XXIII
Neither could see the other in the darkness. The heavy shades at the window created a blackness so impenetrable that not even the outlines of things were visible. Neither could see the movements of the other, but they had the sharpest awareness of each other, a horrible and physical awareness, as though they were chained and imprisoned together, forehead to forehead, breath to breath. They lacked no light, for they needed none.
The darkness gave Niels Heinrich a sense of freedom. It gave him an impulse of defiance and boastfulness and shameless self-revealment. It was chaos, massive and terrible. He did not refuse its demand that he should give an accounting of himself. It split and shattered his inward being, and liberated speech. He dared not jeer; he dropped all defences.
The darkness was a maw that spewed forth his deed. He could himself now hear what had happened. Many things seemed new to him as they were uttered. The thought that yonder a man was listening and dragging your vitals out as though you were a dead animal—there was a certain strange stimulation in the thought. He would turn his mind inside out; then at least that man would trouble him no more. There was time enough later to take proper precautions.
As he was saying, then, it was her virginity. There wasn’t no use denying that. Every one knew how a boy like him grew up, with what sort of creatures. Sometimes they were one kind, sometimes another—red or black, sentimental or jolly, a little better, a little lower, but sluttish creatures all. Well, not exactly prostitutes, but mighty near it; on the edge of it—elegant or dirty, fifteen or thirty, every one had a rotten spot. And even if they hadn’t exactly the rotten spot yet, they’d turn rotten under one’s very hands. And what you got, you couldn’t have faith in, and once you had your claws in ’em, it was all over. So that’s the way life went—Male on Monday and Lottie on Tuesday and Trine on Wednesday; but the difference wasn’t as much as you could put on the tip of a knife. Finally, of course, you got to be like an animal that feeds on everything—wheat and tares, clover and thistles. If it burns—all right; if it tastes good—all right.
Virgins? Sure, you met virgins too. But it was all shoddy and pawed over and second-hand. They’d talk of not staying out late and being afraid of the landlady, and of marrying and buying furniture; and on the third Sunday you had ’em as well trained as poodle dogs. And anyhow, you never knew who’d stirred your soup before you. It was all doubtful, and you had no proper belief in it. Even if sometimes you met a better sort, it wasn’t never the best. They’d be coy and kittenish, and there was no naturalness and no honesty. First you had to lie to ’em and make ’em tame, and then when they got scared about being in trouble, they chilled and disgusted you so, you’d like to kill them.
Sailors who had been on long voyages had told him that they got so sick of the salt-meat and the pickled meat that when they landed and happened to meet a lamb or a rabbit, they felt as if they could tear the living animal limb from limb and devour the warm, fresh flesh. That’s what could happen to a man with women; that’s what had happened to him when he’d seen the Jewess. The sight of her had gone through and through him. It had pierced him as a red-hot iron will slide through ice. It had whirled him around; all his life he hadn’t had no such sensation—as if the lightning had struck him or he’d been bewitched or had drunk a gallon of alcohol. From that moment he had had a twitching in his fingers as though velvet was passing over them; he had felt a terrible avidity to touch something that moves and trembles and is warm, an avidity for the terror of those eyes and her wonderful struggles, as the depth of her soul made moan, and she wept and begged. How she walked in her inviolateness and pride, as in a haze! One wanted to lie down and have her step on one’s chest, and look up at her as at a slender column. Jesus and all the Saints! That had done for him and been the end of him! He knew he’d have to have her, if it cost him his eternal weal, which nobody gives a damn for anyhow.
He knew from the start, of course, that a being like that wasn’t for the like of him. She was like the sacrament that no one could touch but the priest. He had known that; but there was more to it than that from the start. From the start it had been a matter of life and death. There’d been no doubt about that in him at any time: she’d have to die for him—him! He had lain in wait for her, and she had fled like a deer. It had made him laugh. “You’ll come into my net,” he had said, and had fixed his eyes and thoughts on her day and night, so that she didn’t know no more what to do. She had appeared to him in vision, yes, appeared to him whenever he’d commanded her, and begged him to let her off. And he’d told her that was impossible, that she must come to him, that her body and blood must become his, and that he must make an end of her. Unless he did, there wasn’t no peace on earth for him nor for her either.
So he had thought out his plan. He had persuaded the besotted fool that he was crazy about the Jewess and that she was gone on him too. That had made him quite crazy and he hadn’t had an idea left in his skull, and had been soft as mush and had taken every trick and swindle as reality. So they had taken counsel and worked out their plan. They had sent the Jewess a note and had hired out the wench who carried it right afterward to an old acquaintance in Pankow. In the note they’d written to the Jewess that some one wanted her on his bed of death and that his salvation depended on her coming. Sure enough, she had come. The idiot had led her into the cellar. It had been dark there. They had locked the cellar door. Then he had persuaded the idiot to go behind the partition and had given him a bottle of rum, and told him if he so much as made a sound he might as well order his coffin, but if he’d wait, the affair with the Jewess would be fixed up for him. Thereupon he himself had returned to the cellar, and there the Jewess had stood....
He interrupted himself, and felt how the whole being of his invisible neighbour had become a breathless listening, a rapt absorption of every syllable he spoke. It gave him but a scant satisfaction, yet it urged him on. And as he burrowed in his mind and represented what he found there, the events assumed an unnatural size and seemed steeped in an atmosphere fiery-red and violet. He did not so much speak of them as let them speak to him, and thus build themselves up in a guise in which he had never yet seen them. And as he continued, his voice changed. It took on a sharper edge and became hollower, and betrayed for the first time a stirring within, a wildly gathering primordial pain.
She had stood there, he went on, and that had removed his last doubt.
“How?” Christian’s voice came, scarcely audible, out of the blackness. “How?”
He said he couldn’t describe it. She had looked about with a proud astonishment and yet a twitching of fear about her mouth. She had asked where the person was who had sent for her. On the moon, he had answered. Then what was wanted of her? Why was the iron door locked? Good reasons! Couldn’t she be told the reasons? What a voice she had had, like a little silver bell ringing in her throat. The ear drank it in like a wonderful liquor. There weren’t many reasons, he had said; there was just one. She didn’t understand. He’d try to make it plain. She had said she couldn’t think. Then he had taken her by the arm and put his arm about her shoulder and her neck. She had cried out and begun to tremble, run into a corner, and put out her hands to guard herself. The candle-light had fallen straight into her face, which had been like a white rose in the light of a flame. He had rushed toward her, and she had taken refuge behind the table. She had cried for mercy. He had laughed, laughed, utterly beside himself at the little silver bell in her throat. What a woman! God, what a woman! A child still, pure in every fibre, and a woman. It pierced him; it went into his marrow. A man couldn’t let such a woman escape him if his next hour were to be spent in hell-fire.
He had soothed her a bit and made pretty speeches and said she should listen to him. She had been willing, and he had spoken. The table with the candle had been between them—he in front of it, she behind it against the wall. He had said there was a terrible necessity; no way out—not for her and not for him. He was like one damned, and she must redeem him. He was panting for her and withering away for her—for her body and soul, blood and breath, and it had been predetermined thus since the world began. He must be close to her and within her, or the whole world would go mad and life burst with poison. He must have her, whether she was willing or not, through kindness or force. God couldn’t help her. There was a law that compelled them both, and the hour had come. She might better yield herself, and give him the heaven he was bound to have.
Thereupon she had whispered with a rigid expression: “No, never, nevermore.”
He had gazed at her a long time.
From time to time, with a moist glance upward, she had whispered: “No, never, nevermore.”
He had warned her to put away all hope. If she resisted, it would only be the more fearful. And he had laid the knife on the table.
Christian moaned in his supreme pain as he heard this.
Niels Heinrich continued with his fatalistic outer calm. Ruth had tried to make him relent. He would never forget her words, but he could not repeat them. She had spoken feverishly, with glowing eyes, her hair falling over her cheeks; she had lifted her hands in beseeching and leaned across the table, and in her sweet, bell-like voice had spoken of people who needed her, of work and duty, of difficult tasks ahead, and also of the pleasant things in the world. And she had asked him whether nothing in the world was pleasant to him, whether his own life meant nothing to him at all, and he was willing to take up the burden of this crime before man and God. This is what she had said, only her words had been finer and firmer and exacter. At that a rancorous rage had flamed up in his brain, and he had roared at her to stop her crazy jabbering, damned Jewess that she was, and listen to him, listen to what he had to say in reply.
In silence and with a drawn expression, she had listened. Crime, he had said, crime and such talk—there wasn’t no sense in that; he didn’t know what it meant. It had all been thought out by the people who pay the soldiers and the courts to do their bidding, but who, if it served their purposes, committed the same crimes in the name of the State or the Church or Progress or Liberty. If a man was strong enough and cunning enough, he didn’t give a damn for all their laws. Laws were for fools and cowards. If the individual has got to submit to force, he’s got the right to use force too. If he was willing to risk the vengeance and punishment of society, he had a right to satisfy his desires. The only question was whether he was willing to take up the burden of crime, and couldn’t be made to stop by the hocus-pocus invented by teachers and parsons. If he, Niels Heinrich, could work his will, there wouldn’t be one stone left standing on another, all rules would be wiped out, all order destroyed, all cities blown up sky-high, all wells choked, all bridges broken, all books burned, all roads torn up, and destruction would be preached, and war—war of each against all, all against each, all against all. Mankind wasn’t worthy of nothing better.
He could truthfully say that because he had studied people and had seen through them. He had seen nothing but liars and thieves, wretched fools, misers, and the meanly ambitious. He had seen the dogs cringe and creep when they wanted to rise, cringe before those above, snap at those below. He knew the rich with their full bellies and their rotten phrases, and the poor with their contemptible patience. He knew the bribe-takers and the stiff-necked ones, the braggarts and the slinkers, the thieves and forgers, ladies’ men and cowards, the harlots and their procurers, the respectable women with their hypocrisy and envy, their pretence and masquerade and play-acting; he knew it all, and it couldn’t impress him no more. And there were no real things in the world except stench and misery and avarice and greed and treachery and malevolence and lust. The world was a loathsome thing and had to be destroyed. And any one who had come to see that, must take the last step, the very last, to the place where despair and contempt are self-throttled, where you could go no further, where you heard the Angel of the Last Day beating at the dull walls of the flesh, whither neither the light penetrated nor the darkness, but where one was alone with one’s rage and could feel oneself utterly, and heighten that self and take something sacred and smash it into bits. That was it, that! To take something holy, something pure, and become master of it and grind it to the earth and stamp it out.
Christian had never heard anything more dreadful. He gazed into a broken universe. Even in its pale representation, the fury of hatred burst forth like seething lava, and turned the blossoms of the earth to ashes. Horror had reached its supreme point. The fate of the immemorial race of man was sealed. And yet—the fact that this man had come hither, had had the impulse to reveal himself, that he sat there in the darkness and writhed and spoke of monstrous things and plunged into the great deeps that he had opened—in this very fact Christian perceived a shimmer of most mysterious hope, and a first faint ray of dawn upon a hitherto unknown, uncertain path.
Niels Heinrich continued. Slowly the Jewess had understood and looked at him with her great child’s eyes. She had put a question to him, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Then she had said that she saw there was no hope for her, and that it was her fate to be his victim. He had answered that her insight did credit to her understanding. Then she asked whether he knew that he was destroying himself; and he had said that he believed in no expiation, and the rest was his business. Anyhow, there had been enough talk; time was pressing, and the end must come. She had asked what she should do, and this question had confounded him, and he had had no answer to it. She had repeated the question, and he had said that the candle was burning down. Then she had asked him whether he could give her the assurance of death. Yes, he could give her that. Wouldn’t he let her die before he attacked her? No. She had grasped the knife, but he had wrung it from her. The touch of her hand had driven him utterly mad. The walls seemed to crunch and the house to thunder. She had begged him to let her die by her own will. He could not do that, he had answered; he must get to her living heart or there was no help for him.
She begged him to grant her a little quarter of an hour; then she would be ready to die. To this he had consented, and gone out and looked after the idiot, who had lain there helpless and drunk as a swine. That had pleased him; now he could put the fellow to what uses he would. This had been proved later when he had dragged him into the cellar; and the swine still thought he could be gotten out of jail if only to the last gasp he didn’t mention the name of Niels Heinrich.
When he had returned to the Jewess, he had found her leaning against the wall with closed eyes. Her face had been very pale, but she had smiled from time to time. He had asked her why she was smiling and she had not answered, but looked at him most strangely, as though she were trying to remember something. He had gone to her behind the table and she had not stirred, and so he had grasped her shoulders. She had lifted her hands, and then he had seen that, while he was outside, she had severed the veins of both her wrists, and the thick blood was dripping down. She must have done it with a shard of glass that stuck between the bricks of the wall. He had been swept into a storm of madness, as though some one were upon him to rob him of her, and he had caught her by the hair and hurled her on the floor.
And she had uttered one cry, one single, long cry. That cry he still heard, always ... always....
She had become his. He felt no remorse; he would feel none. But that cry—he heard it always and forever.
Silence came upon him. The stillness in that dark chamber was so great that it seemed to gather in the corners and threaten to burst the walls asunder.