The key grated in the lock....
“Mascha! Mascha! For God’s sake! Mascha! What are you going to do?...”
I shook the door like a madman.... It would not give way.... I tore open the window.... “Help! Help!”... The door was burst open.... Break open Mascha’s door!... It was quickly forced.... She lies there.... Dead.... Poison....
V.
Finally—after weeks—I was once more somewhat calmer, and was able to think a little. I had so utterly lost all power that I was only able to get from my bed to the sofa, or back again, with assistance. They had been afraid that I should not get over it at all.... Week after week to endure the most shattering, superhuman sorrows, to oscillate between death and madness!...
But superhuman love had also been mine! The statue of Saïs had been unveiled to me!... I had quaffed the cup of love to the last dregs!... But he only will have had this experience who has first drunk to the dregs the draught of sorrow!...
Oh, short-sighted world, which will call the murder of Mascha “sadism”!... Had not her pains cut twice as deeply into my own heart? Has not my soul been convulsed by her torment?... I wished only to torture myself!... Am I to blame that it was only possible to do so through her martyrdom?... Has not she shared also all my superearthly blisses?... He who has experienced this does not regret—even if he must pay double the price in sorrows!!
Is not that “masochism”?
Have you who wished to pass judgment on me learned that? No! Who will set up to be a judge of a case of which he knows nothing?
Oh, crude psychology, which teaches that out of an inhuman impulse—out of cruelty—we commit “crimes” on those nearest to us! Only from a purely human impulse—from “love”—do we do to the nearest to us what you call “crimes,” in order that he may share that unnamable happiness which we ourselves feel. Thus the influences which move us are purely ethical.