“But where is help to come from? It is strange; never until this thing happened did I know what holds us two together, you and me. Threads are being spun back and forth between us which no hand may touch without withering, as it is written in the Bible. There is a secret, a sacred secret, and if I offended it I would feel as though I had strangled the unborn child in your womb; and not only the child in your womb, but all the unborn children in my own breast. There is in the life of each man a woman in whom his own mother becomes young again, and to whom he is bound by an unseen, indestructible, umbilical cord. Face to face with this woman, his love, great or small, even his hate, his indifference, becomes a phantom, just as everything that we give out becomes a phantom compared with what is given to us. And there is another woman who is my own creation, the fruit of my dreams; she is my picture; I have created her from my own blood; she lay in me just as the seed lay in the bud. And she must be mine once she has been unveiled and made known to me, or I will perish of loneliness and maddened longing.”
The extravagant man pressed his face to the pillow and groaned: “She must be mine, or I will never get up from this bed. But if my way to her passes over you, Gertrude, I would have to cry out with Faust: ‘Oh, had I never been born!’”
Gertrude never uttered a sound. Minute after minute passed by. Daniel, growing calmer, listened to see if he could not hear some sound in the room. He heard nothing. The silence of his wife began to fill him with anxiety; he rose up in bed. The moon had gone down; it was pitch dark. He felt around for some matches, and lighted a candle. Holding it in his hand, he bent over Gertrude. She was as pale as death; she was looking at the ceiling with wide-opened eyes.
“Put the candle out, Daniel,” she whispered, “I have something to say to you.”
He put the candle out, and set it away.
“Give me your hand, Daniel.”
He felt for her hand; he took hold of it. It was ice cold; he laid it on his breast.
“May I stay with you, Daniel? Will you tolerate me in your home?”
“Tolerate? Gertrude, tolerate?” he asked, in a lifeless, toneless voice. “You are my wife, in the presence of God my wife,” he added, in deadened memory of the words of another.
“I will become your mother made young again, as you wish.”