XXI
The sweetishly luring waltz arose. Amadeus Voss ordered champagne. “Drink, Lucile,” he said, “drink, Ingeborg! Life is short, and the flesh demands its delight; and what comes after is the horror of hell.”
He leaned back in his chair and compressed his lips. The two ladies, dressed with the typical extravagance of the Berlin cocotte, giggled. “The dear little doctor is as crazy as they’re made,” one of the two said. “What’s that rot he’s talking again? Is it meant to be indecent or gruesome? You never can tell.”
The other lady remarked deprecatingly: “He’s had a wonderful dinner, he’s smoking a Henry Clay, he’s in charming company, and he talks about the horror of hell. You don’t need us nor the Esplanade for that! I don’t like such expressions. Why don’t you pull yourself together, and try to be normal and good-natured and to have a little spirit, eh?”
They both laughed. Voss blinked his eyes in a bored way. The sweetishly luring waltz ended with an unexpected crash. The naked arms and shoulders, the withering faces of young men, the wrinkled corruption of faces more aged—all blended in the tobacco fumes into a glimmer as of mother of pearl. Visitors to the city came in from the street. They stared into the dazzling room half greedily and half perplexed. Last of all a young girl entered and remained standing at the door. Amadeus Voss jumped up. He had recognized Johanna Schöntag.
He went up to her and bowed. Taken by surprise she smiled with an eagerness that she at once regretted. He asked her questions. She gave a start, as though something were snapping within her, and turned cold eyes upon him. She shuddered at him in memory of her old shudders. Her face was more unbeautiful than ever, but the charm of her whole personality more compelling.
She told him that she had arrived two days ago. At present she was in a hotel, but on the morrow she would move to the house of a cousin near the Tiergarten.
“So you have rich relations?” Voss said tactlessly. He smiled patronizingly, and asked her how long she intended to stay in this nerve-racking city.
Probably throughout the autumn and winter, she told him. She added that she didn’t feel Berlin to be nerve-racking, only tiresome and trivial.
He asked her whether he would have the pleasure of seeing her soon, and remarked that if Wahnschaffe knew she was here, he would assuredly look her up.
He talked with an insistent courtesy and worldly coolness that had apparently been recently acquired. Johanna’s soul shrank from him. When he named Christian’s name she grew pale, and looked toward the stairs as though seeking help. In her trouble the little nursery rhyme came to her which was often her refuge in times of trouble: “If only some one kind and strong, would come this way and take me along.” Then she smiled. “Yes, I want to see Christian,” she said suddenly; “that is why I have come.”
“And I?” Voss asked. “What are you going to do with me? Am I to be discarded? Can’t I be of assistance to you in any way? Couldn’t we take a little walk together? There’s a good deal to be discussed.”
“Nothing that I know of,” Johanna replied. She wrinkled her forehead like one who was helpless and at bay. To get rid of the burden of his insistence courteously, she promised to write him; but she had scarcely uttered the words when they made her very unhappy. A promise had something very binding to her. It made her feel a victim; and the uncanny tension which this man caused her to feel paralyzed her will, and yet had a morbid attraction for her.
Voss drove home in a motor car. His mind was filled by one gnawing, flaring thought: Had she been Christian’s mistress or not? From the moment he had seen Johanna again, this question had assumed an overwhelming importance in his mind. It involved possession and renunciation, ultimate veracity and deceit; it involved inferences that inflamed his senses, and possibilities that threatened to be decisive in his life. He fixed his thoughts upon the image of Johanna’s face, and studied it like a cabalistic document. He argued and analysed and shredded motives and actions like a pettifogger. For his darkened life had again been entered by one who caused strange entanglements and enchainments and focused all decisions in one point. He felt the presage of storms such as he had not ever known.
Next morning, when he came from his bath and was about to sit down to breakfast, his housekeeper said to him: “Fräulein Engelschall is here to see you. She’s in the sitting-room.”
He swallowed his chocolate hastily and went in. Karen sat at a round table, and looked at photographs that were lying on it. They all belonged to Christian and were pictures of friends, of landscapes and houses, of dogs and horses.
Karen wore a very simple suit of blue. Her yellow hair was hidden by a grey felt hat adorned by a silk riband. Her face was thin, her skin pale, her expression sombre.
She disdained to use any introductory turns of speech and said: “I’ve come to ask you if you know about things. He might have told you first; he didn’t tell me till yesterday. So you don’t know? Well, you couldn’t have done nothing about it either. He’s given away all his money. All the money he had, he’s given to his father. The rest too, that came in by the year, I don’t know how many hundred thousands—he’s refused that too. He kept his claim to just a little,—not much more than to keep from starving, and, by what he told me, he can’t use that the way he wants to. And you know how he is; he won’t change. It’s just like when the sexton’s through ringing the church bell; you can’t get back the sound of the chiming. It makes me feel like screaming, like just lying down and screaming. I says to him: ‘My God, what’ve you gone and done?’ And he made a face, as if he was surprised to see any one get excited over a little thing like that. And now I ask you: Can he do that? Is it possible? Does the law allow it?”
Amadeus was quite silent. His face was ashen. Yellow sparks leaped behind his lenses. Twice he passed his hand over his mouth.
Karen got up and walked up and down. “That’s the way things are,” she muttered, and with grim satisfaction her eyes wandered about the elegant room. “First on the box and then in the dirt. That’s the way it is. Far’s I’m concerned I could make my bargain now—if only it’s not too late. Maybe it is, maybe I’ve waited too long. We’ll see. Anyhow, what good’s the money to me? Maybe I’d better wait a while longer.” She stepped to the other side of the table, and caught sight of a photograph which she had not yet seen. It was a picture of Frau Wahnschaffe, and showed her in full evening dress, wearing her famous rope of pearls which, though slung twice, hung down over her bosom.
Karen grasped the picture, and regarded it with raised brows. “Who’s this? Looks like him. His mother, I suppose. Is it his mother?” Voss’s only answer was a nod. In greedy astonishment she went on: “Look at those pearls! Can they be real? Is it possible? Why, they must be the size of a baby’s fist!” In her pale eyes there was a hot glow; her wicked little nether teeth gnawed at her lip: “Can I keep this?” she asked. Voss did not answer. She looked about hastily, wrapped the photograph in a piece of newspaper and slid it under her jacket. “Good Lord, man, why don’t you say something?” She flung the question at Voss brutally. “You look like hell. But don’t you think I feel it too? More than you perhaps. You got legs of your own to stand on like the rest of us!” She gave a cynical laugh, glanced once more at Voss and at the room, and then she went.
For a while Voss sat without moving. Again and again he passed his hand over his mouth; then he jumped up and hurried into the bedroom. He went to the dressing-table on which lay the precious toilet articles that Christian had left behind him—gold-backed brushes and combs, gold-topped flasks, gold cases and boxes for salves and shaving powder. With feverish haste Voss swept these things into a heap, and threw them into a leather hand-bag which he locked and secured in a closet. Then he went back to the sitting-room, and paced up and down with folded arms. His face shrunk more and more like the faces of the dead.
Then he stood still, made the sign of the cross, and said: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”