When morning came her maid found her still sitting before Christian’s picture. The painted face beside the burning lamp still smiled its alien smile.
VI
Johanna Schöntag wrote to Christian: “It is two months now since I parted from you. In those two months misfortune has been very busy with me and mine. My father committed suicide; that was why I was summoned home so suddenly. Rash speculations complicated his affairs beyond his power; he saw no way to prevent his being reduced to beggary, and determined to leave the scene of his failure thus abruptly. All obligations have been decently satisfied, and his good name has been saved. We are also told, as if it were a consolation, that he lost his head too soon, that things might have turned out better than he feared. But we are in an unenviable situation, and life is not showing us an admirable aspect. Such sudden transformations should be confined to melodrama. I am still badly confused; I hardly know what is happening to me. I envy those who have an aim of some kind and also the vitality to pursue it. I wonder whether you will write to me. Or have you already forgotten me? Have I even the right to ask that?”
She sent this letter to Crammon with the request to forward it. Crammon replied: “My dear Rumpelstilzkin:—I hope that your voice will not die in the desert. Unhappy things have taken place. The man to whom you are writing has denied himself and his own past and all who love him. The Lord has darkened his soul; we are striving for his salvation. May your assistance bear rich fruit.”
The words frightened her, and she did not know how to interpret them. She had time to reflect, for weeks passed before she received an answer to her letter; and this answer was worse than none at all. It came not from Christian himself but from Amadeus Voss, and was as follows:
“My dear Fräulein:—While arranging some documents which my friend Christian Wahnschaffe left in the apartment which I have taken off his hands, I found your letter among other things. Since he has failed for some months, with very rare exceptions, to answer any letters, I think I may take it for granted that you have not heard from him. I can hardly dare hope to make up for his negligence. Who am I? What am I to you? You may not even recall me. I, on the contrary, remember you very exactly, and regret most constantly that I did not succeed in making you more conscious of my devotion and sympathy. But I am diffident by nature, and the fear of being repulsed or having my feelings misunderstood has assumed morbid intensity in my mind. Do not therefore, pray, regard it as a tactless importunity if I venture to write you in Christian’s stead. The thought of your uncertainty and fruitless waiting pained me, and I determined to put an end to it so far as it lies in my power to do.
“I believe I can give you the assurance that Christian Wahnschaffe is not as guilty, so far as you are concerned, as he may seem to be, unless we agree that his guilt toward all who knew and loved him is the same. To speak of his practising neglect or failing in a duty would be unbecoming in me as well as incorrect in fact. He has sloughed off his former skin, and the coin in which he pays to-day is of another mintage. Whether its value is higher or lower than formerly it is not my office to decide. He has, in the proverbial expression, burned his bridges behind him. What he does may arouse the horror of the morally immature; I, too, I confess, find the motivation obscure and difficult. But one must have patience and faith in a benevolent providence; for we all eat the bread of some abyss and it is bitter on each man’s lips.
“It is in view of the uncommon circumstances that I beg you to pardon my taking upon myself the part of an alter ego of our friend and making his affairs, as it were, my own. I have done it only after mature reflection; and what may at first seem to you sheer forwardness, and an indelicate intrusion into secrets that are not my own, has been prompted purely by a profound regard for your peace of mind. In closing may I express to you my deep and sincere sympathy? You have suffered from terrible visitations. God in His goodness will assuredly brighten your path again.”
Johanna read this letter innumerable times, and each time with a pang of intolerable shame, each time on the verge of tears. It made her feel so exposed and affronted. And then she would burrow again and again into the artifice of those stilted sentences. Frightened and desperate, and yet with a stabbing curiosity, she asked: What could have happened to make Christian, him whom she trusted immeasurably, whom she knew to be the soul of delicacy and reserve—what could have happened to make him callously expose the most intimate things in life to the treachery and hypocrisy of this man?
In her excitement she went to Crammon’s house, but he had left Vienna long ago. She asked where he was, but received no certain information. Aglaia named a Berlin hotel, Constantine the château of Count Vitztum in the mountains of Saxony. Johanna wrote letters, tore them up, reflected and brooded, was pursued by shame and doubt, and finally determined to write to Amadeus Voss. She wrote a brief note in her rigid, angular writing, her left hand clenched in rage, her forehead wrinkled, her little teeth gnawing at her lip. With a certain mockery of implication she thanked him for his trouble, contemptuously ignored his indiscretion, controlled her profoundly instinctive aversion, and finally, with an impatient turn of speech, demanded some clear information concerning Christian Wahnschaffe, since she had never been taught the reading of riddles or the solving of mysteries. She admitted that she had no right to make this demand, since her interest in Christian was merely a friend’s. But as such it was strong and kind enough to justify her inquiries.