XI
Whenever Lorm played, Judith Imhof was in the theatre. But she went neither with her husband nor with Crammon. They broke in upon her mood. She cared very little for Crammon at any time. Unless he was very jocular, he seemed to her insufferable.
She sat in the stalls, and in the entr’actes waved graciously and calmly to Felix and Crammon in their box. She was careless of the amazement of her acquaintances. If any one had the temerity to ask why she sat alone, she answered, “Imhof is annoyed when another is not pleased with something that arouses his enthusiasm. So we go on different paths.”
Inevitably the curious person would ask next: “Then you don’t care for Lorm?” Whereupon she would reply: “Not greatly. He forces me to take a certain interest; but I resent that. I think he’s terribly overrated.”
One day a lady of her acquaintance asked her whether she was happy in her marriage. “I don’t know,” she answered, and laughed. “I haven’t any exact conception of what people mean by happiness.” Her friend then asked her why she had married. “Very simply,” she replied, “because being a young girl got to be such an undelightful situation that I sought to escape from it as soon as possible.” The lady wanted to know whether she didn’t, then, love her husband. “My dear woman,” Judith said, “love! There’s nothing so mischievous as the loose way in which people use that word. Most people, I believe, pretend quite shamelessly when they talk about it, and defend it simply because they don’t want to admit that they’ve been taken in. It’s exactly like the king’s new clothes in the old fable. Every one acts mightily important and enthusiastic, and won’t admit that the poor king is naked to the winds.”
Another time she was asked whether she didn’t yearn to have a child. “A child!” she cried out. “Horrors! Shall I bring forth more food for the worms?”
Once, in company, the conversation turned to the question of one’s sensitiveness to pain. Judith asserted that she could bear any bodily torment without moving a muscle. She was not believed. She procured a long, golden needle, and bade one of the gentlemen pierce her whole arm with it. When he refused in horror, she asked another of stronger nerves who obeyed her. And really she did not twitch a muscle. The blood gathered in a little pool. She smiled.
Felix Imhof could weep at the least excuse. When he had a sick headache he wept. She despised this in him.
The actor took hold of her. She resisted in vain. The spell he cast over her grew ever firmer, more indissoluble. She brooded over it. Was it his transformations that attracted her so?
Although he was forty, his body was as elegant and flexible as polished steel. And like the ringing of steel was his voice. The words were sparks. Under his tread the wooden stage became a palæstra. Nothing clung or whined or crept. Everything was tension, progression, verve, the rhythm of storms. There was no inner weight or weariness. Bugles soared. She agreed with Felix when he said: “There is more of the true content of our age in this man than in all the papers, editorials, pamphlets, and plethoric three-deckers that the press has spewed forth within the past twenty years. He has crowned the living word and made it our king.”
She was impatient to make the personal acquaintance of Lorm. Crammon became the intermediary, and brought the actor to her house. She was amazed at the homeliness of the man’s face. She resented his insignificant, tilted nose and his mediocre forehead. But the spell was not broken. She desired to overlook these details and succeeded. They represented but another transformation of that self which she believed to be so infinitely varied.
He revealed himself as an epicure, with remnants of that greed which marks the man who has risen from humble things. The delights of the table induced in him outbursts of noisy merriment. Over the oysters and the champagne he discussed his worst enemies with benevolence.
He was so changeable of mood that it was exhausting to associate with him. No one opposed him, and this lack of opposition had produced an empty space about him that had almost the guise of loneliness. He himself took it for the solitariness of the soul, and cherished it with a proud pain.
He discoursed only in monologues. He listened only to himself. But he did all that with the innocence of a savage. When others spoke he disappeared in an inner absorption, his eyes assumed a stony look. The part of him that remained conscious was undeviatingly courteous, but this courtesy often had an automatic air. When he came to speak again, he delighted his hearers by his wit, his paradoxes, and his masterly rendition of anecdotes.
He avoided conversation with women. Beauty and coquetry made no impression on him. When women became enthusiastic over him, his expression was one of merely courteous attention, and his thoughts were contemptuous. He had no adventures, and his name occurred in no racy stories. Once out of the theatre, he lived the life of a private gentleman of simple habits.
With cool but delicate perceptivity Judith examined the conformation of his character. She who was utterly without swift aspiration, whose dry nature perceived only the utilitarian, only the expedient, who had been stifled in mere forms from her girlhood, and esteemed nothing in others but the external, garments, jewels, display, title, name—she was like one possessed and charged with an electric fluid within three days. She was fascinated primarily by external things: his eye, his voice, his fame. But there was one deeper thing: the illusion of his art.
She knew what she was doing. Her steps were scrupulously calculated.
One day Lorm complained of the disorganization in his life, the frightful waste of his substance. It was at table, and he was answered by empty phrases. But Judith, when she succeeded in having him to herself later, took up the subject again. She persuaded him to describe the persons whom he held responsible, and expressed doubts of their trustworthiness. She disapproved of arrangements that he had made, gave him advice that he found excellent, and reproached him with the neglect of which he confessed himself guilty. “I wade in money and suffocate in debt,” he sighed. “In twenty years I’ll be an old man and a poor devil.”
Her practical insight filled him with naïve admiration. He said to her: “I’ve been told once in a while that there are such women in the world as you, but I never believed in their existence. All I’ve ever seen were full of empty exactions and florid emotions.”
“You’re unjust,” she replied and smiled. “Every woman has some field in which she has character and firmness, but the world pays no attention. Then, too, our relation to the world is usually a false one.”
“That is a wise remark,” said Lorm in a satisfied voice. He was a miser of praise.
From now on he loved to have her draw him into talk concerning his little needs and worries. She examined him in detail, and he was glad to submit. He brought her the bills rendered him by his tradespeople. “They capitalize your inexperience, and cheat you,” was Judith’s judgment of the situation. It made him feel ashamed.
“Have you been lending money?” she asked. It appeared that he had. For years and years he had loaned considerable sums to numerous parasites. Judith shrugged her shoulders. “You might just as well have thrown the money away.”
Lorm answered: “It’s such a bother when they come and beg, and their faces are so unappetizing. I give them what they ask just to be rid of them.”
In this wise their conversations moved wholly within the circle of the prosaic things of daily life. But it was precisely this that Edgar Lorm had missed and needed. It was as new and as moving to him, as the discovery of a rapt and ecstatic soul to a bourgeois becoming aware of poetry and passion.
Judith had a dream. She lay quite naked beside a slippery, icy fish. And she lay with it from choice, and snuggled close to its cold body. But suddenly she began to beat it, for its cool, damp, slippery scales, which had a gleam of silver and were opaline along its back, suddenly inspired in her a witch-like fury. She beat and beat the creature, until she lost consciousness and awoke exhausted.
An excursion into the valley of the Isar was arranged. Crammon went, and Felix, a young friend of the latter, Lorm and Judith. They took their coffee in the garden of an inn, and on the way back, which led through woods, they went in couples, Lorm and Judith being the last. “I’ve lost my gold cigarette case,” Lorm announced suddenly, examining his pocket, “I’ve got to go back the last part of the way. I know I had it when we were in the village.” It was an object precious in itself, and to which he attached a great value because it had been given him by a king who had been devoted to him in an enthusiastic friendship in his youth, and so it was irreplaceable.
Judith nodded. “I’ll wait here,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m too tired to cover the distance three times.”
He walked back and left Judith standing there, leaning her head against a tree and reflecting. Her forehead wrinkled and her eyes assumed a piercing look. It was silent in the wood; no breeze stirred, no bird cried, no animal rustled in the bushes. Time passed. Driven not at all by impatience, but by her thoughts, which were both violent and decisive, she finally left her place, and walked in the direction from which Lorm would have to come. When she had been walking for a while, she saw something golden gleaming in the moss. It was the cigarette case, which she picked up calmly.
Lorm came back sorely vexed. He was silent, and as he walked beside her, she quietly presented the case on her flat hand. He made a gesture of joyous surprise, and she had to tell him how she had found it.
For a while he seemed to be struggling with himself. Suddenly he said: “How much easier life would be with you.”
Judith answered with a smile: “You talk of it as of something unattainable.”
“I believe it to be so,” he murmured, with lowered head.
“If you’re thinking of my marriage,” Judith said, still smiling, “I consider your expression exaggerated. The way out would be simple.”
“I wasn’t thinking of your marriage, but of your wealth.”
“Will you tell me your meaning more clearly.”
“At once.” He looked about him, and went up to a tree. “Do you see that little beetle? Look how busily he works to climb the height before him. He has probably worked his way up a considerable distance to-day. No doubt he started before dawn. When he’s on top, he will have accomplished something. But if I take him between my fingers now and place him at the top, then the very path which his own labour has dug becomes a thing of no value to him. That’s the way it is with beetles and also with men.”
Judith considered. “Comparisons must halt. That’s their prerogative, you know.” She spoke with gentle mockery. “I don’t understand why one should reject another, simply because that other doesn’t come with empty hands. It’s a funny notion.”
“Between a hand that is empty, and one that commands immeasurable treasures, there is a fatal difference,” Lorm said with deep earnestness. “I have worked my way up from poverty. You have no faintest notion of the meaning of that word. All that I am and have, I owe to the immediate exertions of my body and my brains. By your birth you have been accustomed all your life to buy the bodies and the brains of others. And though you had a thousand times more instinct and vision for practical things and for the necessities of a sane life than you have, yet you do not and could not comprehend the profoundly moral and rightly revered relation of accomplishment to reward. Your adventitious advantages have constantly made it possible for you to ignore this relation, and to substitute for it an arbitrary will. To me your wealth would be paralysis, a mockery and a spectre.”
He looked at her with head thrown back.
“And so you think our case hopeless?” Judith asked, pale and defiant.
“Since I cannot and dare not expect you to abandon your millions and share the fate of a play-actor, it does indeed seem hopeless.”
Judith’s face was quite colourless. “Let us go,” she said; “the others will remark our absence, and I dislike being gossiped about.”
Swiftly and silently they walked on. They came to a clearing and saw beneath a black rampart of clouds the throbbing, crimson disc of the sun. Judith stared into it with raging fury. For the first time her will had encountered a still stronger will. It was rage that filled her eyes with tears, rage that wrung from her discordant laughter. When Lorm looked at her in pained surprise, she turned away and bit her lip.
“I’m capable of doing it,” she said to herself in her rage. And the impulse hardened into a stubborn determination: “I will! I will!”