XVI
Letitia with the countess and her whole train moved into a magnificently furnished apartment on Prince Bismarck Street near the Reichstag. Crammon took rooms in the Hotel de Rome. He didn’t like the modern Berlin hotels, with their deceptive veneer of luxury. He didn’t, indeed, like the city, and his stay in it gave him a daily sense of discomfort. Even when he strolled Unter den Linden or in the Tiergarten he was an image of joylessness. The collar of his fur-coat was turned up, and of his face nothing was visible but his morose eyes and his small but rather ignobly shaped nose.
The solitary walks increased his hypochondria more and more.
“Child, you are ruining me,” he said to Letitia one Sunday morning, as she outlined to him her programme for the week’s diversions.
She looked at him in astonishment. “But auntie gets twenty thousand a year from the head of the house of Brainitz,” she cried. “You’ve heard her say so herself.”
“I’ve heard,” Crammon replied. “But I’ve seen nothing. Money is something that one has to see in order to have faith in it.”
“Oh, what a prosaic person you are!” Letitia said. “Do you think auntie is lying?”
“Not exactly. But her personal relations to arithmetic may be called rather idealistic. From her point of view a cipher more or less matters no more than a pea more or less in a bag of peas. But a cipher is something gigantic, my dear, something demonic. It is the great belly of the world; it is mightier than the brains of an Aristotle or the armies of an empire. Reverence it, I beseech you.”
“How wise you are, how wise,” Letitia said, sadly. “By the way,” she added in a livelier tone, “auntie is ill. She has heart trouble. The doctor saw her and wrote her a prescription; a new remedy that he’s going to try on her—a mixture of bromine and calcium.”
“Why precisely bromine and calcium?” Crammon asked irritably.
“Oh, well, bromine is calming and calcium is stimulating,” Letitia chattered, quite at random, hesitated, stopped, and broke into her charming laughter. Crammon, like a school-teacher, tried for a while to preserve his dignity, but finally joined in her laughter. He threw himself into a deep armchair, drew up a little table on which was a bowl of fruit and little golden knives, and began to peel an apple. Letitia, sitting opposite him with a closed book in her hand, watched him with delicate and cunning attention. His graceful gestures pleased her. The contrast he afforded between plumpness and grace of movement always delighted her.
“I am told that you’re flirting with Count Egon Rochlitz,” Crammon said, while he ate his apple with massive zest. “I should like to sound a warning. The man is a notorious and indiscriminate Don Juan; all he requires is hips and a bosom. Furthermore, he is up to the eyes in debt; the only hope of his creditors is that he makes a rich marriage. Finally, he is a widower and the father of three small girls. Now you are informed.”
“It’s awfully nice and kind of you to tell me,” Letitia replied. “But if I like the man, why should your moral scruples keep me from continuing to like him? Nearly all men chase after women; all men have debts; very few have three little daughters, and I think that’s charming. He is clever, cultivated, and distinguished, and has the nicest voice. A man who has an agreeable voice can’t be quite bad. But I’m not proposing to marry him. Surely you’re not such a bad, stubborn old stepfather that you think I mean to marry every man who ... who, well, who has an agreeable voice? Or are you afraid, you wicked miser, that I’ll try to extract a dowry from you? I’m sure that’s the cause of your very bad humour. Come, Bernard, confess! Isn’t it so?”
Smiling she stood in front of him with a jesting motion of command. She touched his forehead with the index-finger of one hand; the other she raised half threateningly, half solemnly.
Crammon said: “Child, you are once more omitting the respect due me. Consider my whitening locks, my years and experience. Be humble and learn of me, and don’t mock at your venerable progenitor. My humour? Well, it isn’t the best in the world, I admit. Ah, it was better once. You seem not to know that somewhere in this city, far beyond our haunts, in its slums and morasses, there lives one who was dear to me above all men—Christian Wahnschaffe. You too, in some hoary antiquity, threw out your line after him. Do you remember? Ah, how long ago that is! That would have been a catch. And I, ass that I was, opposed that charming, little intrigue. Perhaps everything might have turned out differently. But complaint is futile. Everything is over between us. There is no path for me to where he is; and yet my soul is driven and goaded toward him, and while I sit here in decent comfort, I feel as though I were committing a scoundrelly action.”
Letitia had opened her eyes very wide while he spoke. It was the first time since the days at Wahnschaffe Castle that any one had spoken to her of Christian. His image arose, and she felt within her breast the faint beating of the wings of dread. There was a sweetness in that feeling and a poignancy.... One had to be as capable of forgetting as she was, in order to be able to recapture for a moment, in the deep chiming of a memoried hour, the keen emotion of a long ago.
She questioned him. At first he answered reluctantly, sentence by sentence; then, urged on by her impatience, his narrative flowed on. The utter astonishment of Letitia flattered him; he painted his picture in violent colours. Her delicate face mirrored the fleeting emotions of her soul. In her responsive imagination and vibrant heart everything assumed concreteness and immediate vividness. She needed no interpretations; they were all within her. She gazed into that unknown darkness full of presage and full of understanding. In truth, it all seemed familiar to her, familiar like a poem, as though she had lived with Christian all that time, and she knew more than Crammon could tell her, infinitely more, for she grasped the whole, its idea and form, its fatefulness and pain. She glowed and cried: “I must go to him.” But picturing that meeting, she grew frightened, and imagined a rapt look she would use, and Crammon’s lack of intensity annoyed her, and his whine of complaint seemed senseless to her.
“I always felt,” she said, with gleaming eyes, “that there was a hidden power in him. Whenever I had wicked little thoughts and he looked at me, I grew ashamed. He could read thoughts even then, but he did not know it.”
“I have heard you say cleverer things than you are doing now,” Crammon said, mockingly. But her enthusiasm moved him, and there welled up in him a jealousy of all the men who stretched out their hands after her.
“I shall go to him,” she said, smiling, “and ease my heart in his presence.”
“You were wiser in those days when you played at ball in that beautiful room while the lightning flashed,” Crammon murmured, lost in memories. “Has madness overtaken you, little girl, that you would act the part of a Magdalene?”
“I’d like, just once, to live for a month in utter loneliness,” Letitia said, yearningly.
“And then?”
“Then perhaps I should understand the world. Ah, everything is so mysterious and so sad.”
“Youth! Youth! Thy words are fume and folly!” Crammon sighed, and reached for a second apple.
At this point the dressmaker arrived with a new evening gown for Letitia. She withdrew to her room, and after a little while she reappeared, excited by her frock, and demanding that Crammon admire her, since she felt worthy of admiration. Yet a patina of melancholy shimmered on her, and even while she imagined the admiring looks that would soon be fixed on her—for Crammon’s did not suffice her—she dreamed with a sense of luxury of renunciation and of turning from the world.
And while she went to her aunt to collect the tribute of that lady’s noisier admiration, she still dreamed of renunciation and of turning from the world.
A bunch of roses was brought her. But even while she gave herself up to their beauty and fragrance with a characteristic completeness, she grew pale and thought of Christian’s hard and sombre life; and she determined to go to him. Only that night there was a ball at the house of Prince Radziwill.
There she met Wolfgang Wahnschaffe, but avoided him with an instinctive timidity. She was a great success. Her nature and fate had reached a peak of life and exercised an assured magic from which, in innocent cunning, she wrung all possible advantages.
On the way home in the motor she asked Crammon: “Tell me, Bernard, doesn’t Judith live in Berlin too? Do you ever hear from her? Is she happy with her actor? Why don’t we call on her?”
“No one will prevent you from calling on her,” answered Crammon. The snow was falling thickly. “She lives in Matthäikirch Street. I cannot tell you whether she is happy; it doesn’t interest me. One would have a lot to do if one insisted on finding out whether the women who drag our friends to the nuptial couch discover the game to have been worth the candle or not. One thing is certain—Lorm is no longer what he was, the incomparable and unique. I once called him the last prince in a world doomed to hopeless vulgarization. That is all over. He is going downhill, and therefore I avoid him. There is nothing sadder on earth than a man who deteriorates and an artist who loses himself. And it is the woman’s fault. Ah, yes, you may laugh—it is her fault.”
“How cruel you are, and how malevolent,” said Letitia, and sleepily leaned her cheek against his shoulder.
She determined to visit Judith. It seemed to her like a preparation for that other and more difficult visit, which she might thus delay for a little while, and to which her courage was not yet equal. It lured her when she thought of it as an adventure; but a voice within her told her that she must not let it be one.