow
down before that!’ So that was in his mind. Strange ploughs are
passing over this earth of yours, prince. In its lacerated body there
streams a darkness into which one would like to plunge in order to
be born again. A primitive breath is there, and chaos; there the
elements thunder and the most terrible dream becomes reality, an
epic reality of immemorial ages. Of such life I once had no
perception, except in some great marble in which a nameless woe
had become rigid and eternal. I feel as though I were looking back
on this scene from the height of centuries to come or from a star,
and as though everything were vision.” All this she said in a
trembling voice and with an impassioned melancholy.
Wiguniewski, who had been a constant witness of her inner
transformations for months past, was not surprised at her speech.
His eyes, too, sought the sleeper’s face. With a deep breath he said,
“Yesterday a student of nineteen, Semyon Markovitch, heard of Ivan
Becker’s recanting and shot himself in his room. I went there and
saw the body. If you had seen that dead boy, Eva, you would speak
differently. A little differently, at all events. Did you ever see a lad lie
in his coffin with a little black wound in his temple? He was charming
and innocent as a girl, and yet he could experience this unspeakable
woe and entertain this determined despair at a loss beyond
measure.”
A shiver passed over Eva’s shoulders, and she smiled with a
glittering feverishness that made her seem strangely possessed and
heartless. The Prince continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “No doubt
there’s a good deal that is alluring about this letter. Why shouldn’t a
man like Ivan Becker render his breach of faith less repulsive by
some plausible psychological excuses? I am ready to grant you that
he acted neither in conscious hypocrisy nor from any self-seeking
motive. But he wouldn’t be the genuine Russian that he is—
emotional, turbid, fanatical, self-tormenting—if his transformation
were not to entail all the fatal consequences of a systematic and
deliberate treachery. He thinks that what he calls his awakening will
serve mankind. In the meantime, out of blindness and weakness,
confusion and mistaken moral fervour, he rushes into the claws of
the beast that waits mercilessly in every corner and nook of Europe
seeking to destroy and annihilate. And what I am doing now is
passing a most charitable judgment. We happen to know that he has
opened negotiations with the Holy Synod and is corresponding
eagerly with the secret cabinet. Here in Moscow, as well as in Kiev
and Odessa, arrests have been made in rapid succession which must
be attributed to him. As things are, he alone could have furnished
the information without which the authorities would not have
ventured on these steps. These are facts that speak for themselves.”
Eva pressed her right hand against her bosom, and stared, as
though fascinated, into the air where she saw a vision that caused
her to feel a rapidly alternating horror and ecstasy. Her lips moved
as though to put a question, but she restrained herself.
With large and earnest eyes she looked at Wiguniewski, and,
whispered: “I suddenly have a longing that burns my heart, but I do
not know after what. I should like to climb a mountain far beyond
the snowline; or fare on a ship out into uncharted seas; or fly above
the earth in an aeroplane. No, it is none of these things. I should like
to go into a forest, to a lonely chapel, and cast myself down and
pray. Will you go on such a pilgrimage with me? To some far
monastery in the steppes?”
Wiguniewski was puzzled. Passion and sadness were in her words,
but also a challenge that wounded him. Before he could formulate
an answer, the Marquis du Caille and Prince Szilaghin approached
them.
The sleeper opened his eyes and showed their slothful stare.
 VIII
The costumer and the wig-maker had arrived in Edgar Lorm’s study.
He was going to try on his costume for the rôle of Petrucchio. “The
Taming of the Shrew” was soon to be given with new scenery and a
new cast, and he looked forward to playing the impetuous and
serene tamer.
Judith, sitting on a low stool in her over-dainty sitting-room, her
arms folded on her knees, heard his resonant voice, although three
closed doors separated them. He was quarrelling; tradesmen and
assistants always enraged him. He was difficult to satisfy, for what
he demanded of himself he also required of others—the tensest
exertion and the most conscientious toil.
Judith was bored. She opened a drawer filled with ribands, turned
over the contents, tried the effect of different ribands in her hair, and
looked at herself in the glass with a frown. That occupation tired her
too. She left the drawer open and the many-coloured silks scattered
about.
She went through the rooms, knocked at Lorm’s door and entered.
She was surprised at his appearance. In the lace-trimmed, velvet
doublet, the pied hose, the broad-brimmed hat with its adventurous
feather, the brown locks of the wig that fell to his shoulders, he
looked a victor, handsome, bold, fascinating. And his very way of
standing there was art and interpretation; the whole world was his
stage.
Like soldiers at attention, the costumer and wig-maker stood before
him and smiled admiringly.
Judith smiled too. She had not expected to find him in a new
transformation, and she was grateful for the experience. She came
to him, and touched his cheeks with her fingers. His eyes, still lit by
the ardour of the poet’s creation, asked after her desire. He was
accustomed to have her express some wish whenever she
condescended to a caress. With her arm she drew his head down a
little and whispered: “I want you to make me a present, Edgar.”
He laughed, embarrassed and amused. The good-natured
observation of the two strangers was painful to him. He drew her
arm through his and led her to the library. “What shall I give you,
child?” The bold fervour of Petrucchio which, with the donning of the
costume, had passed into him, faded from his face.
“Anything you please,” Judith answered, “but something remarkable
that will delight me and something that you are fond of.”
He smacked his lips, looked merry and yielding, glanced about him,
took up one object after another, pushed his chin forward and
reflected, mimicked a whole scale of emotions from puzzled
helplessness to anxious serviceableness, and finally struck his
forehead with a roguish and graceful gesture. “I have it,” he cried.
He opened a little cabinet, and with a bow gave Judith a watch of
very old Nürnberger make. Its case was of exquisite old gold filigree
work.
“How charming,” said Judith, and balanced the watch on the palm of
her hand.
Lorm said: “Now amuse yourself admiring it. I must go and send
those fellows away.” With a swift, resilient tread he left the room.
Judith sat down at the great oak table, looked at the engraved
ornamentation on the watch, pressed a little spring, and, when the
oval sides of the case flew open, gazed into the ancient, lifeless
works. “I shall take it all apart,” she determined. “But not now; to-
night. I want to see what’s inside.” And she looked forward with a
glow to the evening hour when she would take the watch apart.
But the present, charming as it was, did not suffice her. When Lorm
returned in modern dress, a clean-shaven gentleman and husband,
she held out the watch-case from which she had slipped the works,
and begged or rather commanded him, who was now the man of
common clay: “Fill it with gold pieces, Edgar. That’s what I want.”
She was all voracity, avidity, desire.
Lorm lowered his head in vicarious shame. In a drawer of his desk
he had a little roll of gold-pieces. He filled the watch-case and gave
it to her. Then he said, “While you were out driving to-day, your
brother Wolfgang called. He stayed about an hour. He seems to have
a rather sterile nature. It amused me—the difficulty he had in
placing me in some social category whose ways he understood. He’s
a born bureaucrat.”
“What did he want?” Judith asked.
“He wanted to consult you about Christian. He’s coming again to do
so.”
Judith arose. Her face was pale and her eyes glittered. Her
knowledge of Christian’s changed way of life was derived from a talk
she had had with Crammon during his visit to Berlin, from the letters
of a former friend, and from messages that had come to her directly
from her parents. The first news had awakened a rage in her that
gnawed at her soul. Sometimes when she was alone and thought of
it she gritted her teeth and stamped her feet. Further details she
heard made the very thought of him fill her to the brim with
bitterness. If she had not possessed the gift of forcing herself to
forgetfulness, of commanding it so successfully as to annihilate the
things she desired not to be, her inner conflicts over this matter
would have made her ill and morose. Every enforced recollection
awakened that rage in her, and recoiled against him who caused it.
Lorm knew and feared this fact. His instinct told him, moreover, that
what Judith feared in Christian’s actions was an evil caricature of her
own fate; for she did not conceal the fact from him that she
considered herself as one who had voluntarily fallen from her
original station. But he thought too modestly of himself to resent this
attitude of hers. To tremble at the opinions of people had become a
part of her innermost nature. Although she was no longer upheld by
the elements that had once nourished her aristocratic consciousness,
her being was still rooted in them, and she felt herself degraded in
her new life.
But even this could not explain the wild fury to which she yielded at
any mention of Christian’s name.
Her attitude was that of a cat at bay. “I don’t want him to come
back,” she hissed. “I don’t want to hear anything about that man.
I’ve told you that a hundred times. But you’re always so flabby, and
go in for everything. Couldn’t you have told him that I won’t listen?
Get a car and drive to him at once. Forbid him absolutely to enter
my house or to write me. But no! You’re such a coward. I’ll write to
him myself. I’ll tell him that his visits will always be a pleasure to me,
although his sudden fondness is queer enough, but that I will not,
under any circumstances, listen to a word about that man.”
Lorm did not dare to contradict her. With gentle superiority he said:
“I don’t understand your extreme bitterness. No one considers your
brother Christian to have done anything criminal. He is very
eccentric, at the worst. He harms no one. What injury has he done
you? Weren’t you and he very fond of each other? You used always
to speak of him with an affectionate and proud emphasis. I don’t
understand.”
She became livid and drunk with rage. “Of course,” she jeered, “you!
Does anything touch you? Have you any sense left for anything but
grease-paint and old rags? Have you any conception of what those
words stood for—Christian Wahnschaffe? What they meant? You in
your world of lies and hollowness—what should you understand?”
Lorm came a step nearer to her. He looked at her compassionately.
She drew back with a gesture of aversion.
She was beating, beating the fish.
 IX
Karen Engelschall said: “You don’t have to worry; there’s no chance
of his getting back before night. If he does, I’ll tell him you’re an
acquaintance of mine.”
She gave Girke a slow and watchful look. She sat by the window,
resting her body with the broad satisfaction of those women of the
people to whom sitting still is an achievement and a luxury. She was
sewing a baby’s shift.
“Anyhow we don’t have much to talk about,” she continued with a
malicious enjoyment. “You’ve said your say. They offer me sixty
thousand if I go and disappear. That’s all right enough. But if I wait
they’ll go a good bit higher. I’m somebody now. I’ll think it over; you
can come back next week.”
“You should think very seriously,” Girke replied in his official manner.
“Think of your future. This may be the highest offer. Six months ago
you didn’t dream of such a thing. It’s very pleasant to live on one’s
own income; it’s every one’s ideal. It is very foolish of you to lose
such an opportunity.”
With her malicious smile she bent lower over her work. An undefined
well-being made her press her knees together and close her eyes.
Then she looked up, swept her tousled, yellow hair from her
forehead, and said: “I’d have to be a bigger fool than I am to be
taken in. D’you think I don’t know how rich he is? If he wanted to
buy me off he’d make your offer look like dirt. Why shouldn’t I make
a good bargain? No, I’m no fool. This here, as you say, is my great
chance, but not the way you think. I’m going to wait and see. If I’m
wrong, well, I done it to myself.”
Girke shifted his position uncomfortably. He looked at his watch, and
then with his prying eyes regarded the room with its common wall-
paper, furniture, and carpet.
“I can tell you one thing that’ll please you, and I don’t mind because
it don’t change nothing,” Karen Engelschall said. “His people are all
wrong if they think it’s on my account that he’s acting the way he
does, and that he’d have stayed with them except for me. ’Course, I
could make fools of you all and pretend he’d changed his life on my
account. What good would that do? A new-born child could see that
there’s something queer and crazy about it. So why should I go and
play-act in front of you, when I myself just sit here and wonder and
wonder!”
“That’s very true,” said Girke, amazed at her frankness. “I
understand, and what you say interests me immensely. I have
always said that we could count on the most valuable assistance
from you. Now you would do me a very real service if you would
answer a few questions. I should not, of course, forget your
assistance but show my appreciation very practically.”
Karen giggled quietly. “I believe you,” she answered. “You’d like to
spy around a bit and then go and report. No, I’m not fond of that
sort o’ thing. There’re other places where you can hear a lot.
There’re people what can tell you all you want to know. There’s that
friend of his, that Voss: Go to him!” The name brought rage to her
eyes. “He acts as if there wasn’t nothing he didn’t know in the world,
and treats a person so mean and low that you’d like to punch his
dirty nose for him. Ask him who gets the money. I don’t, but Voss
ought to be able to tell you.”
“I’m afraid you overestimate that,” said Girke, with his most expert
air. “There is no doubt that the man in question is at the bottom of
all the trouble. But things being as they are, even ten times the
amount that satisfies his greed would be inconsiderable. I can give
you that very definite assurance. There must be other and quite
unaccounted drains on his purse.”
“I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying there,” Karen
answered, and showed her small, yellow, evil teeth. “Maybe you’d
like to search my wardrobe or my mattress here, eh? Maybe you
think this place is too fine or that I got expensive clothes and
jewels? And did you ever see that hole over at Gisevius’s where the
elegant gentleman himself sleeps? We’re living in luxury, we are!
Why, the very mice starve here. I found one dead in a corner over
there the other day. Most people hate mice, but they don’t bother
him. And it’s pitiful for a man that’s lived like he has. According to
what people say, he must have been just like the emperor. He had
castles and game-preserves and motor cars and the handsomest
women, and they just threw themselves at his head. And never no
trouble and no worry, more of everything than he could use, and
money and clothes and eating and drinking and friends and servants
and everything. And now he’s at Gisevius’s, where the mice die of
hunger.”
Her burning eyes were fixed on Girke, but in reality she saw him no
longer. She was no longer speaking to this unknown man, whose
professional curiosity left her quite unmoved. She was relieving
herself by breaking the convulsive silence of her lonely days. Her
hands lay on her lap like empty shells, and the child’s garment had
slipped to the floor. Her tongue was unleashed. The words poured
forth—words born of her brooding, words familiar to her through
many days and nights of strangeness and amazement. In her voice
there was something metallic, and in her face the slack muscles
grew taut.
Girke listened tensely and took mental notes. He noticed that he
need ask no questions now. The machine, fed by a secret fire, had
started itself.
Karen went on: “He comes here and sits down and looks around. He
sits down and opens a book and studies. Then he puts the book
away and looks around again. Then he notices me sudden like, as if
I’d just been blown in. If only he don’t begin asking questions again,
I says to myself. Then I say to him: ‘There was a big noise in the
street to-day.’ Or I say: ‘Isolde’s hands are swollen; we got to have
some ointment. My mother was here,’ I says maybe, ‘and told me of
a place on Alexander Square where you can buy linen cheap.’ He just
nods. Then I put on the water for the coffee, and he tells me how a
mangy dog followed him for a long time and how he fed it, and that
he’d been to a workingmen’s meeting in Moabit and had talked to
some people. But he don’t tell me much, and acts kind of ashamed.
I’m satisfied so long as he don’t ask questions. But his eyes get that
expression in ’em, and then he asks if my time wasn’t coming
soon,”—brutally she pointed to her distended body—“and if I wasn’t
glad, and how it was the other times, and if I was glad then, and if
I’d like to have this or that. And he brings me apples and cake and
chocolate and a shawl and a fur-piece for my neck. ‘Look, Karen,’ he
says, ‘what I’ve brought you,’ and he kisses my hand. Kisses my
hand, I tell you, ’sif I was God knows what, and he didn’t know
about me. Did you ever hear of anybody kissing the hand of a
woman like me?”
She was pale as she asked the question; her features were distorted,
and the helmet of her yellow hair seemed to rise. Girke’s eyes
became blank and stony. “Very remarkable,” he murmured; “most
interesting.”
Karen paid no attention to him. “‘How are you, Karen?’” she mocked
Christian’s voice. “‘Do you want for anything?’ What should I be
wanting? So I get desperate and I says: ‘A runner for the floor or
cretonne curtains for the bedroom. Red cretonne,’ I says, ‘because it
pops into my mind. Sometimes we go out together to Humboldthain
or the Oranienburger Gate. He thinks to himself and smiles and says
nothing. The people stare and I get a goose-flesh. I’d like to scream
out at ’em: ‘Yes, there he is, the great man, that’s him walking with
me. And this is me—a woman of the streets that’s going to have a
baby. A fine couple, eh? Mighty fine! We’re a grand couple, we are!’
Sometimes that Voss comes and they talk in the other room; or
anyhow Voss talks. He knows how to, too; better’n any preacher.
And once there was a baron here, a young blond fellow. That was a
funny business. He took to crying, and cried and cried like a child.
Christian said nothing, but just sat down by him. You never know
what he’s thinking. Sometimes he walks up and down the room, and
other times he’ll stand and look out of the window. I don’t know
where he goes, and I don’t know where he comes from. Mother says
I’m a fool. She says she’s going to find out what’s what. If she
smells money she sticks like a burr. Only I wish she hadn’t sicked
Niels Heinrich on to me. He gets more shameless all the time. I get
scared when I hear him on the stairs. He begins to cut up rough in
the hall. Last Monday he was here and wanted money. ‘I got none,’ I
says, ‘you go to work.’ He’s learned bricklaying and can earn good
money, but doing nothing suits him better. He told me to shut my
trap or he’d lay me out. Just then Christian came in. Niels Heinrich
glares at him. My legs was shaking, and I draws Christian aside and
says: ‘He wants brass.’ Christian didn’t know what I meant. So I
says: ‘Money.’ And he gave him money, gave him a cool hundred,
and turned and went out. Niels Heinrich followed him; I thought
there’d be a fight. Nothing happened; but it was a nasty business. I
can’t get the scare out of my bones.”
She stopped and panted for breath.
Girke thought it his duty to interpolate: “We have accumulated
sufficient evidence to prove that Niels Heinrich pursues him with
demands for money.”
Karen scarcely listened. Her face grew darker and darker. She put
her hands against her breast, arose clumsily, and looked around in
the room. Her feet were turned inward and her abdomen protruded.
“He comes and he goes, he comes and he goes,” she complained, in
a voice that gradually became almost a scream. “That’s the way it is,
day out and day in. If only he wouldn’t ask questions. It makes me
feel hot and cold. It’s like being searched by a matron. D’you know
how that is? Everything’s turned inside out and everything’s handled.
Awful! And I ought to try to be comfortable here; there’s nothing
better in the world. When you’ve been kicked around like some
stinking animal, you ought to thank God to have a chance to breathe
easy. But to sit and wait and tell how things was at this place and at
that, and how this thing happened and the other—no, I can’t stand
it no more! It’s too much! It’s like splitting a person’s head open!”
She struck her fist against her temple. She seemed an animal, an
animal with all the ugliness of a human soul dead or distorted, a
wicked savage awakened now and untamable.
Girke was confounded. He got up, and pushed the chair, both as a
protection and a weapon, between the woman and himself. He said:
“I won’t take up more of your time. I beg you to consider my
proposition carefully. I shall drop in again some time.” He went with
a sensation as of danger at his back.
Karen hardly observed that she was alone in the room. She brooded.
Her thinking processes were primitive. Two uncertainties tormented
her to the point of morbidness and rage: What impelled Christian to
search her soul and past, again and again, with the same patience,
kindliness, and curiosity? And what inexplicable force made her
answer, explain, relate, and give an accounting of her life?
Every time he began she struggled, but she always yielded to that
force. She always began by turning her face in horror from her own
past. But soon she was forced by an implacable power to embrace
that vision, and everything that she had experienced, everything
that had vanished, all that was desolate, turbid, dark, and dangerous
reappeared with an incomparable vividness. It was her own life, and
yet seemed another’s, who was herself and yet some one else. It
seemed to her that all those desolate, turbid, dark, dangerous things
began over again, doubly terrible, with a foreknowledge of each
day’s disconsolate end.
Forgotten things and places plagued her and emerged terribly from
her consciousness: rooms and beds and walls, cities and streets and
street-corners and public houses and dark halls that led to police
courts; human beings and words, and certain hours and days and
tears and cries; and all terrors and degradations and crimes, all
mockery and wild laughter—all this came back to her, and the past
arose and lacerated her mind.
It was like being in an inconceivably long shaft through which one
had already passed. And now one was commanded to retrace one’s
steps and fetch something that one had forgotten. One resisted
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