“Have you kneeled to many as though you adored them?” Eva asked.
He did not answer, but her naked feet grew heavy in his hands. The sensuous perception which they communicated to him through their warmth, their smoothness, their instinctive flexibility vanished suddenly, and gave way to a feeling in which fear and shame and mournfulness were blended. These human organs, these dancing feet, these limbs of the woman he loved, these rarest and most precious things on earth seemed suddenly ugly and repulsive to him, and those lowly and poverty-stricken objects—the jug with the broken handle, the crooked window with its rim of snow, the muddy boot, the dangling rope, the sooty lamp, these suddenly seemed to him beautiful and worthy of reverence.
“Tell me, have you kneeled to many?” he heard Eva’s voice, with its almost frightened tenderness. And it seemed to him that Ivan Becker gave answer in his stead and said: “That you kneeled down before her—that was it, and that alone. All else was hateful and bitter; but that you kneeled down beside her—ah, that was it!”
He breathed deeply, with closed eyes, and became pale. And he relived, more closely and truly than ever, that hour of fate. He felt the breath of Becker’s kiss upon his forehead, and understood its meaning. He understood the feverish transformations of an evil conscience that had caused him to identify himself with that jug, that window, that boot and rope and lamp, only to flee, only to gain time. And he understood now that despite his change from form to form, he had well seen and heard the beggar, the woman, Ivan Michailovitch, the sick, half-naked children, but that his whole soul had gathered itself together in the effort to guard himself against them for but a little while, before they would hurl themselves upon him with all their torment, despair, madness, cruelty, like wild dogs upon a piece of meat.
His respite had come to an end. With an expression of haste and firmness at once he arose. “Let me go, Eva,” he said, “send me away. It is better that you send me away than that I wrench myself loose, nerve by nerve, inch by inch. I cannot stay with you nor live for you.” Yet in this very moment his love for her gathered within him like a storm of flames, and he would have torn the heart from his breast to have unsaid the irrevocable words.
She sprang up swiftly as an arrow. Then she stood very still, with both hands in her hair.
He walked to the window. He saw the whole space of heaven before him, the evening star and the unresting sea. And he knew that it was all illusion, this great peace, this glittering star, this gently phosphorescent deep, that it was but a garment and a painted curtain by which the soul must not let itself be quieted. Behind it were terror and horror and unfathomable pain. He understood, he understood at last.
He understood those thousands and thousands on the shore of the Thames and their sombre silence. He understood the shipman’s daughter, whose violated body had lain on coarse linen. He understood Adda Castillo and her will to destruction. He understood Jean Cardillac’s melancholy seeking for help, and his sorrow over his wife and child. He understood that ancient rake who cried out behind the gates of his cloister: “What shall I do? My Lord and Saviour, what shall I do?” He understood Dietrich, the deaf and dumb lad who had drowned himself, and Becker’s words concerning his dripping coat, and Franz Lothar’s horror at the intertwined bodies of the Hungarian men and maids, and the panting hunger of Amadeus Voss and his saying concerning the silver cord and the pitcher broken at the fountain. He understood the stony grief of the fishermen’s wives, and the opera singer who had twenty francs in his pocket.
He understood. He understood.