Johanna tormented herself. She was an experienced expert at it. She was glad when things went ill with her, when her hopes failed, when she was insulted or misunderstood. She was glad when the silk stocking into which she slipped her foot tore, when ink dropped on her paper, when she missed a train or found something for which she had paid generously prove worthless. It was a bitter, mischievous gladness, such as one feels at the absurd downfall of a hated rival.
It was this feeling that made her smile now. “I’m a charming creature, am I not?” she said, with a bizarre look and gesture.
Voss was disconcerted.
“Tell me about him,” she said, half-defiantly, half-resignedly, and again pressed her hands against the tiles.
Amadeus looked upon her hands, which were bluish with cold. “You are cold,” he murmured. “You are always cold.”
“Yes, I’m always cold. There’s not enough sunshine for me.”
“People say that foundlings never get really warm; but you are no foundling. I imagine, on the contrary, that your childhood was a hotbed of carefulness. Undoubtedly the rooms were overheated, and hot-water bottles were put into your bed at night, and tonics were prescribed. Yet your soul froze all the more as the attempt was made to reach it through material things. You are no foundling in the body; your bourgeois descent is clear. But your soul is probably a foundling soul. There are such souls. They flutter yearningly up and down in space between heaven and hell, and their fate depends on whether an angel or a demon assigns them their earthly tabernacle. Most of them get into the wrong bodies. They are so anxious for a mortal form that they usually fall into the hands of a demon to whom they are tributary all their lives. Such are the foundling souls.”
“Fantastic nonsense!” Johanna said. “You had better tell me something about him.”
“About him? As I told you before, he is concerned in many different things. The woman Karen is ill, and will probably not get better. It is her rightful reward; vice demands the payment of its debt. You can find the sword foretold for such in Scripture. Well, he nurses her; he watches with her at night. Then there is a Jewish girl who lives in the house. He goes about with her to all sorts of people—a kind of suburban saint. Only he doesn’t preach; preaching is not among his gifts. He is dumb, and that is a blessing. I have never sat so near to a woman,” he went on in precisely the same tone, so as to prevent her interrupting him, “never at least to one who makes me feel that her very existence is a good. And one is so damnably in need of something pure, so filled with terrible longing for a human eye—to know none other regards you as she does. Almighty God, to lose for once the curse of my isolation! What is it that I ask? It is so little! Only not to sicken of my rage and famish of my thirst; once to lay my head into a woman’s lap and feel nothing but the beloved night; and when the silence falls, to feel a hand in my hair and hear a word, a breath, and so to be redeemed!” His voice had grown softer and softer, and at last sank to a whisper.