CHAPTER XXVII
For a while Innstetten sat at the table with Annie in silence. Finally, when the stillness became painful to him, he asked her a few questions about the school superintendent and which teacher she liked best. She answered rather listlessly, because she felt he was not paying much attention. The situation was not improved till Johanna whispered to little Annie, after the second course, that there was something else to come. And surely enough, good Roswitha, who felt under obligation to her pet on this unlucky day, had prepared something extra. She had risen to an omelet with sliced apple filling.
The sight of it made Annie somewhat more talkative. Innstetten's frame of mind was likewise bettered when the doorbell rang a moment later and Dr. Rummschüttel entered, quite accidentally. He had just dropped in, without any suspicion that he had been sent for. He approved of the compresses. "Send for some Goulard water and keep Annie at home tomorrow. Quiet is the best remedy." Then he asked further about her Ladyship and what kind of news had been received from Ems, and said he would come again the next day to see the patient.
When they got up from the table and went into the adjoining room, where the bandage had been searched for so zealously, albeit in vain, Annie was again laid upon the sofa. Johanna came and sat down beside her, while Innstetten began to put back into the sewing table the countless things that still lay in gay confusion upon the window sill. Now and then he was at a loss to know what to do and was obliged to ask.
"Where do these letters belong, Johanna?"
"Clear at the bottom," said she, "here in this drawer."
During the question and answer Innstetten examined more closely than before the little package tied up with a red cord. It seemed to consist of a number of notes, rather than letters. Bending it between his thumb and forefinger, like a pack of cards, he slowly let the edges slip off one at a time, and a few lines, in reality only disconnected words, darted past his eyes. It was impossible to distinguish them clearly, yet it seemed to him as though he had somewhere seen the handwriting before. Should he look into the matter?
"Johanna, you might bring us the coffee. Annie will also take half a cup. The doctor has not forbidden it, and what is not forbidden is allowed."
As he said this he untied the red cord, and while Johanna was going to the kitchen he quickly ran over the whole contents of the package. Only two or three letters were addressed to Mrs. District Councillor von Innstetten. He now recognized the handwriting; it was that of the Major. Innstetten had known nothing about a correspondence between Crampas and Effi. His brain began to grow dizzy. He put the package in his pocket and returned to his room. A few moments later Johanna rapped softly on his door to let him know that the coffee was served. He answered, but that was all. Otherwise the silence was complete. Not until a quarter of an hour later was he heard walking to and fro on the rug. "I wonder what ails papa?" said Johanna to Annie. "The doctor said it was nothing, didn't he?"
The walking to and fro in the adjoining room showed no signs of ending, but Innstetten finally came out and said: "Johanna, keep an eye on Annie and make her remain quiet on the sofa. I am going out to walk for an hour or two." Then he gazed fixedly at the child and left the room.
"Did you notice, Johanna, how papa looked?"
"Yes, Annie. He must have had a great vexation. He was all pale. I never saw him like that."
Hours passed. The sun was already down and only a red glow was visible above the roofs across the street, when Innstetten came back. He took Annie's hand and asked her how she was. Then he ordered Johanna to bring the lamp into his room. The lamp came. In its green shade were half-transparent ovals with photographs, various pictures of his wife that had been made in Kessin for the other members of the cast when they played Wichert's A Step out of the Way. Innstetten turned the shade slowly from left to right and studied each individual picture. Then he gave that up and, as the air was so sultry, opened the balcony door and finally took up the package of letters again. He seemed to have picked out a few and laid them on top the first time he looked them over. These he now read once more in a half audible voice:
"Come again this afternoon to the dunes behind the mill. At old Mrs. Adermann's we can see each other without fear, as the house is far enough off the road. You must not worry so much about everything. We have our rights, too. If you will say that to yourself emphatically, I think all fear will depart from you. Life would not be worth the living if everything that applies in certain specific cases should be made to apply in all. All the best things lie beyond that. Learn to enjoy them."
"'Away from here,' you write, 'flight.' Impossible. I cannot leave my wife in the lurch, in poverty, along with everything else. It is out of the question, and we must take life lightly, otherwise we are poor and lost. Light-heartedness is our best possession. All is fate; it was not so to be. And would you have it otherwise—that we had never seen each other?"
Then came the third letter:
"Be at the old place again today. How are my days to be spent without you here in this dreary hole? I am beside myself, and yet thus much of what you say is right; it is salvation, and we must in the end bless the hand that inflicts this separation on us."
Innstetten had hardly shoved the letters aside when the doorbell rang.
In a moment Johanna announced Privy Councillor Wüllersdorf.
Wüllersdorf entered and saw at a glance that something must have
happened.
"Pardon me, Wüllersdorf," said Innstetten, receiving him, "for having asked you to come at once to see me. I dislike to disturb anybody in his evening's repose, most of all a hard-worked department chief. But it could not be helped. I beg you, make yourself comfortable, and here is a cigar."
Wüllersdorf sat down. Innstetten again walked to and fro and would gladly have gone on walking, because of his consuming restlessness, but he saw it would not do. So he took a cigar himself, sat down face to face with Wüllersdorf, and tried to be calm.
"It is for two reasons," he began, "that I have sent for you. Firstly, to deliver a challenge, and, secondly, to be my second in the encounter itself. The first is not agreeable and the second still less. And now your answer?"
"You know, Innstetten, I am at your disposal. But before I know about the case, pardon me the naïve question, must it be? We are beyond the age, you know—you to take a pistol in your hand, and I to have a share in it. However, do not misunderstand me; this is not meant to be a refusal. How could I refuse you anything? But tell me now what it is."
"It is a question of a gallant of my wife, who at the same time was my friend, or almost a friend."
Wüllersdorf looked at Innstetten. "Instetten, that is not possible."
"It is more than possible, it is certain. Read."
Wüllersdorf ran over the letters hastily. "These are addressed to your wife?"
"Yes. I found them today in her sewing table."
"And who wrote them?"
"Major von Crampas."
"So, things that occurred when you were still in Kessin?"
Innstetten nodded.
"So, it was six years ago, or half a year longer?"
"Yes."
Wüllersdorf kept silent. After a while Innstetten said: "It almost looks, Wüllersdorf, as though the six or seven years made an impression on you. There is a theory of limitation, of course, but I don't know whether we have here a case to which the theory can be applied."
"I don't know, either," said Wüllersdorf. "And I confess frankly, the whole case seems to turn upon that question."
Innstetten looked at him amazed. "You say that in all seriousness?"
"In all seriousness. It is no time for trying one's skill at pleasantry or dialectic hair-splitting."
"I am curious to know what you mean. Tell me frankly what you think about it."
"Innstetten, your situation is awful and your happiness in life is destroyed. But if you kill the lover your happiness in life is, so to speak, doubly destroyed, and to your sorrow over a wrong suffered will be added the sorrow over a wrong done. Everything hinges on the question, do you feel absolutely compelled to do it? Do you feel so injured, insulted, so indignant that one of you must go, either he or you? Is that the way the matter stands?"
"I don't know."
"You must know."
Innstetten sprang up, walked to the window, and tapped on the panes, full of nervous excitement. Then he turned quickly, stepped toward Wüllersdorf and said: "No, that is not the way the matter stands."
"How does it stand then?"
"It amounts to this—that I am unspeakably unhappy. I am mortified, infamously deceived, and yet I have no feeling of hatred or even of thirst for revenge. If I ask myself 'why not?' on the spur of the moment, I am unable to assign any other reason than the intervening years. People are always talking about inexpiable guilt. That is undeniably wrong in the sight of God, but I say it is also in the sight of man. I never should have believed that time, purely as time, could so affect one. Then, in the second place, I love my wife, yes, strange to say, I love her still, and dreadful as I consider all that has happened, I am so completely under the spell of her loveliness, the bright charm peculiarly her own, that in spite of myself I feel in the innermost recesses of my heart inclined to forgive."
Wüllersdorf nodded. "I fully understand your attitude, Innstetten, I should probably feel the same way about it. But if that is your feeling and you say to me: 'I love this woman so much that I can forgive her everything,' and if we consider, further, that it all happened so long, long ago that it seems like an event in some other world, why, if that is the situation, Innstetten, I feel like asking, wherefore all this fuss?"
"Because it must be, nevertheless. I have thought it over from every point of view. We are not merely individuals, we belong to a whole, and have always to take the whole into consideration. We are absolutely dependent. If it were possible to live in solitude I could let it pass. I should then bear the burden heaped upon me, though real happiness would be gone. But so many people are forced to live without real happiness, and I should have to do it too, and I could. We don't need to be happy, least of all have we any claim on happiness, and it is not absolutely necessary to put out of existence the one who has taken our happiness away. We can let him go, if we desire to live on apart from the world. But in the social life of the world a certain something has been worked out that is now in force, and in accordance with the principles of which we have been accustomed to judge everybody, ourselves as well as others. It would never do to run counter to it. Society would despise us and in the end we should despise ourselves and, not being able to bear the strain, we should fire a bullet into our brains. Pardon me for delivering such a discourse, which after all is only a repetition of what every man has said to himself a hundred times. But who can say anything now? Once more then, no hatred or anything of the kind, and I do not care to have blood on my hands for the sake of the happiness taken away from me. But that social something, let us say, which tyrannizes us, takes no account of charm, or love, or limitation. I have no choice. I must."
"I don't know, Innstetten."
Innstetten smiled. "You shall decide yourself, Wüllersdorf. It is now ten o 'clock. Six hours ago, I will concede, I still had control of the situation, I could do the one thing or the other, there was still a way out. Not so now; now I am in a blind alley. You may say, I have nobody to blame but myself; I ought to have guarded and controlled myself better, ought to have hid it all in my own heart and fought it out there. But it came upon me too suddenly, with too much force, and so I can hardly reproach myself for not having held my nerves in check more successfully. I went to your room and wrote you a note and thereby lost the control of events. From that very moment the secret of my unhappiness and, what is of greater moment, the smirch on my honor was half revealed to another, and after the first words we exchanged here it was wholly revealed. Now, inasmuch as there is another who knows my secret, I can no longer turn back."
"I don't know," repeated Wüllersdorf. "I don't like to resort to the old worn-out phrase, but still I can do no better than to say: Innstetten, it will all rest in my bosom as in a grave."
"Yes, Wüllersdorf, that is what they all say. But there is no such thing as secrecy. Even if you remain true to your word and are secrecy personified toward others, still you know it and I shall not be saved from your judgment by the fact that you have just expressed to me your approval and have even said you fully understood my attitude. It is unalterably settled that from this moment on I should be an object of your sympathy, which in itself is not very agreeable, and every word you might hear me exchange with my wife would be subject to your check, whether you would or no, and if my wife should speak of fidelity or should pronounce judgment upon another woman, as women have a way of doing, I should not know which way to look. Moreover, if it came to pass that I counseled charitable consideration in some wholly commonplace affair of honor, 'because of the apparent lack of deception,' or something of the sort, a smile would pass over your countenance, or at least a twitch would be noticeable, and in your heart you would say: 'poor Innstetten, he has a real passion for analyzing all insults chemically, in order to determine their insulting contents, and he never finds the proper quantity of the suffocating element. He has never yet been suffocated by an affair.' Am I right, Wüllersdorf, or not?"
Wüllersdorf had risen to his feet. "I think it is awful that you should be right, but you are right. I shall no longer trouble you with my 'must it be.' The world is simply as it is, and things do not take the course we desire, but the one others desire. This talk about the 'ordeal,' with which many pompous orators seek to assure us, is sheer nonsense, there is nothing in it. On the contrary, our cult of honor is idolatry, but we must submit to it so long as the idol is honored."
Innstetten nodded.
They remained together a quarter of an hour longer and it was decided that Wüllersdorf should set out that same evening. A night train left at twelve. They parted with a brief "Till we meet again in Kessin."