Ivan Michailovitch shook his head. From the hall floated the sound of the violins, playing an ingratiating air by Puccini.
“Won’t you at least dry your coat?” Christian asked again. The strains of the music, the splendour there within, the merriment and laughter, the fullness of beauty and happiness, all this presented so sharp a contrast to the appearance of this man in a wet coat, with wax-like face and morbidly flaming eyes, that Christian could no longer endure his apparently unfeeling position between these two worlds, of whose utter and terrible alienation from each other he was acutely aware.
Ivan Michailovitch smiled. “It is kind of you to think of my coat. But you can’t do any good. It will only get wet again.”
“I’d like to take you, just as you are,” said Christian, and he smiled too, “and go in there with you.”
Ivan Michailovitch shrugged his shoulders, and his face grew dark.
“I don’t know why I should like to do that,” Christian murmured. “I don’t know why it tempts me. I stand before you, and you put me in the wrong. Whether I speak or am silent does not matter. By merely being I am in the wrong. We should not be conversing here in the servants’ corner. You are making some demand of me, Ivan Michailovitch, are you not? What is it that you demand?”
The words bore witness to a confusion of the emotions that went to the very core of his being. They throbbed with the yearning to become and to be another man. Ivan Michailovitch, in a sudden flash of intuition, saw and understood. At first he had suspected that here was but a lordly whim, or that it was at best but the foolish and thoughtless defiance of a too swiftly ardent proselyte that urged this proud and handsome man to his words. He recognized his error now. He understood that he heard a cry for help, and that it came from the depth of one of those decisive moments of which life holds but few.
“What is it that I am to demand of you, Christian Wahnschaffe?” he asked, earnestly. “Surely not that you drag me in there to your friends, and ask me to regard that as a definite deed and as a triumph over yourself?”
“It would not be that,” Christian said, with lowered eyes, “but a simple confession of my friendship and my faith.”