“I’m surprised, Amadeus, that your thoughts always cling to that one point,” Christian said. “Do you really believe it to be of such decisive importance? No one cares whether you’re poor or rich. Since you appear in my company, no one questions your equality, or would be so vulgar as to question it. The feelings that you express originate in yourself, and you seem to take a kind of perverse joy in them. You like to torment yourself, and then revenge yourself on others. I hope you won’t take my frankness amiss.”
Amadeus Voss grinned. “Sometimes, Christian Wahnschaffe, I’d like to pat your head, as though I were your teacher, and say: You did that very well. Yes, it was wonderfully well done. And yet your little arrow went astray. To hit me, you must take better aim. It is true that the morbidness is deep in my soul, far too deep to be eradicated by a few inexpensive aphorisms. When this Russian prince or this Spanish legate shake hands with me, I feel as though I had forged cheques and would be discovered in a minute. When this lady passes by me, with her indescribable fragrance and the rustling of her garments, I grow dizzy, as though I dangled high over an abyss, and my whole soul writhes in its own humiliation and slavishness. It writhes and writhes, and I can’t help it. I was born that way. This is not my world, and cannot become mine. The under dogs must bleed to death, for the upper dogs consider that the order of the world. I belong to that lower kind. My place is with those who have the odour of decayed flesh, whom all avoid, who go about with an eternally festering wound. The law of my being ranges me with them. I have no power to change that, nor has any pleasant agreement. This is not my world, Wahnschaffe; and if you don’t want me to lose my reason and do some mischief, you had better take me out of it so soon as possible, or else send me away.”
Christian passed the tips of his fingers over his forehead. “Have patience, Amadeus. I believe it is not my world any longer. Give me but a little more time in which to straighten out my own thoughts.”
Voss’s eyes clung to Christian’s hands and lips. The words had been quietly, almost coolly uttered, yet there was a deep conflict in them and an expression that had power over Voss. “I cannot imagine a man leaving this woman, if once he has her favour,” he said, with a hovering malice on his lips, “unless she withdraws her favour.”
Christian could not restrain a gesture of aversion. “We’ll meet to-night then,” he said, and arose.
An hour later Amadeus Voss saw him and Eva on the beach. He was coming down the dunes, and saw them on the flat sands by the foam of the waves. He stopped, shaded his eyes with his hands, and gazed out over the ocean as though watching for a sail. The other two did not see him. They walked along in a rhythmic unity, as of bodies that have tested the harmony of their vibrations. After a while they, too, stopped and stood close together, and were defined like two dark, slender shafts against the iron grey of air and water.
Voss threw himself into the sparse, stiff grass, and buried his forehead in the moist sand. Thus he lay many hours.
Evening came. Its great event was to be the appearance of Eva with the diamond Ignifer in her hair. She wore it in an exquisitely wrought setting of platinum, and it shone above her head, radiant and solitary, like a ghostly flame.
She felt its presence in every throb of her heart. It was a part of her, at once her justification and her crown. It was no longer an adornment but a blazing and convincing symbol of herself.