Christian answered with a forced smile: “It’s not a good one.”
“Listen to me. In the seminary I had a fellow-student named Dippel. His gifts were moderate, but he was a decent chap and a hard worker. His father was a signalman on the railroad—one of the very poor, and his son was his one hope and pride. Dippel happened to be acquainted with a painter in whose studio he came across an album of photographs displaying the female form in plastic poses. The adolescent boy gazed at them again and again, and finally begged the painter to lend him the album. Dippel slept in my dormitory. I was monitor, and I soon observed the crowding and the sensuous atmosphere about Dippel, who had shown the pictures to a few friends. It was like a spreading wound. I went into the matter and ruthlessly confiscated the pictures. I informed the faculty. Dippel was summoned, sternly examined, and expelled. Next day we found him swinging dead from the apple tree.”
Christian’s face flushed hotly. The tone of equanimity with which it was recited was more repulsive than the story itself.
Amadeus Voss continued: “You think that was a contemptible action. But according to the principles that had been impressed on us I was merely doing my duty. I was sixteen; and I seemed to be, and was, in a dark hole. I needed to get out to the air and light. I was like one squeezed in by a great throng, who cannot see what happens beyond. The fumes of impatience throttled me, and everything in me cried out for space and light. It was like living on the eternally dark side of the moon. I was afraid of the might of evil; and all that I heard of men was more or less evil. The scales rose and fell in my breast. There are hours in which one can either become a murderer or die on the cross. I yearned for the world. Yet I prayed much in those days, and read many books of devotion, and practised cruel penances. Late at night, when all others slept, a priest found me absorbed in prayer with the hair-shirt about my body. During mass or choral singing an incomparable and passionate devotion streamed through me. But then again I saw flags in the streets of the city, or well-dressed women, or I stood in the railway station, and a train of luxurious cars seemed to mock me. Or I saw a man who had hurled himself out of a window and whose brains spattered the pavement, and he seemed to cry out to me: Brother, brother! Then the evil one arose in bodily form and I desired to clutch him. Yes, evil has bodily form and only evil—injustice, stupidity, lying, all the things that are repulsive to one to the very core, but which one must embrace and be, if one has not been born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth. To save a ray of light for myself, I learned to play the organ. It helped little. What does music matter, or poems or beautiful pictures, or noble buildings, or books of philosophy, or the whole magnificent world without? I cannot reach myself. Between me and that real self there is something—what is it? A wall of red-hot glass. Some are accursed from the beginning. If I ask: how could the curse be broken? there is but one answer: the monstrous would need to come to pass, the unimaginable! Thus it is with me.”
Christian was shocked. “What do you mean by that?”
“One would have to gain a new experience,” answered Amadeus Voss, “to know a being truly human—in the highest and deepest sense.” In the gathering dusk his face had the hue of stone. It was a well-shaped face—long, narrow, intelligent, full of impassioned suffering. The lenses in front of his eyes sparkled in the last light of day, and on his fair hair was a glimmer as upon jewels.
“Are you going to stay in the village?” Christian inquired, not from a desire to know, but out of the distress which he felt in the heavy silence. “You were employed by Councillor Ribbeck. Will you return to him?”
Voss’s nerves twitched. “Return? There is no return,” he murmured. “Do you know Ribbeck? Well, I hardly know him myself. I saw him just twice. The first time was when he came to the seminary to engage a tutor for his sons. When I think of him I have the image of something fat and frozen. I was picked out at once. My superiors approved of me highly and desired to smooth my path. Yes. And I saw him for the second time one night in December, when he appeared at Halbertsroda with a commissary of police to put me out. You needn’t look at me that way. There were no further consequences. It wouldn’t have done to permit any.”
He fell silent. Christian got up. Voss did not urge him to stay longer, but accompanied him to the door. There he said in a changed voice: “What kind of a man are you? One sits before you and pours out one’s soul, and you sit there in silence. How does it happen?”
“If you regret it I shall forget all you have said,” Christian answered in his flexible, courteous way, that always had a touch of the equivocal.