Thus when, against her determination and her better instinct, she entered the house on Ansbacher Street once more, she said to herself: “O Rumpelstiltzkin, I’m afraid you’re rushing into destruction. But run on and be destroyed. Then, at least, something will have happened.”
She carried the letters back to him. She asked coldly what had been his intention in sending them. She feigned not to hear his answer that his letter had explained his intention. She refused to sit down. Voss tried to find a subject of conversation; he walked up and down before her like a sentinel. In her mind she passed caustic comments on him; she observed the negligence of his clothes, and thought his way of swinging on his heel and suddenly rubbing his hands absurd. Everything about him seemed silly and comical to her. She mocked at him to herself: “A schoolmaster who has gone a little crazy.”
He told her he had made up his mind to move to Zehlendorf. Out there he had found a peaceful attic room in a villa. He felt the need of trees and fields, at least of their odour. In the morning he would ride in to attend lectures and in the afternoon return. Even if this plan could not be carried out daily, yet he would have the consolation of knowing that he had a refuge beyond this stony pandemonium which tasted of maltreated minds and of ink. He would move in two weeks.
“All the better.” The words slipped out before Johanna was aware.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked, with a cattish look. Then he laughed, and his laughter sounded like the clashing of shards. “Ah,” he said, and stopped, “do you really think the distance will make any difference? You will come to me, I assure you; and you will come not only when I summon you, but of your own impulse. So please don’t cling to a delusive hope.”
Johanna had no answer ready. His insolence shook her self-control. Voss laughed again, and took no notice of the impression made by his words. He spoke of the progress of his studies: he had worked for two semesters, and was as far advanced as others at the end of six. The professors were saying excellent things of him. He considered all that part of medical knowledge that could be directly acquired mere child’s play. No man of normal mind and decent industry should need more than eighteen months to master it. After that, to be sure, the paths divided. On one were artisans, dilettanti, mere professionals, and charlatans; on the other were great brains and spirits, pioneers and illustrious discoverers. At first surgery had attracted him, but that attraction had been brief. It was the merest butchery. He would refuse to depend wholly on knife and saw, and at all crucial moments of practice to submit to the dictates of a professional diagnostician, with nothing left him but whether the butcher would turn out to be an executioner or not. What attracted him inordinately was psychiatry. In it mystery was heaped on mystery. Unexplored and undiscovered countries stretched out there—great epidemics of the soul, illnesses of the sexes, deep-rooted maladies of whole nations, a ghostly chase between heaven and earth, new proofs of psychical bonds that stretched from millennium to millennium as well as from man to man, the discovery of whose nature would make the whole structure of science totter.
Johanna was repelled. One couldn’t go much further in the way of boasting. His voice, which constantly passed from falsetto to bass, like a young bird thudding awkwardly between two walls, gave her a physical pain. She murmured a polite formula of agreement, and gave him her hand in farewell. Even this she hated to do.
“Stay!” he said commandingly.
She threw back her head and looked at him in astonishment.
Now he begged. “Do stay! You always leave in such a mood that the minute you are outside I’m tempted to hang myself.”