THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY
EDITED BY J. E. SPINGARN

THE WORLD’S
ILLUSION

BY
JACOB WASSERMANN

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY
LUDWIG LEWISOHN

THE SECOND VOLUME:
RUTH

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME

THE WORLD’S ILLUSION

CONVERSATIONS IN THE NIGHT

I

When Wolfgang visited his home during the Christmas vacation he congratulated his father on the latter’s accession to a new dignity; Albrecht Wahnschaffe had been made a Privy Councillor.

He found the house changed—silent and dull. From a brief conversation with his father he learned that Christian was causing anxiety and excitement. He listened avidly, but did not succeed in gathering any details. Strangers had told him of Christian’s sale of his properties; but he had no notion of the meaning of this step.

He had but one long talk with his mother. She seemed to him to be morbid and to treat him with an indifference that wounded him.

Rumours of all kinds reached him. The major-domo informed him that Herr von Crammon had spent a couple of days at the castle, almost constantly closeted with its mistress. They had sent an enormously long telegram to Berlin, offering some one a bribe of forty or fifty thousand marks. The telegram had not been addressed directly to the person in question, but to an intermediary. The reply must have been unfavourable, for on its receipt Herr von Crammon had announced that he himself would proceed to Berlin.

Wolfgang decided to write to Crammon, but his letter remained unanswered.

Since, at bottom, he took very little interest in Christian’s doings, he refrained from any further investigation, and at the beginning of January returned to Berlin. From the behaviour of his acquaintances it was evident that a secret in which he was concerned weighed on their minds. In many eyes there was an indefinite yet watchful curiosity. But he was not particularly sensitive. His aim was to appear faultless in the worldly sense and not to alienate any who might affect his career. He was so wholly identified with the views of his social group that he trembled at the very thought of being accused of a mistake or an unconventionality. For this reason his demeanour had an element of the nervously watchful and restless. He was extremely careful to venture the expression of no opinion of his own, but always to be sure that whatever he said represented the opinion of the majority who set the standards of his little world.

At a social gathering he observed near him several young men engaged in eager but whispered conversation. He joined them and they became silent at once. He could not but remark the fact. He drew one of them aside and put the question to him brusquely. It was a certain Sassheimer, the son of an industrial magnate of Mainz. He could have made no better choice, for Sassheimer envied him, and there was an old jealousy between his family and the house of Wahnschaffe.

“We were talking about your brother,” he said. “What’s the matter with him? The wildest stories are floating around both at home and here in Berlin. Is there anything to them? You ought to know.”

Wolfgang grew red. “What could be wrong?” he replied with reserve and embarrassment. “I know of nothing. Christian and I scarcely communicate with each other.”

“They say that he’s taken up with a loose woman,” Sassheimer continued, “a common creature of the streets. You ought to do something about that report. It isn’t the sort of thing your family can simply ignore.”

“I haven’t heard a syllable about it,” said Wolfgang, and became redder than ever. “It’s most improbable too. Christian is the most exclusive person in the world. Who is responsible for such rot?”

“It is repeated everywhere,” Sassheimer said maliciously; “it’s queer that you’re the only one who has heard nothing. Besides, he is said to have broken with all his friends. Why don’t you go to him? He is in the city. Things like that can ordinarily be adjusted in a friendly way before the scandal spreads too far.”

“I shall inquire at once,” said Wolfgang, and drew himself very erect. “I’ll probe the matter thoroughly, and if I find the report to be a slander I shall hold those who spread it strictly accountable.”

“Yes, that would seem the correct thing to do,” Sassheimer answered coolly.

Wolfgang went home. All his old hatred of his brother flamed up anew. First Christian had been the radiant one who threw all others in the shade; now he threatened to bring disgrace and danger into one’s most intimate circles.

The hatred almost choked him.

II

The hours of consultations and interviews were drawing to an end. The features of Privy Councillor Wahnschaffe showed weariness. The last person who had left him had been a Japanese, a councillor of the ministry of war at Tokio. One of the directors had been present at the conference, which had been important and of far-reaching political implications. He was about to go when Wahnschaffe called him back by a gesture.

“Have you selected an engineer to go to Glasgow?” he asked. He avoided looking at the man’s face. What annoyed him in the men around him was a certain expression of greed after power, possession, and success, which they wore like a mental uniform. He saw almost no other expression any more.

The director mentioned a name.

Herr Wahnschaffe nodded. “It is a curious thing about the English,” he said. “They are gradually becoming wholly dependent on us. Not only do they no longer manufacture machines of this type, but we have to send an expert to set them up and explain their workings. Who would have thought that possible ten years ago?”

“They frankly admit their inferiority in this respect,” the director answered. “One of the gentlemen from Birmingham, whom we took through the works recently, expressed his utter amazement at out resistless progress. He said it was phenomenal. I gave him the most modest reason I could think of. I explained that we didn’t have the English institution of the weekend, and this added five to six hours a week to our productive activity.”

“And did that explanation satisfy him?”

“He asked: ‘Do you really think that accounts for your getting ahead of us?’ I said that the time amounted to several thousand hours a year in the activity of a whole nation. He shook his head and said that we were extremely well-informed and industrious, but that, closely looked upon, our competition was unfair.”

The Privy Councillor shrugged his shoulders. “It is always their last word—unfair. I do not know their meaning. In what way are they fairer than ourselves? But they use the word as a last resort.”

“They haven’t much good-will toward us,” said the director.

“No. I regret it; but it is true that they have not.” He nodded to the director, who bowed and left the room.

Herr Wahnschaffe leaned back in his chair, glanced wearily at the documents scattered over his huge desk, and covered his eyes with his pale hand. It was his way of resting and of collecting his thoughts. Then he pressed one of the numerous electric buttons on the edge of the desk. A clerk entered. “Is there any one else?”

The clerk handed him a card, and said: “This gentleman is from Berlin, and says he has an appointment with you, sir.”

The card read: “Willibald Girke, Private Detective. The Girke and Graurock Private Detective Agency. Puttbuser Street 2, Berlin, C.”

III

“Have you anything new to report?” the Privy Councillor asked.

A swift glance showed him in this face, too, that well-known and contemptible greed for power and possession and success that stopped in its hard determination at no degradation and no horror.

“Your written communications did not satisfy me, so I summoned you in order to have you define more closely the methods to be used in your investigations.” The formal phraseology hid Herr Wahnschaffe’s inner uncertainty and shame.

Girke sat down. His speech was tinged with the dialect of Berlin. “We have been very active. There is plenty of material. If you’ll permit me, I can submit it at once.” He took a note-book out of his pocket, and turned the leaves.

His ears were very large and stood off from his head. This fact impressed one as a curious adaptation of an organism to its activity and environment. His speech was hurried; he sputtered his sentences and swallowed portions of them. From time to time he looked at his watch with a nervous and uncertain stare. He gave an impression as of a man whom the life of a great city had made drunken, who neither slept nor ate in peace through lack of time, whose mind was shredded from a ceaseless waiting for telephone calls, letters, telegrams, and newspapers.

He spoke with hurried monotony. “The apartment on Kronprinzenufer has been kept. But it is not clear whether your son may be regarded as still occupying it. During the past month he passed only four nights there. It seems that he turned the apartment over to the student of medicine, Amadeus Voss. We have been watching this gentleman right along as you directed. The style in which this young man lives is most unusual, in view of his origin and notorious poverty. It is obvious, of course, where he gets the money. He is matriculated at the university; and so is your son.”

“Suppose we leave Voss out for the moment,” Herr Wahnschaffe interrupted, still burdened by his uncertainty and shame. “You wrote me that my son had rented in succession quite a series of dwellings. I should like an explanation of this, as well as the exact facts of his present whereabouts.”

Girke turned the leaves of his note-book again. “Here we are, sir. Our investigations provide an unbroken chain. From Kronprinzenufer he moved with the woman concerning whom we have gathered full and reliable data to Bernauer Street, in the neighbourhood of the Stettiner Railroad Station. Next he moved to 16 Fehrbelliner Street; then to No. 3 Jablonski Street; then to Gaudy Street, quite near the Exerzier Square; finally to Stolpische Street at the corner of Driesener. The curious thing is not only this constant change of habitation, but the gradual decline in the character of the neighbourhoods selected, down to a hopelessly proletarian level. This fact seems to reveal a secret plan and a definite intention.”

“And he stopped at Stolpische Street?”

“He’s been there five weeks, since the twentieth of February. But he rented two flats in this place, one for the woman in question and one for himself.”

“This place is far in the north of the city, isn’t it?”

“As far as you can get. West and north of it there are empty lots. To the east the roads lead to the cemeteries of Weissensee. All around are factories. It’s an unhealthy, unsafe, and hideous locality. The house itself was built about six years ago, but is already in a deplorable condition. There are forty-five flats with outside light, and fifty-nine with nothing but light from the court. The latter are inhabited by factory hands, hucksters, people of uncertain occupations, and characters that are clearly suspicious. Karen Engelschall, the woman in question, has an outside flat on the third floor, consisting of two rooms and a kitchen. The furnishings belong to a widow named Spindler. The monthly rent is eighty marks, payable in advance. She has a servant, a young girl named Isolde Schirmacher, who is the daughter of a tailor. Your son lodges on the ground-floor of the inside flats with a certain Gisevius, who is night watchman in the Borsig works. His accommodation consists of a barely furnished living-room and a half-dark sleeping chamber in which there is nothing but a cot.”

Herr Wahnschaffe’s eyes grew wide, under the influence of a fright which he could not quite control. “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “what can be the meaning of it?”

“It is a mystery indeed, sir. We have never had a similar case. There is plenty of room for supposition, of course. Then there’s the hope that future events may throw light on everything.”

Herr Wahnschaffe recovered his self-control, and coldly dismissed the other’s attempts at consolation. “And what is your information concerning the woman?” he asked in his most official tone. “What results have you in that direction?”

“I was just about to come to that, sir. We have done our best, and have succeeded in uncovering the woman’s antecedents. It was an extremely difficult task, and we had to send a number of agents to different parts of the country. The name and occupation of her father could not be discovered, since her birth was illegitimate. Her mother is a Frisian. She was housekeeper on a small estate near Oldenburg. After that she lived with a pensioned tax-gatherer. After his death she opened a small shop in Hanover, but the business failed. In 1895 she was convicted of fraud, and spent three months in prison at Cleve. We lost track of her after that, until she turned up in Berlin in 1900. First she lived in Rixdorf. Next she rented rooms—first in Brüsseler Street behind the Virchow Hospital, at present in Zionskirch Square. She has been accused of renting rooms for immoral purposes, but nothing could be proved against her. She pretends to be an art-embroiderer, but as a matter of fact she practises fortune-telling and clairvoyance. To judge by her way of living there is money in the business. She never had but two children, Karen, and a son, now twenty-six, named Niels Heinrich, who is known to the police as a worthless rogue and has come into conflict with the law on several occasions. Karen has had a shady career since her early girlhood. No doubt her mother put her up to everything. When she was seventeen her mother is reported to have sold her to a Dutch ship captain for five hundred gilders. She has given birth to two illegitimate children, at Kiel in 1897 and at Königsberg in 1901. Both died shortly after birth. In addition to the cities named, she has lived in Bremen, Schleswig, Hanover, Kuxhaven, Stettin, Aachen, Rotterdam, Elberfeld, and Hamburg. At nearly all these places she was a registered prostitute. We lost sight of her between 1898 and ’99. Her circumstances seemed to have improved temporarily during that year. According to one informant she accompanied a Danish painter to Wassigny in the North of France. From Hamburg, where she gradually sank lower and lower, she was brought to Berlin in the manner concerning which we had the honour of rendering you an account in our report of February 14th.”

Girke drew a long breath. His achievement in its architectonic structure somehow impressed him anew. He enjoyed the methodical arrangement of the material gleaned from so many sources, and threw a glance of triumph at the Privy Councillor. He did not observe the latter’s stony expression, but continued on his victorious progress. “On her arrival in Berlin she sought out her mother, and they rapidly became very intimate again. The mother came to visit both at Kronprinzenufer and at all the other places. The brother Niels Heinrich also came to see Karen—twice at Fehrbelliner Street, once on Gaudy, and five times on Stolpische. Quarrels arose among these three persons, which grew noisier on every occasion. On the eleventh inst., at five o’clock in the afternoon, Niels Heinrich left his sister’s flat in a rage, uttered threats and boasted and created an uproar in a gin-shop. On the twelfth he came from the house in the company of your son. They went together as far as Lothringer Street; there your son gave the fellow money. On the sixteenth he walked up and down before the house on Kronprinzenufer till evening. When your son, accompanied by the student Voss, appeared in the street, he approached them. After a brief exchange of words your son gave him money again, gold-pieces as well as a bank note. Your son and Voss walked on together as far as the Tiergarten, and during that time Voss seemed to be violently expostulating with your son. The subject of their conversation is unknown. Our agent did not succeed in getting close enough to them, and I had other engagements that day. We are credibly informed, however, by parties in the house on Kronprinzenufer, that Voss is often of an extreme insolence and bitter aggressiveness which are both directed again your son.”

Albrecht Wahnschaffe was white to the very lips. To hide the tumult of his soul, he arose and went to the window.

The foundations were trembling. The peak of life on which he stood was being obscured by dark fumes, even as out there the smoke and soot which the wind blew down from the great smoke-stacks covered all things. The chaotic noises of toil and the whir of machines floated dully to him. On roofs and cornices lay soiled snow.

What was to be done? There were provisions in law for extreme cases; but to have Christian declared irresponsible would not destroy the disgrace. There was nothing to do but persuade, prevent, guard, hush up.

Words finally wrung themselves from his aching throat: “Does he associate with any other questionable people?”

“Not that I know of,” Girke answered. “With plain people, yes; both in the house and on the street. But he goes to lectures regularly, and studies at home. He does not associate with his fellow students or, rather, did not until lately. We are told, however, that at the university his personality has aroused attention. Two days ago he received a visit from a Herr von Thüngen, who is stopping in the Hotel de Rome. Whether this event will have any consequences we cannot say yet.”

With clouded brow the Privy Councillor said: “I have bought all of my son’s possessions. The proceeds of the sale, amounting to thirteen million five hundred thousand marks, have been deposited in the Deutsche Bank. There are unhappily no legal methods by means of which I can be informed concerning the use to which this money is put, and whether not only the income but the capital is being used. Some clear information on this point would be of importance.”

The sum named filled Girke with a reverential shudder. He lowered his head, and saliva gathered in his month. “In addition to the thirteen millions, your son also receives his annual income, doesn’t he?”

Herr Wahnschaffe nodded. “It is paid him by the firm in quarterly installments through a branch of the Bank of Dresden.”

“I merely ask, of course, to have a clear view of the situation. Considering such unlimited means, your son’s way of life is mysterious, most mysterious. He usually takes his meals at very humble inns and restaurants; he never uses a motor or a cab, and even the tramway quite rarely. He walks long distances both morning and evening.”

This bit of information stabbed the Privy Councillor. It made a deeper impression on him than anything else the detective had told him.

“I shall have due regard to your wishes in every respect, sir,” Girke said. “The information you last referred to will not be easy to obtain. But I shall see to it, sir, that you will be satisfied with the services of our firm.”

That ended the interview.

IV

From the unconscious brooding of many days there arose in the mind of Albrecht Wahnschaffe the clear memory of an incident which had taken place at Aix-les-Bains when Christian was fourteen years old.

Albrecht Wahnschaffe had made the acquaintance of a Marchesa Barlotti, a witty old lady who had been a famous opera singer in her youth, and who was now of a positively fascinating ugliness. One day she had met Albrecht Wahnschaffe and Christian on the promenade, and had been so enchanted by the boy’s beauty that she had cordially asked him, in her fine, free way, to visit her. Christian had turned pale; but his father had promised, and appointed an hour in his stead. But Christian, in whom the ugliness of the Marchesa had aroused an unconquerable aversion, calmly and coldly refused obedience to his father’s wish. No persuasion or request or command had influenced the boy. Albrecht Wahnschaffe fell into one of those Berserker rages which made him drunk and dizzy; it didn’t happen more than once in ten years, and when the attack had passed he felt like a man who had had a serious illness. In his rage he had approached Christian and struck him with his stick. But no second blow fell. The expression in the boy’s face paralyzed his arm. For it was as of ice, yet as of flame: there was in it a loftiness and also a deadly scorn, against which anger broke as glass will break on granite. And that icy and infinitely astonished expression seemed to say: You hope to chastise me? To force me?

And the father, in his amazement and humiliation and shame, had recognized the fact that here was a human soul that could not and must not be forced, never, under no circumstances, unto no purpose in the world.

It was this incident that came into his mind now, and was the reason why he definitively gave up the intention of using force.

Months ago he had written to Christian, asking him to come home and explain himself, to rescue his parents from the pressure of anxiety and confusion, and especially his mother, who was suffering beyond her strength. To this letter Christian had replied laconically that there would be no purpose in his coming, and that there was no ground for anxiety, that he was very well and in excellent spirits, and that no one need suffer because he followed his own devices.

But what was the sense of his action? Was there any key to this mystery? Was it possible in this age of science and enlightenment to conceive of a mystic metamorphosis of personality?

He had a vision of Christian walking through the long streets, especially at night, going into humble inns and eating poor food. What was the meaning of it? And he could imagine meeting Christian on such an occasion, and could see his son’s conventional courtesy, the proud, cool eyes, the firm, white teeth which that conventional smile revealed. And even to imagine such a meeting filled him with fear.

But perhaps that was necessary. Perhaps he would have to go to him. Perhaps all that had happened did not in reality have the deadly seriousness which it seemed to have at a distance. Perhaps there was some simple confusion that could be cleared and disentangled easily enough.

The thought of Christian burrowed deep into his brain, and his fear grew. If he sought release from that thought, it emerged to torment him the more, in dreams, in sleepless nights, amid the tumult of affairs, in conversation, in every place, at all times, through all the weeks and months.

V

The castle of the Wahnschaffes, built for delight and splendour, lay desolate. The great reception halls and the guest-rooms were empty. Some American friends had announced their arrival; but Frau Wahnschaffe had begged to be excused.

Her husband sent her delicacies and flowers from the hothouses. She cared for neither. In a lethargy she sat in an armchair or lay in her bed of state. The curtains were drawn even by day. The electric lamps were veiled.

Memories of Christian’s childhood were her refuge. She lived them over in imagination: how Christian as a child of five had lain in bed with her. Early in the morning the nurse had brought him in his loud delight, still with the rosy warmth of sleep upon him. She recalled the bird-like voice, the golden locks, the flexible hands, the radiant, deep-blue eyes. He had stretched out his little hands after her ropes of pearls, when she had come in evening dress into the nursery. Once little maidens had placed a wreath of sweet peas on his head and danced about him in innocent homage. He had raced through the park with two dogs, and stopped with an admirable gesture of astonishment before a statue of bronze. Later, when he was a youth, at the carnival in Mainz he had stood amid lovely women in a flowery chariot and raised a silver goblet toward the beholders.

Unforgettable to her were his gestures, his glances, his resilient walk, the dark tones of his voice. Equally unforgettable were the expectation of his coming, the delight of his presence, the admiration that met him from the eyes of men. The world contained him only.

She read the few letters that he had written her. She guarded them like relics in a little ebony box. They were sober, dry notes, but to her they were magical. There were ten or twelve lines from Paris or San Sebastian, Rome, Viareggio, Corfu, or the Isle of Wight. Once she had drunk all the beauty of earth from these places. Now that he was no longer there, they faded and died to her.

She had loved her womb because it had borne him; she hated it now because she had lost him. But how or why she had lost him—that was a thing unfathomable. She brooded over it by day and night.

No one could guide her. No thought revealed a gleam of light. She stood before a wall and stared at it in despair. She listened, but no voice reached her ear from the other side. All that people told her seemed absurd and false.

In her bedroom hung a portrait of Christian painted in his twentieth year. It had been done three years before by a Swedish painter. It was very like him, and she adored it. One night she took it from the wall and placed it on a table and lifted the shade from a lamp nearby. She crouched in a chair, rested her head upon her hands, and gazed at the picture steadily and with a questioning passion.

She asked the picture, but it gave no answer. She thrilled with a desire to take that head into her hands. But the face on the canvas smiled its equivocal and remote smile. If only she could have wept! But tears were denied her: too hard and unmoved had she passed through life.

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.

Four days later Voss’s answer reached her. Her heart beat as she held the letter. Unopened she hid it in a drawer. Not till evening, when she had locked herself into her room, did she open and read it.

“My dear Fräulein Schöntag:—I am surprised that you are unaware of a rumour which the very sparrows twitter from the house-tops here. Everybody whispers and peers and is astonished, and dares not trust the evidence of his senses. Hence to spare you unnecessary circumlocutions I shall proceed at once to the point. You may remember that I left Hamburg a week before Christian Wahnschaffe, and rented a comfortable apartment for us both in Berlin. Since we had both determined to study medicine there, I had every reason to suppose that as long as our relations were harmonious we would have a common household. So I waited for him, and he came at last; but he did not come alone. He brought a woman with him. Here words fail me. I use the word woman because my consideration for you forbids me the use of any other. And yet how shall I convey the true state of affairs, if I shrink back from the unchangeable facts? The truth cannot remain hidden. This person’s name is Karen Engelschall. He rescued her in a state of hopeless degradation from some harlots’ haunt near the harbour. She is a characteristic outcast. Her appearance is coarse and her manners repulsive. She expects to be confined shortly. She was in the power of a ruffian who maltreated her and beat her; whenever she thinks of him she shakes with terror and horror. She is between thirty and thirty-two years old, but she looks older. One look at her face suffices to convince one that she is familiar with every vice and with every crime.

“My dear young lady, pray do not stop here as you would stop listening were I saying these things to you. The words I have written down are brutally frank, and your imagination, unaccustomed to such images, may identify me with the horrors I am forced to evoke. But I shall be patient, if it be so, until your impressions become sufficiently clarified to do me justice. What I have said is only an introduction, and I must proceed.

“He came with his cases and boxes, but he had discharged his valet. Toward me he was of an extreme cordiality, and indeed he seemed far more cheerful than he had been when I left him. Two rooms were set aside for this woman—a bedroom and a sitting-room. There remained three rooms for him and two for me. But I had not been prepared for this additional companion and hardly knew what to say. He gave me a superficial explanation of her presence, but he withheld his real confidence. How repulsive is this smoothness of the mere worldling, how indistinguishable from downright falseness! To smile and be silent convinces no one, though it may serve to deceive. We who are lowly born do not know such gestures, and disdain to take refuge in polite irresponsibility. The woman appeared at our meals. She sat there like a clod, played with the cloth, asked foolish question, rattled the silver, and used her knife as a shovel. Whenever Wahnschaffe glanced at her, she looked like a thief who had been caught. I was confounded. He seemed to me out of his senses. His entire behaviour toward her was marked by a considerateness so exquisite that I was compelled to believe that her influence over him had been gained in some supernatural way. But what was its nature? I soon ascertained beyond a doubt that she was not his mistress. Nor was such a thing conceivable; it was a thought to be dismissed at once. What then was the source of her power? It was in some devilish magic. Do not think that my mind is wandering. In hours of spiritual insight I have looked deeply into the secrets of creation. The human soul, poor and rich at once, has endless capacities and powers of transformation. The stars gleam over us and we know them not, neither their influence nor their power. The fissures of the earth have been closed, and we know but as through the memory of a dream that there are demons seeking to rule us. I trust that in this matter we shall some day understand each other when we meet. Accept this prophecy in proof of the truth of my assertions.

“I must continue. I no longer felt at home in those handsome rooms. At night I often stood alone in the darkness, and listened for sounds from the rooms of the other two. I conquered my aversion, and sought out the woman when she was alone. She was talkative in a disagreeable way. I did not conceal my contempt. In his presence she was dull. Superficially she seems to rule him through her own servility. The sight of her complete degradation impressed an eye satiated with the glories of this world. I tried to discover in her some alluring quality, some trace of lost or ruined beauty, some charm, however humble or even perverse. I hoped to discover her secret by seeming to agree with her and appreciate the situation. I watched for some sign of a change in her soul, some symptom of expiation or conversion. I found instead a crude, stained, stubborn, bestial, lumpish, unformed creature.

“I shuddered. All too near was the time when it had taken all my passionate energy to save myself from the slime; too deeply had I suffered among those from whom the Lord averts His countenance; too many midnights lay behind me in which my soul hovered over the abyss; too long had I been ground between the millstones of sin; too accursed was this woman in my eyes, far too accursed for me to see her glide calmly and sinuously to a point of sloth where she could rest from past evil and prepare herself for more. I felt impelled to flee. It was no spectacle for me. My spirit threatened to become poisoned again and also my heart—that writhing thing that made me a burden to myself and to mankind. I told Wahnschaffe that he could have my rooms; but he urged me to stay, saying that he felt uncomfortable in the house and would leave it. Aha, I thought, he is lusting after palaces; this is too humble for him. But to every one’s astonishment he sought far humbler quarters, stayed but a week, sought others that were still meaner, and thus changed his abode twice more until he moved with the woman to the reeking and buzzing tenement house in the north end of the city where he is now.

“If I did not know the facts and were told them, I should laugh incredulously. The widow Engelschall, Karen’s mother, was furious when she heard of it. I have met her too, and I cannot describe her without physical nausea. Karen’s brother, a rogue and an outcast, questioned Wahnschaffe and threatened him. He is surrounded by the offscourings of the earth. Yet there he studies, sleeps in a dark hole on a shabby sofa of leather—he the spoiled darling, the expectancy and rose of his own class, the epicure and the allurer, the Adonis and Crœsus! Does my voice seem to pierce your ears even from the pallor of this written sheet? Is your inmost mind petrified? Then pray come here and be a witness to this experiment in monasticism, this modern hermitage, this sombre farce. Come, for perhaps we need you as one of the hearts that once glowed for him. Perhaps eyes from the world of his old delights will be the mirrors in which he will see himself, and find and recover himself once more.

“Do I seem to triumph in his downfall? I should not wish to do so; yet there may be a touch of grimness in my soul. For it is I who prepared the way, I whom dreams of sin like a leprosy of the soul condemn to this very day to an accursed disquietude. He throws away what he has. Millions that breed new millions lie in the bank, and he does not regard them. He lives without luxury or diversion or agreeable company, without plays or cars or games or love or flirtation, without being honoured or admired or spoiled. I await the hour in which he will laugh and declare the period of forgetfulness to be over. So long as the millions breed millions, and his father and mother guard their strong-boxes for him in the background, there is no room for serious fear. His clothes and linen, his cravats and jewels and toilet articles are largely still here where I live alone. He drops in at times to bathe and change his garments. His appearance is what it always was; he looks as though he were going to a luncheon with a minister of state or to a rendezvous with a duchess. He is not melancholy or thoughtful or hollow-eyed. He is as arrogant, as dry of soul, as insignificant, as princely as ever. But there is a new lightness in his actions, a new decisiveness in his speech. And he laughs oftener.

“Once he did not laugh, on that day in his castle when I told him of darkness and of terror, before he went to meet the dancer. He listened, listened day and night, and asked and listened again. But was it compassion that stirred in his soul? By no means. He is not even a Christian; no heavenly spark enlightens his soul; he knows nothing of God, and is of those to whom the passage in Corinthians applies: The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. I had desired to awaken him. I spoke as with tongues of flame out of the nethermost depths. But he was the stronger: he lured me to his Saturnalia and drove me into crime, and I forgot my eternal weal for the sake of the lusts of this earth. He was like a shadow to me; now I am myself like a shadow, and he insults the holy thing he mocks. What knows he of the axe and the ring? I know of both. What knows he of the signs and symbols that become torches in the darkness of the soul? To him all things are concrete and finite;—the nail and the board, the bell and the candle, the stone and the root, the trowel and the hammer are but dead things to him, but not to me. Rome and Galilee rise and battle. Torment proceeds from him; a torment drives me to him. It is as though we were brothers and linked in the flesh and had crept out of the same womb, and yet neither can find or understand the other.

“Why does he live close to that woman? What does he expect of her? He speaks of her in a tone of strange suspense. It is an uncanny, rash, and insatiable curiosity that is in him. Once he lusted after palaces, now he lusts after sties; once he desired counts and artists, cavaliers and cocottes with ropes of pearls, now he seeks drunkards and paupers, pimps and prostitutes. It is a lust that is in him, and neither pilgrimage nor aspiration nor prayer—lust after the nail and stone, the bell and candle, the stone and root, the trowel and hammer, and all things wherein there is power and from which proceed both suffering and knowledge. I have seen his eyes gleam when I spoke of the death of an outcast, or of a deaf-mute’s drowning himself, who was my own brother and died through his fault; and likewise when I spoke of the self-inflicted death of another which I caused in my downtrodden youth. I watched him well amid his jewels and paintings and silver plate, and the flowers and costly books of his houses, when these things began to satiate him, and when he began to listen greedily for the wailing that comes from prison houses, and when a sleep full of fear came over him. And now he plays with the poor and the things of the poor, and wanders by and collects these things and takes delight in them; he reaches out after one and then after another, and desires to know what is in each and what that signifies, and yet remains the man he was. There is no salvation in this, for it is written: Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

“But why does the woman follow him? Why does she refuse the monstrous sums which his family has offered her to leave him? Why does she calmly return with him to her own underworld, when she must be panting after his gold, his jewels, his houses and gardens, his power and his freedom? What holds her? Why does she tarry? What devil’s work is being done? It happened recently that I walked home with him during a violent snow-storm. He had given me a letter of his friend Crammon to read. It was a long and foolish whine, such as one would rather expect from an elderly blue-stocking than from a man of sense. We argued about the letter, that is to say, he would not take it seriously, while I talked myself into a rage over it.

“Then he told me that a certain Baron von Thüngen, one of his former boon-companions, had visited him on the previous day. You may remember him; he was one of those who danced attendance on Eva Sorel—a reddish-blond, affected dandy. This man, Wahnschaffe told me, had hunted for him long and had sat talking with him a whole day. He had said that he was dissatisfied with his life and longed for another way of living; that he did not know what to do, but had become a prey to unbearable melancholy; that he had always felt a deep sympathy for Wahnschaffe, but had not ventured to approach him; and that all he asked now was the privilege of sometimes spending an hour in his company. All this Wahnschaffe told me half diffidently, half in surprise. But the matter was not clear to me, and I said that Thüngen was probably merely one of those half-crazy idlers who had lost his appetite, and whose palate lusts for more sharply seasoned food. He did not take my rudeness amiss, and only said that such a judgment was rash.

“When we had reached our goal I went upstairs with him to Karen Engelschall’s rooms. I did not wish to leave him. I was angry because he had again gotten the better of me by his icy sobriety. When we had passed through the narrow hall-way, we heard Karen’s screeching voice from the kitchen as well as the sound of wood chopping. We opened the kitchen door. The pregnant woman was kneeling by the hearth and splitting kindling wood. On a chair near the wall Isolde Schirmacher, the young girl that waits on her, leaned back with a yellowish pale face and closed eyes. An indisposition had overtaken her; it seemed epileptic in character, for her limbs were rigid and her head bent over backwards. She had evidently been at this task before, and Karen had taken her place. The girl’s condition seemed to have caused her no concern. She split the wood with her hatchet, and, unconscious of our presence on the threshold, talked bitterly and blasphemously concerning her pregnancy: she didn’t want another brat; she had a horror of it; it ought to be throttled at its first breath. Her talk was pure filth—impossible to report. Then Wahnschaffe entered the room, and lifted Isolde Schirmacher from her chair, and carried her, as though she were no burden at all, into the next room, and laid her on the bed. Then he came back, and said to the woman: ‘Let that be, Karen,’ and took the hatchet from her hand and heaped up the wood that had been cut. The woman was frightened. She obeyed him, and was silent, as though speech had died within her. This thing I saw with my own eyes, and from this picture you can see the nature of the woman and the relations of Wahnschaffe and herself.

“No peace is left in me. From an invisible wound in the world’s body the blood keeps flowing. I cry out for a vessel to receive it, but no one brings me such a vessel. Or are the sickness and the wound within myself? Is there such a thing as the yearning of the shadow for its body? Is it conceivable that the unimaginable has come to pass, and yet that he who yearned and sobbed and struggled and prayed for it to come to pass cannot recognize it now? There is some strange fatality in it all. I have learned now to tell fruit from rottenness, the bitter from the sweet, the fragrant from the stinking, the hurtful from the harmless. And I have also learned how limbs swing from their sockets, how vertebra joins vertebra, how muscle is intertwined with muscle, how ligament grows on ligament, how the veins pulse and how the brain is stratified. I can open the magic clockwork and put my hand into the mechanism that is forever rigid. There are compensations; but always at the sombre gates of existence must I pay my entrance fee to brighter regions. The other day I had a vision: You stood with me beside the corpse of a young person, and asked me to cut out the heart which had survived by a little the death of its body and twitched under my knife.

“That one more thing I wanted to tell you. With it I close.”

Johanna sat over that letter all night until morning. A storm of March swept about the house. Her virginal room, with its hangings of white silk and the white enamelled furniture, seemed already bare and rifled to her. For on the morrow she was to leave it forever.

VII

Dead and wounded men lay on the red velvet sofas of the restaurant. They had been carried here hurriedly, and people were trying to help the living. Through the open doors there blew in an icy blast mixed with snow. Random shots were still fired in the streets, soldiers galloped up and down, an infantry squad appeared and disappeared. Guests hovered at the windows. A German waiter said: “They have mounted cannons on the Neva.” A gentleman in a fur-coat entered hastily and said: “Kronstadt is in flames.”

In one of the halls which were used for exclusive banquets, there was a brilliant company invited by Count Tutchkoff, one of the friends of the Grand Duke Cyril. There were Lord and Lady Elmster, the Earl of Somerset, Count and Countess Finkenrode, gentlemen belonging to the German and Austrian embassies, the Marquis du Caille, and the Princes Tolstoi, Trubetzkoi, Szilaghin, and their ladies.

The Grand Duke and Eva Sorel had come late. The dinner was over, and the general conversation had ceased. The couples whispered. The Duke, sitting between Lady Elmster and the Princess Trubetzkoi, had fallen asleep. However animated the company, this would happen from time to time; every one knew it, and had become accustomed to it.

Though he slept, his pose remained erect and careful. From time to time his lids twitched; the furrow on his forehead deepened so that it seemed black; his colourless beard was like a fern on the bark of a tree. One might have suspected that he feigned sleep in order to listen; but there was a slackness in his features that showed the uncontrolled muscles of sleep, and lent his face the appearance of a lemur. On his excessively long, lean hand, which rested on the cloth, and, like his lids, twitched at times, gleamed a solitaire diamond, the size of a hazelnut.

A restlessness had stolen over the company. When the rifles outside began to rattle again, the young Countess Finkenrode arose and turned frightened glances toward the door. Szilaghin approached her, and calmed her with a smile. An officer of the guards entered, and whispered a report to Tutchkoff.

Eva and Wiguniewski sat a little aside, in front of a tall mirror that reflected a pallid image of them and of a part of the room.

Wiguniewski said to her: “Unhappily the report is vouched for. No one thought of such a thing.”

“I was told he was in Petrograd,” Eva answered. “In a German newspaper, moreover, I read a report that he was arrested in Moscow. And where are your proofs? To condemn Ivan Becker on hearsay is almost as terrible as the crime of which he is accused.”

Wiguniewski took a letter from his pocket, looked about him carefully, unfolded it, and said: “From Nice he wrote this to a friend of his who is also my friend. I am afraid it puts an end to all doubt.” Painfully, and with many hesitations, he translated the Russian words into French. “I am no longer what I was. Your suppositions are not groundless, and the rumours have not lied. Announce and confirm it to all who have set their hopes on me and given me their trust on definite conditions. A terrible time lies behind me. I could not go farther on my old and chosen path. You have been deceived in me, even as a phantom has misled me. In a case like mine it requires greater courage and strength to confess sincerely, and to wound those who had put their faith and trust in me, than to mount the scaffold and give up one’s life. Gladly would I have suffered death for the ideas to which all my thoughts and feelings have been devoted hitherto. All of you know that. For I had already sacrificed to them my possessions, my peace, my youth, my liberty. But now when I have come to recognize these ideas as destructive errors, I must not serve them for another hour. I fear neither your accusations nor your contempt. I follow my inner light and the God that is within. There are three truths that have guided me in that searching of my soul which led to my conversion: It is a sin to resist; it is a sin to persuade others to resistance; it is a sin to shed the blood of man. I know all that threatens me; I know the isolation that will be mine. I am prepared for all persecutions. Do what you must, even as I do what I must.”

After a long silence Eva said: “That is he. That is his voice; that is the bell whose chime none can resist. I believe him and I believe in him.” She threw a sombre glance at the face of that sleeper beside the radiant board.

Wiguniewski crushed the letter, and thrust forward his chin with a bitter gesture. “His three truths,” he replied, “will be as effective against our cause as three army divisions of Cossacks. They will suffice to fill the dungeons on both sides of the Urals, to unman our youth, to bury our hopes. Each one is a whip that will smite unto the earth an hundred thousand awakened spirits. Crime? It is worse; it is the tragedy of all this land. Three truths!” He laughed through his compressed teeth. “Three truths, and a blood-bath I will begin that will make those of Bethlehem and St. Bartholomew seem jests. You may look at me. I do not weep; I laugh. Why should I weep? I shall go home, summon the popes, and give them this rag; and let them made amulets of it to distribute among those who wait for salvation. Perhaps that will suffice them.”

Eva’s face grew hard. An evil fascination still drew her eyes toward that sleeper’s face. Upon the edges of her lips hovered a morbid smile; the skin of her cheek glimmered like an opal. “Why should he not follow the command of his soul?” she asked, and for a moment turned her diademed brow toward the prince. “Is it not better that a man should express and embody himself completely than that many hundreds of thousands be helped in the dreary mediocrity of their rigid lives? He has said it in his own beautiful way: ‘I follow the inner light and the God that is within.’ How many can do that? How many dare? And now I understand something he once said”—more penetratingly she looked into that sleeper’s face—“‘one must bow down before that!’ So that was in his mind. Strange ploughs are passing over this earth of yours, prince. In its lacerated body there streams a darkness into which one would like to plunge in order to be born again. A primitive breath is there, and chaos; there the elements thunder and the most terrible dream becomes reality, an epic reality of immemorial ages. Of such life I once had no perception, except in some great marble in which a nameless woe had become rigid and eternal. I feel as though I were looking back on this scene from the height of centuries to come or from a star, and as though everything were vision.” All this she said in a trembling voice and with an impassioned melancholy.

Wiguniewski, who had been a constant witness of her inner transformations for months past, was not surprised at her speech. His eyes, too, sought the sleeper’s face. With a deep breath he said, “Yesterday a student of nineteen, Semyon Markovitch, heard of Ivan Becker’s recanting and shot himself in his room. I went there and saw the body. If you had seen that dead boy, Eva, you would speak differently. A little differently, at all events. Did you ever see a lad lie in his coffin with a little black wound in his temple? He was charming and innocent as a girl, and yet he could experience this unspeakable woe and entertain this determined despair at a loss beyond measure.”

A shiver passed over Eva’s shoulders, and she smiled with a glittering feverishness that made her seem strangely possessed and heartless. The Prince continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “No doubt there’s a good deal that is alluring about this letter. Why shouldn’t a man like Ivan Becker render his breach of faith less repulsive by some plausible psychological excuses? I am ready to grant you that he acted neither in conscious hypocrisy nor from any self-seeking motive. But he wouldn’t be the genuine Russian that he is—emotional, turbid, fanatical, self-tormenting—if his transformation were not to entail all the fatal consequences of a systematic and deliberate treachery. He thinks that what he calls his awakening will serve mankind. In the meantime, out of blindness and weakness, confusion and mistaken moral fervour, he rushes into the claws of the beast that waits mercilessly in every corner and nook of Europe seeking to destroy and annihilate. And what I am doing now is passing a most charitable judgment. We happen to know that he has opened negotiations with the Holy Synod and is corresponding eagerly with the secret cabinet. Here in Moscow, as well as in Kiev and Odessa, arrests have been made in rapid succession which must be attributed to him. As things are, he alone could have furnished the information without which the authorities would not have ventured on these steps. These are facts that speak for themselves.”

Eva pressed her right hand against her bosom, and stared, as though fascinated, into the air where she saw a vision that caused her to feel a rapidly alternating horror and ecstasy. Her lips moved as though to put a question, but she restrained herself.

With large and earnest eyes she looked at Wiguniewski, and, whispered: “I suddenly have a longing that burns my heart, but I do not know after what. I should like to climb a mountain far beyond the snowline; or fare on a ship out into uncharted seas; or fly above the earth in an aeroplane. No, it is none of these things. I should like to go into a forest, to a lonely chapel, and cast myself down and pray. Will you go on such a pilgrimage with me? To some far monastery in the steppes?”

Wiguniewski was puzzled. Passion and sadness were in her words, but also a challenge that wounded him. Before he could formulate an answer, the Marquis du Caille and Prince Szilaghin approached them.

The sleeper opened his eyes and showed their slothful stare.

VIII

The costumer and the wig-maker had arrived in Edgar Lorm’s study. He was going to try on his costume for the rôle of Petrucchio. “The Taming of the Shrew” was soon to be given with new scenery and a new cast, and he looked forward to playing the impetuous and serene tamer.

Judith, sitting on a low stool in her over-dainty sitting-room, her arms folded on her knees, heard his resonant voice, although three closed doors separated them. He was quarrelling; tradesmen and assistants always enraged him. He was difficult to satisfy, for what he demanded of himself he also required of others—the tensest exertion and the most conscientious toil.

Judith was bored. She opened a drawer filled with ribands, turned over the contents, tried the effect of different ribands in her hair, and looked at herself in the glass with a frown. That occupation tired her too. She left the drawer open and the many-coloured silks scattered about.

She went through the rooms, knocked at Lorm’s door and entered. She was surprised at his appearance. In the lace-trimmed, velvet doublet, the pied hose, the broad-brimmed hat with its adventurous feather, the brown locks of the wig that fell to his shoulders, he looked a victor, handsome, bold, fascinating. And his very way of standing there was art and interpretation; the whole world was his stage.

Like soldiers at attention, the costumer and wig-maker stood before him and smiled admiringly.

Judith smiled too. She had not expected to find him in a new transformation, and she was grateful for the experience. She came to him, and touched his cheeks with her fingers. His eyes, still lit by the ardour of the poet’s creation, asked after her desire. He was accustomed to have her express some wish whenever she condescended to a caress. With her arm she drew his head down a little and whispered: “I want you to make me a present, Edgar.”

He laughed, embarrassed and amused. The good-natured observation of the two strangers was painful to him. He drew her arm through his and led her to the library. “What shall I give you, child?” The bold fervour of Petrucchio which, with the donning of the costume, had passed into him, faded from his face.

“Anything you please,” Judith answered, “but something remarkable that will delight me and something that you are fond of.”

He smacked his lips, looked merry and yielding, glanced about him, took up one object after another, pushed his chin forward and reflected, mimicked a whole scale of emotions from puzzled helplessness to anxious serviceableness, and finally struck his forehead with a roguish and graceful gesture. “I have it,” he cried. He opened a little cabinet, and with a bow gave Judith a watch of very old Nürnberger make. Its case was of exquisite old gold filigree work.

“How charming,” said Judith, and balanced the watch on the palm of her hand.

Lorm said: “Now amuse yourself admiring it. I must go and send those fellows away.” With a swift, resilient tread he left the room.

Judith sat down at the great oak table, looked at the engraved ornamentation on the watch, pressed a little spring, and, when the oval sides of the case flew open, gazed into the ancient, lifeless works. “I shall take it all apart,” she determined. “But not now; to-night. I want to see what’s inside.” And she looked forward with a glow to the evening hour when she would take the watch apart.

But the present, charming as it was, did not suffice her. When Lorm returned in modern dress, a clean-shaven gentleman and husband, she held out the watch-case from which she had slipped the works, and begged or rather commanded him, who was now the man of common clay: “Fill it with gold pieces, Edgar. That’s what I want.”

She was all voracity, avidity, desire.

Lorm lowered his head in vicarious shame. In a drawer of his desk he had a little roll of gold-pieces. He filled the watch-case and gave it to her. Then he said, “While you were out driving to-day, your brother Wolfgang called. He stayed about an hour. He seems to have a rather sterile nature. It amused me—the difficulty he had in placing me in some social category whose ways he understood. He’s a born bureaucrat.”

“What did he want?” Judith asked.

“He wanted to consult you about Christian. He’s coming again to do so.”

Judith arose. Her face was pale and her eyes glittered. Her knowledge of Christian’s changed way of life was derived from a talk she had had with Crammon during his visit to Berlin, from the letters of a former friend, and from messages that had come to her directly from her parents. The first news had awakened a rage in her that gnawed at her soul. Sometimes when she was alone and thought of it she gritted her teeth and stamped her feet. Further details she heard made the very thought of him fill her to the brim with bitterness. If she had not possessed the gift of forcing herself to forgetfulness, of commanding it so successfully as to annihilate the things she desired not to be, her inner conflicts over this matter would have made her ill and morose. Every enforced recollection awakened that rage in her, and recoiled against him who caused it.

Lorm knew and feared this fact. His instinct told him, moreover, that what Judith feared in Christian’s actions was an evil caricature of her own fate; for she did not conceal the fact from him that she considered herself as one who had voluntarily fallen from her original station. But he thought too modestly of himself to resent this attitude of hers. To tremble at the opinions of people had become a part of her innermost nature. Although she was no longer upheld by the elements that had once nourished her aristocratic consciousness, her being was still rooted in them, and she felt herself degraded in her new life.

But even this could not explain the wild fury to which she yielded at any mention of Christian’s name.

Her attitude was that of a cat at bay. “I don’t want him to come back,” she hissed. “I don’t want to hear anything about that man. I’ve told you that a hundred times. But you’re always so flabby, and go in for everything. Couldn’t you have told him that I won’t listen? Get a car and drive to him at once. Forbid him absolutely to enter my house or to write me. But no! You’re such a coward. I’ll write to him myself. I’ll tell him that his visits will always be a pleasure to me, although his sudden fondness is queer enough, but that I will not, under any circumstances, listen to a word about that man.”

Lorm did not dare to contradict her. With gentle superiority he said: “I don’t understand your extreme bitterness. No one considers your brother Christian to have done anything criminal. He is very eccentric, at the worst. He harms no one. What injury has he done you? Weren’t you and he very fond of each other? You used always to speak of him with an affectionate and proud emphasis. I don’t understand.”

She became livid and drunk with rage. “Of course,” she jeered, “you! Does anything touch you? Have you any sense left for anything but grease-paint and old rags? Have you any conception of what those words stood for—Christian Wahnschaffe? What they meant? You in your world of lies and hollowness—what should you understand?”

Lorm came a step nearer to her. He looked at her compassionately. She drew back with a gesture of aversion.

She was beating, beating the fish.

IX

Karen Engelschall said: “You don’t have to worry; there’s no chance of his getting back before night. If he does, I’ll tell him you’re an acquaintance of mine.”

She gave Girke a slow and watchful look. She sat by the window, resting her body with the broad satisfaction of those women of the people to whom sitting still is an achievement and a luxury. She was sewing a baby’s shift.

“Anyhow we don’t have much to talk about,” she continued with a malicious enjoyment. “You’ve said your say. They offer me sixty thousand if I go and disappear. That’s all right enough. But if I wait they’ll go a good bit higher. I’m somebody now. I’ll think it over; you can come back next week.”

“You should think very seriously,” Girke replied in his official manner. “Think of your future. This may be the highest offer. Six months ago you didn’t dream of such a thing. It’s very pleasant to live on one’s own income; it’s every one’s ideal. It is very foolish of you to lose such an opportunity.”

With her malicious smile she bent lower over her work. An undefined well-being made her press her knees together and close her eyes. Then she looked up, swept her tousled, yellow hair from her forehead, and said: “I’d have to be a bigger fool than I am to be taken in. D’you think I don’t know how rich he is? If he wanted to buy me off he’d make your offer look like dirt. Why shouldn’t I make a good bargain? No, I’m no fool. This here, as you say, is my great chance, but not the way you think. I’m going to wait and see. If I’m wrong, well, I done it to myself.”

Girke shifted his position uncomfortably. He looked at his watch, and then with his prying eyes regarded the room with its common wall-paper, furniture, and carpet.

“I can tell you one thing that’ll please you, and I don’t mind because it don’t change nothing,” Karen Engelschall said. “His people are all wrong if they think it’s on my account that he’s acting the way he does, and that he’d have stayed with them except for me. ’Course, I could make fools of you all and pretend he’d changed his life on my account. What good would that do? A new-born child could see that there’s something queer and crazy about it. So why should I go and play-act in front of you, when I myself just sit here and wonder and wonder!”

“That’s very true,” said Girke, amazed at her frankness. “I understand, and what you say interests me immensely. I have always said that we could count on the most valuable assistance from you. Now you would do me a very real service if you would answer a few questions. I should not, of course, forget your assistance but show my appreciation very practically.”

Karen giggled quietly. “I believe you,” she answered. “You’d like to spy around a bit and then go and report. No, I’m not fond of that sort o’ thing. There’re other places where you can hear a lot. There’re people what can tell you all you want to know. There’s that friend of his, that Voss: Go to him!” The name brought rage to her eyes. “He acts as if there wasn’t nothing he didn’t know in the world, and treats a person so mean and low that you’d like to punch his dirty nose for him. Ask him who gets the money. I don’t, but Voss ought to be able to tell you.”

“I’m afraid you overestimate that,” said Girke, with his most expert air. “There is no doubt that the man in question is at the bottom of all the trouble. But things being as they are, even ten times the amount that satisfies his greed would be inconsiderable. I can give you that very definite assurance. There must be other and quite unaccounted drains on his purse.”

“I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying there,” Karen answered, and showed her small, yellow, evil teeth. “Maybe you’d like to search my wardrobe or my mattress here, eh? Maybe you think this place is too fine or that I got expensive clothes and jewels? And did you ever see that hole over at Gisevius’s where the elegant gentleman himself sleeps? We’re living in luxury, we are! Why, the very mice starve here. I found one dead in a corner over there the other day. Most people hate mice, but they don’t bother him. And it’s pitiful for a man that’s lived like he has. According to what people say, he must have been just like the emperor. He had castles and game-preserves and motor cars and the handsomest women, and they just threw themselves at his head. And never no trouble and no worry, more of everything than he could use, and money and clothes and eating and drinking and friends and servants and everything. And now he’s at Gisevius’s, where the mice die of hunger.”

Her burning eyes were fixed on Girke, but in reality she saw him no longer. She was no longer speaking to this unknown man, whose professional curiosity left her quite unmoved. She was relieving herself by breaking the convulsive silence of her lonely days. Her hands lay on her lap like empty shells, and the child’s garment had slipped to the floor. Her tongue was unleashed. The words poured forth—words born of her brooding, words familiar to her through many days and nights of strangeness and amazement. In her voice there was something metallic, and in her face the slack muscles grew taut.

Girke listened tensely and took mental notes. He noticed that he need ask no questions now. The machine, fed by a secret fire, had started itself.

Karen went on: “He comes here and sits down and looks around. He sits down and opens a book and studies. Then he puts the book away and looks around again. Then he notices me sudden like, as if I’d just been blown in. If only he don’t begin asking questions again, I says to myself. Then I say to him: ‘There was a big noise in the street to-day.’ Or I say: ‘Isolde’s hands are swollen; we got to have some ointment. My mother was here,’ I says maybe, ‘and told me of a place on Alexander Square where you can buy linen cheap.’ He just nods. Then I put on the water for the coffee, and he tells me how a mangy dog followed him for a long time and how he fed it, and that he’d been to a workingmen’s meeting in Moabit and had talked to some people. But he don’t tell me much, and acts kind of ashamed. I’m satisfied so long as he don’t ask questions. But his eyes get that expression in ’em, and then he asks if my time wasn’t coming soon,”—brutally she pointed to her distended body—“and if I wasn’t glad, and how it was the other times, and if I was glad then, and if I’d like to have this or that. And he brings me apples and cake and chocolate and a shawl and a fur-piece for my neck. ‘Look, Karen,’ he says, ‘what I’ve brought you,’ and he kisses my hand. Kisses my hand, I tell you, ’sif I was God knows what, and he didn’t know about me. Did you ever hear of anybody kissing the hand of a woman like me?”

She was pale as she asked the question; her features were distorted, and the helmet of her yellow hair seemed to rise. Girke’s eyes became blank and stony. “Very remarkable,” he murmured; “most interesting.”

Karen paid no attention to him. “‘How are you, Karen?’” she mocked Christian’s voice. “‘Do you want for anything?’ What should I be wanting? So I get desperate and I says: ‘A runner for the floor or cretonne curtains for the bedroom. Red cretonne,’ I says, ‘because it pops into my mind. Sometimes we go out together to Humboldthain or the Oranienburger Gate. He thinks to himself and smiles and says nothing. The people stare and I get a goose-flesh. I’d like to scream out at ’em: ‘Yes, there he is, the great man, that’s him walking with me. And this is me—a woman of the streets that’s going to have a baby. A fine couple, eh? Mighty fine! We’re a grand couple, we are!’ Sometimes that Voss comes and they talk in the other room; or anyhow Voss talks. He knows how to, too; better’n any preacher. And once there was a baron here, a young blond fellow. That was a funny business. He took to crying, and cried and cried like a child. Christian said nothing, but just sat down by him. You never know what he’s thinking. Sometimes he walks up and down the room, and other times he’ll stand and look out of the window. I don’t know where he goes, and I don’t know where he comes from. Mother says I’m a fool. She says she’s going to find out what’s what. If she smells money she sticks like a burr. Only I wish she hadn’t sicked Niels Heinrich on to me. He gets more shameless all the time. I get scared when I hear him on the stairs. He begins to cut up rough in the hall. Last Monday he was here and wanted money. ‘I got none,’ I says, ‘you go to work.’ He’s learned bricklaying and can earn good money, but doing nothing suits him better. He told me to shut my trap or he’d lay me out. Just then Christian came in. Niels Heinrich glares at him. My legs was shaking, and I draws Christian aside and says: ‘He wants brass.’ Christian didn’t know what I meant. So I says: ‘Money.’ And he gave him money, gave him a cool hundred, and turned and went out. Niels Heinrich followed him; I thought there’d be a fight. Nothing happened; but it was a nasty business. I can’t get the scare out of my bones.”

She stopped and panted for breath.

Girke thought it his duty to interpolate: “We have accumulated sufficient evidence to prove that Niels Heinrich pursues him with demands for money.”

Karen scarcely listened. Her face grew darker and darker. She put her hands against her breast, arose clumsily, and looked around in the room. Her feet were turned inward and her abdomen protruded. “He comes and he goes, he comes and he goes,” she complained, in a voice that gradually became almost a scream. “That’s the way it is, day out and day in. If only he wouldn’t ask questions. It makes me feel hot and cold. It’s like being searched by a matron. D’you know how that is? Everything’s turned inside out and everything’s handled. Awful! And I ought to try to be comfortable here; there’s nothing better in the world. When you’ve been kicked around like some stinking animal, you ought to thank God to have a chance to breathe easy. But to sit and wait and tell how things was at this place and at that, and how this thing happened and the other—no, I can’t stand it no more! It’s too much! It’s like splitting a person’s head open!” She struck her fist against her temple. She seemed an animal, an animal with all the ugliness of a human soul dead or distorted, a wicked savage awakened now and untamable.

Girke was confounded. He got up, and pushed the chair, both as a protection and a weapon, between the woman and himself. He said: “I won’t take up more of your time. I beg you to consider my proposition carefully. I shall drop in again some time.” He went with a sensation as of danger at his back.

Karen hardly observed that she was alone in the room. She brooded. Her thinking processes were primitive. Two uncertainties tormented her to the point of morbidness and rage: What impelled Christian to search her soul and past, again and again, with the same patience, kindliness, and curiosity? And what inexplicable force made her answer, explain, relate, and give an accounting of her life?

Every time he began she struggled, but she always yielded to that force. She always began by turning her face in horror from her own past. But soon she was forced by an implacable power to embrace that vision, and everything that she had experienced, everything that had vanished, all that was desolate, turbid, dark, and dangerous reappeared with an incomparable vividness. It was her own life, and yet seemed another’s, who was herself and yet some one else. It seemed to her that all those desolate, turbid, dark, dangerous things began over again, doubly terrible, with a foreknowledge of each day’s disconsolate end.

Forgotten things and places plagued her and emerged terribly from her consciousness: rooms and beds and walls, cities and streets and street-corners and public houses and dark halls that led to police courts; human beings and words, and certain hours and days and tears and cries; and all terrors and degradations and crimes, all mockery and wild laughter—all this came back to her, and the past arose and lacerated her mind.

It was like being in an inconceivably long shaft through which one had already passed. And now one was commanded to retrace one’s steps and fetch something that one had forgotten. One resisted desperately and struggled against the command, but in vain. One had to turn back to search for that forgotten thing without knowing what it was. And as one wandered along, a figure met one from the opposite direction, and that other figure was one’s very self. One was inclined to believe in a mirror and its image. But that other self was lacerated; its breast was torn open, and within it one saw the crimson gleaming of a naked heart.

What was it? What did it all mean?

She fell back on the chair with a deep moan, and covered her face with her hands. Oh, he should be made to pay dearly for it—that tormentor of hers.

The darkness crept in and blotted out her form.

X

Amadeus Voss said to Christian: “I’ll tell you exactly how you feel. You are like a man who wants to harden himself to bear cold, and suddenly strips off his garments; or like one who has never drunk whiskey nor even smelt it, and suddenly pours down a bottle of the vilest sort. But you are freezing in the cold, and reeling from the liquor. And that is not the worst. The worst is that you feel a secret horror. And how could it be otherwise? The elements of which you are made are in bitter conflict with your will. You are full of horror and will not confess it to yourself. Your hands are touching a hundred things, dirty and common and ugly, that once did not so much as enter the circle of your life. Now you sit and look at your nails that are still well manicured. You look at them with disgust, and you cannot bring yourself to touch the glass that greasy lips have touched and calloused hands have held. Yes, you are sorriest of all for your hands. And of what avail is the whole experiment so long as you feel sorry for your hands? Do you think you really lie on that bed and rest on that sofa?”

“I believe I do, Amadeus.”

“You are wrong. When the nights are cold, is it really you who stir the fire in that stove?”

“Who else? I’ve even learned how to do it.”

“And is it you who light the kerosene lamp, you whose light pressure made the lustres in palaces to radiate? No, it is not your real self. Think of that smoky ceiling. How restless you must be, and how shaken by aversion! Can you really sleep there? And is not your awakening ghastly? You go about among the poor, but your clothes are handsome; any one can see that a good tailor made them, and that they were pressed recently. It makes those people grin and feel cheated, for in their eyes the greatest cheat is a rich man who apes the poor. They will not take you seriously, though you were to throw your whole fortune into the river or were to wander among them in rags. You only embitter them, and they take your mood for a deception and a morbid whim. You don’t know them. You do not know the utter raggedness of their souls; you do not know what they have lacked and have been forced to lack for generations, nor how they hate you for the bitterness of that necessity. You do not know their interests, nor their thought, nor their speech. And they will never, never comprehend that a man can renounce that which is the very blood of all their hopes and wishes, the essence of their dreams, their envy and their rancour. They toil for ten, twenty, thirty years, to have breath and food in their belly. And you expect them to believe that all you ask is a little breath and food—you, to whom they were hitherto but nameless beasts of burden, you for whom they sent their sons into mines and their daughters into the streets and hospitals, for whom their lungs were corroded by the fumes of mercury and the shavings of steel, for whom hundreds of thousands were sacrificed in the dumb heat of those daily battles which the proletarian fights with capital, sacrificed as stokers and masons, weavers and smiths, glass-blowers and machine-hands, all wage-slaves of your own? What do you hope to accomplish? With what powers of the spirit are you reckoning? What space of time do you give yourself? You are but a gamester, nothing but a gamester; and so far you are but playing with counters, without knowing whether you will ever be able to redeem them.”

“All that you say is true,” Christian replied.

“Well, then?”

“I cannot do otherwise than I am doing.”

“Not a week ago such a horror of that place seized you that you fled to the Hotel Westminster to spend the night there.”

“It is true, Amadeus. How do you know it?”

“Never mind that. Do you want to smother your very soul in horror? See to it that you leave a way of escape for yourself. These Engelschalls, mother and son, will make your life a veritable hell. If you fall into their snares, you’ll be worse off than some poor devil in the hands of usurers. Surely you’re not deceived in regard to the character of that crowd? A child would know what they are after. I warn you. They and others like them—the longer you live with them, the nearer will they bring you to despair.”

“I am not afraid, Amadeus,” Christian said. “One thing I don’t understand,” he added gently, “and it is that you of all people would deter me from doing what I feel to be right and necessary.”

Voss answered with intense passion. “You threw me a plank so that I might save myself and reach the shore. Will you thrust me back into the abyss before I feel the firm earth beneath my feet? Be what you really are! Don’t turn into a shadow before my very eyes! If you withdraw the plank, I cannot tell what will become of either of us.”

His face was horribly distorted, and his clenched hands shook.

XI

In his increasing oppression and confusion of mind, surrounded by hostility, mockery, and unbelief, the face of Ivan Becker appeared to Christian like a beautiful vision. Suddenly he knew that in some sense he had been waiting for Becker and counting on him.

He was heavily burdened, and it seemed to him that Becker was the one human being who could ease that burden. At times he was near despair. But whenever he thought of the words and the voice of Becker and those hours of the beginning of his present path—hours between darkness and dawn—his faith would return.

To him Becker’s word was the word of man, and Becker’s eye the eye of the race; and the man himself one upon whom one could cast all one’s own burdens and fetters and obstacles.

That vision grew clearer and clearer. Becker became a figure with an abyss in his breast, an inverted heaven, in which the tormenting and the heavy things of the world could be cast, and in which they became invisible.

He sent a telegram to Prince Wiguniewski requesting Becker’s present address. The reply informed him that, in all likelihood, Becker was in Geneva.

Christian made all preparations to go to Switzerland.

XII

Karen gave birth to a boy.

At six o’clock in the morning she called Isolde Schirmacher and bade her go for the midwife. When she was alone she screamed so piercingly that a young girl from a neighbouring flat hastened in to ask what ailed her. This girl was the daughter of a Jewish salesman who went about the city taking orders for a thread mill. Her name was Ruth Hofmann. She was about sixteen. She had dark grey eyes and ash-blond hair that fell loose to her shoulders, where it was evenly clipped and made little attempts to curl.

Isolde in her haste had left the hall-door open, and Ruth Hofmann had been able to enter. Her pale face grew a shade paler when she caught sight of the screaming and writhing woman. She had never yet seen a woman in labour. Yet she grasped Karen’s hands and held them firmly in her own, and spoke to the suffering woman in a sweet and soothing voice until the midwife came.

When Christian arrived, a cradle stood by Karen’s bed, and on its pillows lay an unspeakably ugly little creature. Karen nursed the child herself; but no maternal happiness was to be seen in her. A sombre contempt lay in the very way in which she handled the infant. If it cried, she gave it to Isolde Schirmacher. The odour of diapers filled the room.

On the second day Karen was up and about again. When Christian came that evening, he found the widow Engelschall and Ruth Hofmann. The widow Engelschall said that she would take the child into her care. Karen cast an uncertain glance at Christian. The woman said in a loud tone: “Five thousand marks for the care of it, and everything’s settled. What you need is rest, and then you’ll have it.”

“Far’s I’m concerned you can do what you please,” said Karen peevishly.

“What do you think, Herr Wahnschaffe?” The widow Engelschall turned to Christian.

He replied: “It seems to me that a child should stay with its mother.”

Karen gave a dry laugh, in which her mother joined. Ruth Hofmann arose. Christian asked her courteously whether she had any request to make. She shook her head so that her hair moved a little. Suddenly she gave him her hand, and it seemed to Christian as though he had long known her.

He had already told Karen that he was leaving the city for a time; but he postponed his departure a whole week.

XIII

The house was slowly turning in for the night. Heavy trucks rattled on the street. Boys whistled piercingly. The outer door was closed thunderously. The walls shook with the tread of a hundred feet. In the yard some one was driving nails into a box. Somewhere a discordant voice was singing. Tumult arose from the public houses at the corners. A bestial laugh sounded from above.

Christian opened the window. It was warm. Groups of workingmen came from Malmöer Street and scattered. At one corner there was a green-grocer’s shop. In front of it stood an old woman with a lidless basket, in which there were dirty vegetables and a dead chicken with a bloody neck. Christian could see these things, because the light of the street lamp fell on them.

“She’ll take the child for four thousand,” said Karen.

Surreptitiously Christian glanced at the cradle. The infant both repelled and attracted him. “You had better keep it,” he said.

Hollow tones could be heard from the adjoining flat. Hofmann had come home. He was talking, and a clear boyish treble answered him.

The clock ticked. Gradually the confused noises of the house blended into a hum.

Karen sat down at the table and strung glass beads. Her hair had recently become even yellower and more touselled; but her features had a firmer modelling. Her face, no longer swollen and puffed from drinking, was slimmer and showed purer tints.

She looked at Christian, and, for a moment, she had an almost mad feeling; she yearned to know some yearning. It was like the glowing of a last spark in an extinguished charcoal stove.

The spark crimsoned and died.

“You were going to tell me about Hilde Karstens and your foster-father, Karen,” Christian said persuasively. “You made a promise.”

“For God’s sake, leave me alone! It’s so long ago I can’t remember about it!” She almost whined the words. She held her head between her hands and rested her elbows on her knees. Her sitting posture always had a boastful lasciviousness. Thus women sit in low public houses.

Minutes passed. Christian sat down at the table facing her. “I want to give the brat away,” she said defiantly. “I can’t stand looking at it. Come across with the four thousand—do! I can’t, I just can’t bear looking at it!”

“But strangers will let the child sicken and perhaps die,” said Christian.

A grin, half coarse and half sombre, flitted across her face. Then she grew pale. Again she saw that mirrored image of herself: it came from afar, from the very end of the shaft. She shivered, and Christian thought she was cold. He went for a shawl and covered her shoulders. His gestures, as he did so, had something exquisitely chivalrous about them. Karen asked for a cigarette. She smoked as one accustomed to it, and the way she held the cigarette and let the smoke roll out of her mouth or curl out from between pointed lips was also subtly lascivious.

Again some minutes passed. She was evidently struggling against the confession. Her nervous fingers crushed one of the glass beads.

Then suddenly she spoke: “There’s many that isn’t born at all. Maybe we’d love them. Maybe only the bad ones are born because we’re too low to deserve the good ones. When I was a little girl I saw a boy carry seven kittens in a sack to the pool to drown ’em. I was right there when he spilled them into the water. They struggled like anything and came up again and tried to get to land. But as soon as one of the little heads came up, the boy whacked at it with a stick. Six of ’em drowned, and only the ugliest of ’em managed to get into a bush and get away. The others that was drowned—they was pretty and dainty.”

“You’re bleeding,” said Christian. The broken bead had cut her hand. Christian wiped the blood with his handkerchief. She let him do it quietly, while her gaze was fixed on old visions that approached and receded. The tension was such that Christian dared scarcely breathe. Upon his lips hovered that strange, equivocal smile that always deceived men concerning his sympathies.

He said softly: “You have something definite in mind now, Karen.”

“Yes, I have,” she said, and she turned terribly pale. “You wanted to know how it was with Hilde Karstens and with the cabinet-maker. He was the man with whom my mother was living at that time. Hilde was fifteen and I was thirteen. She and I was good friends, together all the time, even on the dunes one night when the spring-tide came. The men were wild after her. Lord, she was pretty and sweet. But she laughed at ’em. She said: ‘When I’m eighteen I’m going to marry a man—a real man that can do things; till then, just don’t bother me.’ I didn’t go to the dance at the ‘Jug of Hösing’; I had to stay home and help mother pickle fish. That’s when it all happened. I could never find out how Hilde Karstens got to the mounds on the heath alone. Maybe she went willingly with the pilot’s mate. It was a pilot’s mate; that’s all we ever knew about him. He was at the ‘Jug’ for the first time that night, and, of course, he wasn’t never seen again. It was by the mounds that he must have attacked her and done her the mischief, ’cause otherwise she wouldn’t have walked out into the sea. I knew Hilde Karstens; she was desperate. That evening the waves washed her body ashore. I was there. I threw myself down and grasped her wet, dead hair. They separated me from her, but I threw myself down again. It took three men to get me back home. Mother locked me up and told me to sift lentils, but I jumped out of the window and ran to Hilde’s house. They said she’d been buried. I ran to the church yard and looked for her grave. The grave-digger showed it to me far off in a corner. They looked for me all night and found me by the grave and dragged me home. Half the village turned out to see. Because I’d run away from the lentils my mother beat me with a spade handle so that my skin peeled from my flesh. And while I lay there and couldn’t stir, she went to the schoolmaster, and they wrote a letter to the squire asking if he wouldn’t take me to work on the estate. The house was empty, and the cabinet-maker came into the kitchen where I was lying. He was drunk as a lord. He saw me stretched out there by the hearth, and stared and stared. Then he picked me up and carried me into the bedroom.”

She stopped and looked about as though she were in a strange place and as though Christian were a menacing stranger.

“He tore off my clothes, my skirts and my bodice and my shirt and everything, and his hands shook. In his eyes there was a sparkling like burning alcohol. And when I lay naked before him he stroked me with his trembling hands over and over again. I felt as if I’d have to scratch the brain out of his skull; but I couldn’t do nothing. I just felt paralyzed, and my head as heavy as iron. If I get to be as old as a tree, I’ll never forget that man’s face over me that time. A person can’t forget things like that—never in this world. And as soon as ever I could stir again, he reeled in a corner and fell down flat, and it was all dark in the room.” She gave a deep sigh. “That was the way of it. That’s how it started.”

Christian did not turn his eyes from her for the shadow of a moment.

“After that,” she went on, “people began to say, ‘Lass, your eyes are too bold.’ Well, they was. I couldn’t tell everybody why. The vicar drivelled about some secret shame and turning my soul to God. He made me laugh. When I went into service on the estate, they grudged me the food I ate. I had to wait on the children, fetch water, polish boots, clean rooms, run errands for the Madame. There was an overseer that was after me—a fellow with rheumy eyes and a hare-lip. Once at night when I got to my little room, there he was and grabbed me. I took a stone jug and broke it across his head. He roared like a steer, and everybody came hurrying in—the servants and the master and the mistress. They all screamed and howled, and the overseer tells them a whacking lie about me, and the master says: ‘Out with you, you baggage!’ Well, why not, I thought. And that very night I tied up my few rags, and off I was. But next night I slunk back, ’cause I’d found no shelter anywhere. I crept all around the house, not because I was tired or hungry, but to pay them out for what they’d done to me. I wanted to set the house on fire and burn it down and have my revenge. But I didn’t dare, and I wandered about the countryside for three days, and always at night came back to the house. I just couldn’t sleep and I’d keep seeing the fire that I ought to have lit, and the house and stables flaring up and the cattle burning and the hay flying and the beams smoking and the singed dogs tugging at their chains. And I could almost hear them whine—the dogs and the children who’d tormented me so, and the mistress who’d stood under the Christmas tree in a silk dress and given presents to everybody except to me. Oh, yes, I did get three apples and a handful o’ nuts, and then she told me to hurry and wash the stockings for Anne-Marie. But at last my strength gave out, wandering about that way and looking for a chance. The rural policeman picked me up and wanted to question me. But I fainted, and he couldn’t find out nothing. If only I’d set fire to that house, everything would have been different, and I wouldn’t have had to go with the captain when my mother got me in her claws again. I let him talk me into going for a blue velvet dress and a pair of cheap patent leather shoes. And I never heard till later about the bargain that mother’d struck with him.”

With her whole weight she shoved the chair she sat on farther from the table, and bent over and rested her forehead on the table’s edge. “O gee,” she said, absorbed by the horror of her fate, “O gee, if I’d set fire to that house, I wouldn’t have had to let everybody wipe their boots on me. If only I’d done it! It would have been a good thing!”

Silently Christian looked down upon her. He covered his eyes with his hand, and the pallor of his face and hand was one.

XIV

On the train between Basel and Geneva Christian learned from some fellow travellers that an attempt to assassinate Ivan Michailovitch Becker had been made in Lausanne. A student named Sonya Granoffska had fired at him.

Christian knew nothing of the events that explained the deed. He neither read newspapers nor took any interest in public events. He now asked some questions, and was told what all the world was talking about.

The Matin of Paris had printed a series of articles that had caused intense excitement all over Europe, and had been widely reprinted and commented on. They were signed by a certain Jegor Ulitch, and consisted of revelations concerning the Russian revolution, its foreign committee, and the activities of the terrorists. They dragged evidence with so wide a net that they materially strengthened the case of the Russian state against the workingmen’s delegate Trotzky, who was then being tried at Petrograd, and thus contributed to his condemnation.

Jegor Ulitch remained in the background. The initiated asserted that there was no such person, and that the name was the mask assumed by a traitor to the revolution. The Gaulois and the Geneva Journal published vitriolic attacks on the unknown writer. Ulitch did not hesitate to reply. To justify himself he published letters and secret documents that vitally incriminated several leaders of the revolutionary party.

With increasing definiteness the authorship of the Matin articles was being assigned to Becker. The newspapers openly voiced this suspicion, and had daily reports of his supposed activities. During a strike of the dock-hands of Marseilles, he was said to have appeared at a strikers’ meeting in the garb of a Russian pope; a report had it that he had addressed a humble letter to the Czarina, another that he had become an outcast fleeing from land to land, a third, that he had succeeded in mediating between the Russian police and his exiled country-men, and that hence the Western Powers, who were slavishly supine before Czarism, had somewhat relaxed their cruel vigilance.

Yet Becker’s very face remained a mystery and a source of confusion, and the knowledge of his mere existence spread a wide restlessness.

And Christian sought him. He sought him in Geneva, Lausanne, Nice, Marseilles. Finally he followed a hint that led him to Zürich. There he happened to meet the Russian Councillor of State Koch, who introduced him to several of his compatriots. These finally gave him Becker’s address.

XV

“I’ve never lost sight of you,” said Becker. “Alexander Wiguniewski wrote me about you, and told me that you had altered the conditions of your life. But his hints were equivocal; so I commissioned friends in Berlin to inquire, and their information was more exact.”

They sat in a wine room in an obscure quarter. They were the only guests. From the smoky ceiling hung the great antlers of a stag, to which the electric bulbs had been fastened with an effect of picturesqueness.

Becker wore a dark litevka buttoned to his chin. He looked poor and ill; his bearing had a touch of the subtly fugitive. Sometimes a sad quietude overspread his features, like the quietude of waves where a ship has gone down. In moments of silence his face seemed to become larger, and his gaze to be fixed upon an outer emptiness and an inner flame.

“Are you still in communication with Wiguniewski and the—others?” Christian asked; and his eyes seemed to express a delicate deprecation of the level impersonality of his own demeanour.

Becker shook his head. “My old friends have all turned against me,” he replied. “Inwardly I am still deeply at one with them; but I no longer share their views.”

“Must one absolutely share the views of one’s friends?” Christian asked.

“Yes, in so far as those views express one’s central aim in life. The answer depends also on the degree of affection that exists among people. I’ve tried to win them over, but my strength failed me. They simply don’t understand. Now I no longer feel the urge to shake men and awaken them, unless some one flings his folly at me in the form of a polemic, or unless I feel so close to one that any dissonance between us robs me of peace or weighs upon my heart.”

Christian paid less attention to the meaning of the words than to Becker’s enchanting intonation, the gentleness of his voice, the wandering yet penetrating glance, the morbid, martyred face. And he thought: “All that they say of him is false.” A great trust filled him.

XVI

One night, as they were walking together, Becker spoke of Eva Sorel. “She has attained an extraordinary position,” he said. “I’ve heard people say that she is the real ruler of Russia and is having a decisive influence on European diplomacy. She lives in incomparable luxury. The Grand Duke presented to her the famous palace of Duke Biron of unblessed memory. She receives ministers of state and foreign ambassadors like a crowned sovereign. Paris and London reckon with her, bargain with her, consult her. She will be heard of more and more. Her ambition is inconceivable.”

“It was to be foreseen that she would rise high,” Christian remarked softly. He wanted more and more to talk to Becker about his own affairs and explain the errand on which he had come. But he did not find the right word.

Becker continued: “Her soul was bound to lose the harmony that rules her body so severely. It is a natural process of compensation. She desires power, insight, knowledge of the obscure and intricate. She plays with the fate of men and nations. Once she said to me, ‘The whole world is but a single heart.’ Well, one can destroy that single heart, which is all humanity, in one’s own bosom. Ambition is but another form of despair; it will carry her to the outermost boundary of life. There she will meet me and many others who have come to the same spot from another direction, and we shall clasp hands once more.”

They had reached the shores of the lake. Becker buttoned his coat and turned up the collar. His voice sank almost to a whisper. “I saw her in Paris once crossing the floor in an old house. In either hand she bore a candelabrum, and in each candelabrum burned two candles. A brownish smoke came from the flames, a white veil flowed from her shoulders; an undreamed-of lightness took possession of me. Once when she was still appearing at the Sapajou, I saw her lying on the floor behind the stage, watching with the intensest scrutiny a spider that was spinning its web in a crack between two boards. She raised her arm and bade me stand still, and lay there and observed the spider. I saw her learning of the spider, and I knew then the power of utter absorption that she had. I scarcely knew it, but she drew me into the burning circle of her being. Her unquenchable thirst for form and creation and unveiling and new vision taught me whom she called her master. Yes, the whole world is but a single heart, and we all serve but a single God. He and I together are my doom.”

Christian thought restlessly: “How can I speak to him?” But the right word did not come.

“The other day,” Becker said, “I stood in a chapel, lost in the contemplation of a miracle-working image of the Mother of God, and thinking about the simple faith of the people. A few sick men and women and old men were kneeling there and crossing themselves and bowing to the earth. I lost myself in the features of the image, and gradually the secret of its power became clear to me. It was not just a painted piece of wood. For centuries the image had absorbed the streams of passionate prayer and adoration that had come to it from the hearts of the weary and the heavy-laden, and it became filled with a power that seemed to proceed from it to the faithful and that was mirrored in itself again. It became a living organism, a meeting place between man and God. Filled with this thought, I looked again upon the old men and the women and the children there, and I saw the features of the image stirred by compassion, and I also kneeled down in the dust and prayed.”

Christian made no comment. It was not given him to share such feelings. But Becker’s speech and ecstatic expression and the great glow of his eyes cast a spell upon him; and in the exaltation which he now felt, his purpose seemed more possible to realize.

Walking restlessly up and down in the inhospitable room of his hotel, he was surprised to find himself in an imaginary conversation with Becker, which drew from him an eloquence that was denied him in the presence of men.

“Hear me. Perhaps you can understand. I possess fourteen millions, but that is not all. More money pours in on me, daily and hourly, and I can do nothing to dam the torrent. Not only is the money a vain thing to me, but an actual hindrance. Wherever I turn, it is in my way. Everything I undertake appears in a false light on account of it. It is not like something that belongs to me, but like something that I owe; and every human being with whom I speak explains in some way how and why I owe it to him or to another or to all. Do you understand that?”

Christian had the feeling that he was addressing the Ivan Becker of his imagination in a friendly, natural, and convincing tone; and it seemed to him that Ivan Becker understood and approved. He opened the window, and caught sight of some stars.

“If I distribute it I cause mischief,” he continued, and walked up and down again without articulating a sound. “That has been proved. The fault is probably in me; I haven’t the art of doing good or useful things with money. And it’s unpleasant to have people remind me wherever I go: ‘You’ve got your millions behind you; whenever you have enough of this, you can quit and go home.’ This is the reason why everything glides from my grasp and no ground is secure under my feet; this is the reason why I cannot live as I would live, nor find any pleasantness within myself. Therefore relieve me of my millions, Ivan Michailovitch. Do with them whatever you wish. If necessary we can go to a notary and make out a deed of gift. Distribute the money, if you desire, feed the hungry, and relieve the suffering. I can’t do it; it repels me. I want to be rid of my burden. Have books printed or build refuges or bury it or waste it; only take the burden from me. I can only use it to fill maws that afterwards show me their teeth.”

And as he spoke those words within himself, a serenity overspread his features. His smooth forehead, his deep blue eyes, his large and rather pallid cheeks, his healthy red lips, and the clean-shaven skin about them were all bathed in that new serenity.

It seemed to him that on the next day, when he would see Becker, he might be able to speak to him quite as he had spoken to-night, or at least nearly so.

XVII

One passed through a little hall-way into a poorly furnished room. There were several young men in this hall. One of these exchanged a few words with Becker, and then went away.

“It’s my bodyguard,” Becker explained, with a faint smile. “But like all the others they distrust me. They’ve been ordered not to lose sight of me. Didn’t you notice that we were constantly shadowed out of doors?”

Christian shook his head.

“When that unhappy woman pointed her revolver at me in Lausanne,” Becker went on, shivering, “her lips flung the word ‘traitor’ at me. I looked into the black muzzle and awaited death. She missed me, but since that moment I have been afraid of death. That evening many of my friends came to me, and besought me to clear and justify myself. I replied to them and said: ‘If I am to be a traitor in your eyes, I shall not avoid any of the horror, any of the frightfulness of that position.’ They did not understand me. But a summons has come to me to destroy, to extinguish and destroy myself. I am to build the pyre on which I am to be consumed. I am to spread my suffering until it infects all who come near me. I am to forget what I have done and abandon hope, and be lowly and loathed and an outcast, and deny principles and break fetters and bow down before the spirit of evil, and bear pain and cause pain, and tear up and plough the earth, even though beautiful harvests be destroyed. Traitor—how little that means! I wander about and hunger after myself. I flee from myself, and yet cry out after myself, and am the sacrificer and the sacrifice. And that has caused an unparalleled increase of pain in the world. The souls of men descend to the source of things in order to become brothers to the damned.”

He pressed his hands together and looked like a madman. “My body seeks the earth, the depths, pollution, and the night,” he said. “My innermost being gapes like a wound; I feel the thongs and weight of doom and the terror of time; I pray for prayers; I am a shadowy figure in the ghostly procession of created things in travail; the grief that fills the air of the world grinds me to dust; mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”

The feeling of pained embarrassment grew in Christian. He simply looked at Becker.

Suddenly, a repeated knocking sounded at the outer door. Becker started and listened. The knocking increased in loudness and speed.

“It has come after all,” Becker murmured in consternation. “I must leave. Forgive me, I must leave. A car is waiting for me. Stay a few minutes longer, I beg of you.” He took a valise that lay on the bed, looked about vaguely, pressed his mutilated hand to his coat, and murmured hastily, “Lend me five hundred francs. I spent my last money at noon. Don’t be angry with me; I’m in a fearful hurry.”

Mechanically Christian took out his wallet and gave Becker five bank-notes. The latter stammered a word of thanks and farewell, and was gone.

Christian left the house fifteen minutes later in a bewildered condition. For hours he wandered in the valleys and on the hills around the city. He took the night train back to Berlin.

During the many hours of the journey he felt very wretched in body and soul.

XVIII

In his flat he found many begging letters, one from his former valet, one from a Society for Succouring the Shelterless, one from a musician whom he had met casually in Frankfort. There was also a letter from the bank, requesting his signature on an enclosed document.

Next day Amadeus Voss asked for six thousand marks; the widow Engelschall, loudly lamenting that her furniture would be sold unless she met a promissory note, asked for three thousand.

He gave and gave, and the act of giving disgusted him. In the lecture halls of the university they came to him—the merest strangers, the most indifferent persons. Wherever he appeared, even in an eating-house, people came to him and told him of their troubles, and were diffident or brazen, and begged or demanded.

He gave and gave, and saw no end to it and no salvation in it, and felt a leaden heaviness steal over him. And he gave and gave.

He saw greed and expectation in every eye. He dressed himself more plainly, he cut down his expenditures to the barest necessities; the gold towered up behind him like rolling lava, and burned everything he touched. He gave and gave, and people asked and asked.

And so he wrote to his father: “Take my money from me!” He was aware of the strangeness and the unheard-of nature of what he asked, so he accompanied his request with elaborate reasons and persuasive phrases. “Assume that I have emigrated and have been lost sight of, or that I live far away under a false name, or that through your fault or mine there had been a definite breach between us, that you had therefore reduced my allowance to a minimum, but that my pride forbade my accepting even that, since I desire to stand on my own feet and live by the work of my hands. Or else imagine that I had wasted my means, and hopelessly mortgaged the capital and interest still due me. Or, finally, imagine that you yourself had become impoverished, and were forced to withdraw all assistance from me. At all events, I want to live without independent means. I have lost all pleasure in living with them. It is hard, I know, to explain that to any one who has money and has never been without it. Do me this favour! First of all, dispose of the sums that are banked in my name; next stop the income that has hitherto been paid out to me. The money is all yours, indisputably so. During our conversation last year you gave me very clearly and justly to understand that I have always lived on the fruit of your labour.”

Lastly he made the proposal to which he had referred in his imaginary conversation with Ivan Becker. “If it wounds your sensibilities to make a personal or practical use of the money which I am returning to you who gave it—use it to build orphanages, homes for foundlings, hospitals, institutions for the disabled, or libraries. There is so much misery in the world, and so much suffering that needs to be alleviated. I cannot do these things. They do not attract me; indeed, the very thought of them is disagreeable. I do not deny that this specific inability argues a weakness in my character; so if you determine to expend the money upon charities, don’t do it in my name.”

He ended thus: “I do not know whether it even interests you to have me say that I think of you affectionately. Perhaps in your heart you have already cast me off and separated yourself from me wholly. If any bond is to continue to exist between us, it can only be, however, if you do not refuse me your help in this matter, which is, from one point of view, so difficult, and from another, so perfectly simple.”

The letter remained unanswered. But several days after it had been sent, a friend of the Wahnschaffe family, Pastor Werner, called on Christian. He came both on a mission from the Privy Councillor and of his own impulse. Christian had known him since childhood.

XIX

Very attentively the clergyman examined the room, the shabby, ugly furniture, the window shades bordered by sentimental pictures, the dirty, white-washed walls, the dim, little lamp, the split boards of the flooring, the imitation leather of the sofa, the chest of drawers which was broken and which bore a cheap plaster of Paris bust. A dumb yet fiery amazement appeared on his face.

“I am asked to inform you,” Pastor Werner said, “that your father is of course ready to comply with your request. What else, after all, can he do? But I need not conceal from you the fact that his anxiety about you is very grave, and that he finds your actions wholly incomprehensible.”

Christian answered a little impatiently. “I told him months ago that there wasn’t the slightest ground for anxiety.”

“You must admit,” Werner objected gently, “that your latest plan does involve the question of your very existence. Have you taken up any occupation that secures you from need?”

Christian replied that, as his father was aware, he was definitely preparing himself for a profession. The measure of his talent and success was, of course, still in question.

“And until that profession begins to pay, what will you live on?” the pastor asked. “Let me repeat to you the words which your father cried out at our last interview: ‘Does he intend to beg? Or to accept gifts from the charitable? Or starve? Or trust to chance and false friends? Or take refuge in shady and dishonourable things, and yet be forced at last, a remorseful fool, to ask for that which he now casts aside?’ I have never in all these many years seen your father in such a state of mind, or heard him express such grief and such passion.”

“My father may calm himself,” Christian replied. “Nothing of what he fears is likely to happen; nor what, perhaps, he hopes, namely, that I shall ask my patrimony back again. It is as inconceivable as that the bird should return to the egg or the burning log to the tree whence it came.”

“Then you did not intend to renounce all pecuniary assistance at once?” the pastor asked, feeling his way carefully.

“No.” Christian hesitated. “I suppose not. I’m not equal to that; not yet. One has to learn that. It is a difficult thing and must be learned; and life in a great city would involve fatal and disturbing elements. Then, too, I have assumed certain obligations; there are several people who have definitely been counting on my help. I don’t know whether they could follow my own course. I haven’t in fact, any programme at all. What good would it do me? My great aim just now is to get into a situation that is clear and reasonable, and get rid of all sorts of stupid torments. I want to drop the burden of the superfluous; and everything is superfluous except what I and those few people absolutely need on the most stringent estimate. But every supposed need, I think, can be reduced, until such gradual renunciation produces a profit.”

“If I understand you correctly,” the pastor said, “it is your intention to retain such a portion of your fortune as will secure you against actual need.”

Christian sat down at the table and rested his head on his hand. “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes. But there the great difficulty arises. I cannot fix the boundary between necessity and superfluity in terms of money. Unhappily I was brought up amid conditions that make it hard for me to have a practical opinion on this net basis. I lack a norm of what is necessary and what is dispensable, and I lack it especially where others are concerned. You’ve understood me quite rightly. I want to retain a part, but only a very small part; and I hate to bargain with myself over the exact amount. The whole question of money is so absurd and trivial; it is only dragged in the wake of the really important things. One thing I couldn’t endure; and that would be to invest a capital, however modest, and use the interest. Then I’d be a capitalist again, and back in the world of the protected. But what other way is there? You’re an experienced man. Advise me.”

The clergyman considered. From time to time he looked searchingly at Christian; then he lowered his eyes and reflected again. “I am rather confounded by your words,” he confessed at last. “Much that you say surprises me—no, everything—yet it also seems to give me a certain insight. Very well then; you ask my advice.” Again he thought, and again observed Christian. “You renounce your personal fortune as well as the income which the firm and family have paid you. So far, so good. This renunciation will be officially acknowledged. I am also willing to believe that you will never ask back what you now renounce. The manner in which you bind yourself impresses me more than many solemn oaths would do. You are through with your past. That, too, will be respected on the other side. I understand the spiritual pain caused you by the question as to what leeway you should permit yourself in the matter of your personal and bodily needs during the period on which you are entering, and which will be bitter and full of necessities for self-conquest. I understand that. The problem is one of inner delicacy, of spiritual modesty. To consider it runs counter to your feelings and attitude. Yes, I understand that.”

Christian nodded, and the pastor continued in a raised voice. “Then listen to me. What I shall propose is subtle and difficult. It is almost like a game or a trick. You may remember that I am chaplain of the prison at Hanau. I try to help the souls of the lost and the outcast. I study these people. I know their inmost motives, the darkness of their hearts, their frozen yearnings. I dare to assert that there is not one of them who cannot, in the higher sense, be saved, nor one whose heart will not be reached by simple words earnestly realized in action. That awakens the divine spark, and the vision of such an awakening is beautiful. I serve my cause with all my strength, and the improvement and transformation of some of my flock has been so complete, that they have returned into society as new men, and bravely resisted all temptations. I admit that success often depends on my ability to save them from immediate need. Here is my problem. Kindly people help; the state, too, though in its frugal manner, contributes. But it is not enough. How would it be if from the fortune which you are returning to your father a capital were to be deducted the interest of which is to be used for my discharged convicts? Don’t draw back, but hear me out. This capital would be in good securities and would amount, let us say, to three hundred thousand marks. The interest would be in the neighbourhood of fifteen thousand marks. That would suffice. A great deal of good could be done with it. To touch or sell the securities would be a privilege reserved to you alone. From the capital itself you take in monthly or quarterly installments such sum or sums as you need to live on. To draw and expend the interest should be a privilege reserved to me and my successors. All these conditions must be secured by legal means. The purpose, as you see, is a double one. First, the plan will effect a great and needed good; secondly, it furnishes an inherent norm and aim for you. Every superfluous or thoughtless expenditure of yours jeopardizes a human soul; every frugality you practise is at once translated into concrete human weal. That gives you a point of orientation, a line of moral action. It is, if I may call it so, an automatic moral mechanism. I judge that the independence you desire will be achieved in two or three years. Within that time you can hardly use up even one-tenth of the capital according to your present standard of life. Of course, even this plan involves a problem for you, but it is a problem that would, I think, attract you. You don’t have to think of my humanitarian aims. I know that in your letter to your father you expressed your dislike of such aims, a dislike which I have no means of understanding. But I could tell you things and relate circumstances that would show you how the subtlest fibres of humanity are poisoned, and what a sacred duty it is to plough up the spiritual soil in my particular little field. If you could once see face to face some of these men restored to freedom and hope, your heart would be won for my cause. It is such visible evidence that instructs and converts.”

“You have too high an opinion of me,” Christian said, with his old, equivocal smile. “It’s always the same. Everybody overestimates me in this respect and judges me wrongly. But don’t bother about that, and don’t ask about it. It doesn’t matter.”

“And what answer do you make to my proposal?”

Christian lowered his head, and said: “It’s a nice little trap that you are setting for me. Let me consider it a moment. I am to feed, one might say, on my own charity. What a horrible word that is—charity. And by feeding on it myself I, of course, diminish it. And that, you think, will constitute a sort of moral gymnastic for me, and make it easier to realize my purpose——?”

“Yes, that was what, since you have chosen this path, I had in mind.”

“Well, if I disappoint you, you will have nothing to regret but your own modesty,” Christian continued, with a peculiarly mocking expression. “You could ask twice or even three times the sum you named, and I would probably or, rather, assuredly not refuse. For into whose pockets the millions go that I refuse, is a matter I care little about. Why don’t you do that and thus decrease your own risk?”

“Is your question inspired by distrust of the cause I represent?”

“I don’t know. Answer it, if you don’t mind.”

“I’ve explained the situation to you. The circumstances themselves are the guide to what I can and ought to ask for. On the one hand there is an urgent need. On the other hand there are definite considerations that not only set a natural limit, but forbid my using this opportunity in such a way as to give a handle to the malicious and quarrelsome.”

Christian continued his purely argumentative resistance. “Do you think it means anything to me or attracts me to know that you will give some discharged criminal, whose moral nature you think you have saved, one or two hundred marks to start life anew? That doesn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t know those men. I don’t know how they look or act or talk or smell, or what they’ll do with the money, or whether it will really be of service to them. And since I don’t know that, the arrangement has no meaning to me.”

Pastor Werner was taken aback. “To be sure,” he replied. “But I do know them, you see.”

Christian smiled again. “We’re very differently constituted; we neither think nor act alike.” Suddenly he looked up. “But I’m not making these objections to create difficulties. Quite the contrary. You personally ask me for assistance and I personally render it. In return you do me the service of acting as my paymaster and showing me how to solve my problem. I hope you will have no reason to complain.”

“Then you do consent and I may proceed to make definite arrangements?” the clergyman asked, half delighted and half doubtful still.

Christian nodded. “Go ahead,” he said. “Make what arrangements seem best to you. It’s all too trivial to bother about.”

“What do you mean by that exactly?” Werner asked, just as Eva had once, between laughter and amazement, asked his meaning. “A while ago you also said that what was really important was dragged down by these matters of money. What is the truly important thing to you?”

“I can’t explain that to you. But I feel the triviality of all this. All I am doing is the merest beginning, and everyone overestimates it absurdly and makes a mountain of this molehill. I haven’t reached the real difficulty yet. And that will consist in earning back all one has given away—earning it back in another manner, and so, above all, that one does not feel one’s loss.”

“Strange,” murmured the pastor. “It is strange. To hear you talk, one would think you were discussing a sporting event or a matter of barter.”

Christian laughed.

The pastor came up to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. His eyes were serious as he asked: “Where is the woman whom you ... have taken in?”

Christian’s reply was a gesture in the direction of Karen’s flat.

A thought that was strange and new seemed to flash into the clergyman’s mind. “Then you don’t live with her?” His voice sank to a whisper. “You are not living together?”

“No,” Christian answered with a frown. “Certainly not.”

The pastor’s arm dropped. There came a long silence. Then he spoke again: “Your father is stricken to the heart by a feeling as though several people whom he loves had succumbed to the same disease. He tries to hide his emotion, but he doesn’t succeed. Before he had any reason to be anxious about you, he once spoke to me of your sister Judith. He used the expression, ‘self-degradation.’ He described her as afflicted by a perverse impulse toward self-degradation.”

Christian swept the matter aside with a vivid gesture. “Oh, yes, Judith! She flings a trivial challenge at the world. That’s no self-degradation. She’s curious as to how far she dare go, how far others will go for her, and what the upshot will be. She confessed as much to me. She’ll plunge into water and be affronted because it’s wet; she’ll go through fire in the hope that it won’t burn her. After her experiment she’ll hate both fire and water. No, I have nothing in common with that.”

“You speak very harshly for a brother,” the pastor said with gentle reproachfulness. “However that may be, this new trouble has wounded your father to the very core. He feels that all his life’s effort is being negated from within, and that the fruit of all his toil is rotting in his hands. He stood on the very peaks of success. What does it mean to him now? His own flesh and blood rises up against him. His hand seemed blessed; he feels it withering now. His wealth carried him to a very great height. Now he is lonely there, and the son who, above all others, should rejoice in that station, turns from him, and fills him with a feeling for which he knows no name but shame and disgrace.”

Christian did not answer. He seemed quite indifferent. Werner continued: “I ask you to consider the social structure of mankind. Cruelty and force may seem to cling to it, yet there is something infinitely delicate and venerable within. You might liken it to a tree, deep-rooted in the earth, expanding in the air with many branches and twigs, buds and blossoms. It has come to be through some action of God, and no one should contemn it.”

“Why do you tell me that?” Christian asked, with a subtle withdrawal of himself.

“Because your father suffers. Go to him, and explain yourself and your ways. You are his son; it is your duty.”

Christian shook his head. “No,” he answered. “I cannot.”

“And your mother? Do I have to remind you of her too? I did not think I should have to admonish you in her name. She waits. All her days are one long waiting.”

Once more Christian shook his head. “No,” he said, “I cannot.”

The pastor buried his chin in his hollow hand and looked dully at the floor. He left with divided feelings.

XX

Crammon desired a friend. The one who was lost could never be replaced. The hope of winning him back still smouldered within, but the empty space in his bosom was desolate and chill. To install a lodger there seemed wise and would be stimulating.

Franz Lothar von Westernach had the first claim upon the place. They had agreed by letter to meet at Franz Lothar’s country house in Styria, so at the beginning of spring Crammon left Vienna. At Nürnberg he left in the lurch a certain handsome Miss Herkinson in whose car he had travelled from Spa.

To an acquaintance whom, by a mere chance, he met in the dining-car, he said, “I can no longer bear the noise that young people always make. The subdued and clarified attracts me now. The fifth decade of our lives demands milder ways.”

Crammon found Franz Lothar in the thick of a mental struggle. His sister Clementine wanted him to get married. Laughing and yet helpless, he confided the state of affairs to Crammon. His sister had picked out a girl of excellent family, and was sure that the alliance would have a wholesome influence on her brother’s career, as well as on his uncertain and idle way of life. All preliminaries had been arranged, and the parents of the young lady had intimated their full approval.

Crammon said: “Don’t let them take you in, my son. The affair can have none but a disgraceful outcome. I do not know the girl in question personally. But she is a vampire. Her ancestors were among the most infamous robber knights of the Middle Ages. Later they came into conflict with the empire on account of cruelty to their serfs. You can imagine what your future would be.”

Franz Lothar was highly amused. Crammon’s rage at the thought of being robbed of this friend too, in the same old stupid way, was positively rabid and passed all the bounds of decency. He treated Clementine with embittered silence. If any dispute arose, he barked at her like an angry dog.

Franz Lothar’s own indecision and fear of change saved Crammon from further conflicts. He simply informed his disappointed sister one day that he was thoroughly unprepared for so important a step, and begged her to break off the negotiations.

This turn of affairs satisfied Crammon, but brought him no definite peace of mind. He wanted to prevent the possibility of a similar assault on his contentment. The best thing seemed to be to marry off Clementine herself. It would not be easy. She was no longer in her first youth; she had had her experiences and knew her world; she possessed a clear vision and a sharp understanding. Great care would have to be taken. He looked about in his mind for a candidate, and his choice fell on a man of considerable wealth, distinguished ancestry, and spotless reputation, the Cavaliere Morini. He had made his acquaintance years ago through friends in Trieste.

He took to cultivating Clementine’s society. Fragrant little anecdotes of married bliss and unstilled longing and cosy households flowed from his lips. He found her very receptive. He dropped, as though casually, intimations of his friendship with an uncommonly distinguished and able Italian gentleman. He built up the character with an artist’s care, and turned the excellent cavaliere into a striking figure. Next he wrote to Morini, feigned deep concern for his well-being, recalled the memory of hours they had passed together, pretended a great longing and a desire to see him again, and inquired after his plans. So soon as the correspondence flourished it was not difficult to mention Clementine and praise her admirable qualities.

Morini nibbled at the bait. He wrote that he would be in Vienna in May, and would be charmed to meet Crammon there. He added that he dared scarcely hope to meet the Baroness von Westernach at the same time. Crammon thought, “The old idiot!” but he persuaded Franz Lothar and Clementine to promise to join him in Vienna. The plan succeeded; Morini and Clementine liked each other at once. Crammon said to her: “You have charmed him wholly.” And to him: “You have made an ineffaceable impression on her.” Two weeks later the betrothal took place. Clementine seemed to revive and was full of gratitude toward Crammon. What he had planned, hardly with the purest intentions, became an unalloyed blessing to her.

Crammon bestowed upon himself the recognition he held to be his due. His action was as useful as any other. He said: “Be fruitful and multiply! I shall be the godfather of your first-born. It goes without saying that I shall celebrate that event with a solemn feast.”

Furthermore he said: “In the records of history I shall be known as Bernard the Founder. Perhaps I am myself the remote ancestor of a race destined to fame—a race of kings. Who can tell? In that case my far descendants, whom God protect, will have every reason to regard me with veneration.”

But all this was but the deceptive flash of a fleeting mood. The worm of doubt burrowed in his mind. The future seemed black to him. He prophesied war and revolution. He took no joy in himself or in his deeds. When he lay in bed and the lights were out, he felt surrounded by troops of evils; and these evils fought with one another for the chance to lacerate him first. Then he would close his eyes, and sigh deeply.

Fräulein Aglaia became aware of his depression, and admonished him to pray more industriously. He thanked her for her counsel, and promised to follow it.

XXI

The sweetishly luring waltz arose. Amadeus Voss ordered champagne. “Drink, Lucile,” he said, “drink, Ingeborg! Life is short, and the flesh demands its delight; and what comes after is the horror of hell.”

He leaned back in his chair and compressed his lips. The two ladies, dressed with the typical extravagance of the Berlin cocotte, giggled. “The dear little doctor is as crazy as they’re made,” one of the two said. “What’s that rot he’s talking again? Is it meant to be indecent or gruesome? You never can tell.”

The other lady remarked deprecatingly: “He’s had a wonderful dinner, he’s smoking a Henry Clay, he’s in charming company, and he talks about the horror of hell. You don’t need us nor the Esplanade for that! I don’t like such expressions. Why don’t you pull yourself together, and try to be normal and good-natured and to have a little spirit, eh?”

They both laughed. Voss blinked his eyes in a bored way. The sweetishly luring waltz ended with an unexpected crash. The naked arms and shoulders, the withering faces of young men, the wrinkled corruption of faces more aged—all blended in the tobacco fumes into a glimmer as of mother of pearl. Visitors to the city came in from the street. They stared into the dazzling room half greedily and half perplexed. Last of all a young girl entered and remained standing at the door. Amadeus Voss jumped up. He had recognized Johanna Schöntag.

He went up to her and bowed. Taken by surprise she smiled with an eagerness that she at once regretted. He asked her questions. She gave a start, as though something were snapping within her, and turned cold eyes upon him. She shuddered at him in memory of her old shudders. Her face was more unbeautiful than ever, but the charm of her whole personality more compelling.

She told him that she had arrived two days ago. At present she was in a hotel, but on the morrow she would move to the house of a cousin near the Tiergarten.

“So you have rich relations?” Voss said tactlessly. He smiled patronizingly, and asked her how long she intended to stay in this nerve-racking city.

Probably throughout the autumn and winter, she told him. She added that she didn’t feel Berlin to be nerve-racking, only tiresome and trivial.

He asked her whether he would have the pleasure of seeing her soon, and remarked that if Wahnschaffe knew she was here, he would assuredly look her up.

He talked with an insistent courtesy and worldly coolness that had apparently been recently acquired. Johanna’s soul shrank from him. When he named Christian’s name she grew pale, and looked toward the stairs as though seeking help. In her trouble the little nursery rhyme came to her which was often her refuge in times of trouble: “If only some one kind and strong, would come this way and take me along.” Then she smiled. “Yes, I want to see Christian,” she said suddenly; “that is why I have come.”

“And I?” Voss asked. “What are you going to do with me? Am I to be discarded? Can’t I be of assistance to you in any way? Couldn’t we take a little walk together? There’s a good deal to be discussed.”

“Nothing that I know of,” Johanna replied. She wrinkled her forehead like one who was helpless and at bay. To get rid of the burden of his insistence courteously, she promised to write him; but she had scarcely uttered the words when they made her very unhappy. A promise had something very binding to her. It made her feel a victim; and the uncanny tension which this man caused her to feel paralyzed her will, and yet had a morbid attraction for her.

Voss drove home in a motor car. His mind was filled by one gnawing, flaring thought: Had she been Christian’s mistress or not? From the moment he had seen Johanna again, this question had assumed an overwhelming importance in his mind. It involved possession and renunciation, ultimate veracity and deceit; it involved inferences that inflamed his senses, and possibilities that threatened to be decisive in his life. He fixed his thoughts upon the image of Johanna’s face, and studied it like a cabalistic document. He argued and analysed and shredded motives and actions like a pettifogger. For his darkened life had again been entered by one who caused strange entanglements and enchainments and focused all decisions in one point. He felt the presage of storms such as he had not ever known.

Next morning, when he came from his bath and was about to sit down to breakfast, his housekeeper said to him: “Fräulein Engelschall is here to see you. She’s in the sitting-room.”

He swallowed his chocolate hastily and went in. Karen sat at a round table, and looked at photographs that were lying on it. They all belonged to Christian and were pictures of friends, of landscapes and houses, of dogs and horses.

Karen wore a very simple suit of blue. Her yellow hair was hidden by a grey felt hat adorned by a silk riband. Her face was thin, her skin pale, her expression sombre.

She disdained to use any introductory turns of speech and said: “I’ve come to ask you if you know about things. He might have told you first; he didn’t tell me till yesterday. So you don’t know? Well, you couldn’t have done nothing about it either. He’s given away all his money. All the money he had, he’s given to his father. The rest too, that came in by the year, I don’t know how many hundred thousands—he’s refused that too. He kept his claim to just a little,—not much more than to keep from starving, and, by what he told me, he can’t use that the way he wants to. And you know how he is; he won’t change. It’s just like when the sexton’s through ringing the church bell; you can’t get back the sound of the chiming. It makes me feel like screaming, like just lying down and screaming. I says to him: ‘My God, what’ve you gone and done?’ And he made a face, as if he was surprised to see any one get excited over a little thing like that. And now I ask you: Can he do that? Is it possible? Does the law allow it?”

Amadeus was quite silent. His face was ashen. Yellow sparks leaped behind his lenses. Twice he passed his hand over his mouth.

Karen got up and walked up and down. “That’s the way things are,” she muttered, and with grim satisfaction her eyes wandered about the elegant room. “First on the box and then in the dirt. That’s the way it is. Far’s I’m concerned I could make my bargain now—if only it’s not too late. Maybe it is, maybe I’ve waited too long. We’ll see. Anyhow, what good’s the money to me? Maybe I’d better wait a while longer.” She stepped to the other side of the table, and caught sight of a photograph which she had not yet seen. It was a picture of Frau Wahnschaffe, and showed her in full evening dress, wearing her famous rope of pearls which, though slung twice, hung down over her bosom.

Karen grasped the picture, and regarded it with raised brows. “Who’s this? Looks like him. His mother, I suppose. Is it his mother?” Voss’s only answer was a nod. In greedy astonishment she went on: “Look at those pearls! Can they be real? Is it possible? Why, they must be the size of a baby’s fist!” In her pale eyes there was a hot glow; her wicked little nether teeth gnawed at her lip: “Can I keep this?” she asked. Voss did not answer. She looked about hastily, wrapped the photograph in a piece of newspaper and slid it under her jacket. “Good Lord, man, why don’t you say something?” She flung the question at Voss brutally. “You look like hell. But don’t you think I feel it too? More than you perhaps. You got legs of your own to stand on like the rest of us!” She gave a cynical laugh, glanced once more at Voss and at the room, and then she went.

For a while Voss sat without moving. Again and again he passed his hand over his mouth; then he jumped up and hurried into the bedroom. He went to the dressing-table on which lay the precious toilet articles that Christian had left behind him—gold-backed brushes and combs, gold-topped flasks, gold cases and boxes for salves and shaving powder. With feverish haste Voss swept these things into a heap, and threw them into a leather hand-bag which he locked and secured in a closet. Then he went back to the sitting-room, and paced up and down with folded arms. His face shrunk more and more like the faces of the dead.

Then he stood still, made the sign of the cross, and said: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

XXII

An old-fashioned phaeton was waiting at the station. Botho von Thüngen got into it. He wrapped his feet in the carriage robes, for the evening was cool and the drive to the manor house long. The road passed straight across the flat Brandenburg plain.

Botho sat rigidly erect in the carriage and thought over the coming interview with the baron, his grandfather, who had summoned him. Herr von Grunow-Reckenhausen of Reckenhausen was the head of the family, final judge in all controversies and court of last appeal. His sentences and commands were no more to be disputed than those of the king. His sons, his sons-in-law, and his grandsons trembled before him.

The ramifications of the family spread far and wide. Its members were in the government and in the Reichstag; they were general officers in the army, landed proprietors, industrial magnates, superior deaconesses of the State church, governors of provinces, and judges in the higher courts. On the occasion of Bismarck’s death, the old baron had retired from public life.

Black and verging upon ruin, the manor house arose in its neglected park. Two great Danes growled as they emerged from the entrance hall, which was illuminated by candles. The rather desolate hall in which Botho faced his grandfather at supper was also lit by candles. Everything about the house had a ghastly air—the shabby wall-hangings, the cracked and dusty stucco of the ceilings, the withered flowers on the table, the eighteenth century china, the two dogs who lay at the baron’s feet, and not least the old baron himself, whose small head and oblong, lean, malicious face bore a resemblance to the later pictures of Frederick the Great.

They remained in the hall. The baron sat down in an armchair by the fire. A silent, white-haired servitor threw logs into the fireplace, cleared the table, and withdrew.

“On the first you are going to Stockholm,” the old gentleman declared, and with a moan wrapped his plaid shawl tighter about him. “I’ve written to our ambassador there; his father was an old friend and fraternity brother of mine, and he will be sure to befriend you. So soon as you return to Berlin, be sure to call on the secretary of state. Give him my regards. He knows me well; we were in the field together in the year ’seventy.”

Botho cleared his throat. But the old baron neither desired nor expected an interruption. He continued: “Your mother and I have agreed that your engagement is to be officially announced within a few days. Things have dragged on long enough. Next winter you two are to marry. You are in luck, my boy. Not only has Sophie Aurore a princely estate and a million in cash, but she’s a beauty of the first order, and a racy one to boot. By Gad, sir, you hardly deserve that, and you seem hardly to appreciate it.”

“I feel very close to Sophie Aurore, and love her very dearly,” Botho replied diffidently.

“You say that, and you look as nervous as a cat when it thunders.” The old gentleman was irate. “That sort of effeminate and sentimental twaddle is sickening. We weren’t debating whether you loved her or not, and I didn’t ask you. It would be much more pertinent to ask you about your recent conduct. And if I did, the best thing you could do would be to observe silence in seven languages, as the late lamented Schleiermacher used to say. You ran after a dancing woman, wasted a fortune, and almost missed the proper moment for entering upon your career. Well, I understand that. Madness, of course. But I was young once. Wild oats. But that, as I am told, you consort with filthy proletarians, spend your nights in God knows what dens, and frequent meetings of the Salvation Army—that surpasses both belief and decency. I thought I’d let those things be, but you have a trick of rousing one’s gall. What I wanted to do was this: to give you definite directions and get a definite answer.”

“Very well. My answer is that I can neither go to Stockholm nor marry Sophie Aurore.”

The old baron almost flew out of his chair. “What——? You——? I don’t——!” He grew inarticulate.

“I am already married.”

“You are already ... already ... what!” The old man, greenish pale, stared at his grandson, and collapsed in his chair.

“I have married a girl whom I seduced three years ago. She was the daughter of my landlady. You know what life is like. After a night of revelry I came back to my rooms rather drunk and morally insensitive. The girl was a seamstress in a fashionable tailoring establishment. It was early morning and she was on her way to work. I drew her into my room. When she gave birth to my child, I was far away, and had long forgotten the incident. Her parents disowned her; the child was boarded out and died; the girl herself sank lower and lower. It’s a common enough story. Through an unescapable dispensation of fate I met her again two months ago, and learned of all the wretchedness she had gone through. In the meantime my views of life had undergone a radical change, chiefly through my meeting a ... peculiar personality. I did my duty. I know that I have lost everything—my future, my happiness, the love of my mother and my betrothed, the advantages of my birth, the respect of my equals. But I could not do differently.”

The young man’s firm and quiet words seemed to have turned the baron to stone. The bushy eyebrows almost hid the eyes beneath; the bitter mouth was but a cavern between chin and nose. “Is that so?” he said after a while in the wheezing pipe of age. “Is that so? You come to me with a fait accompli and with one of a particularly loathsome sort. Well, well. I haven’t any desire to bandy words with a God damned fool. The necessary steps will be taken. All support will be withdrawn from you, and you will be put under lock and key where you belong. Fortunately there are madhouses in Prussia, and I am not quite without influence. It would be a nice spectacle, would it not, a Botho Thüngen publicly wallowing in the gutter? A new triumph for the Jewish press! Yes, no doubt. I needn’t stop to remark that we are strangers from this day on. You need expect no consideration under any circumstances. Unfortunately I must endure your presence in the house to-night. The horses are too tired to drive back to the station.”

Botho had arisen. He passed his hands several times over his reddish blond hair. His freckled face had a sickish pallor. “I can go on foot,” he said. But he listened and heard the downpour of rain, and the thought of the long tramp frightened him. Then he said: “Are you so sure of your own righteousness? Do you feel so utterly sure of all you have and do and say? I don’t deny that your threats frighten me. I know that you will try to carry them out. But my conviction cannot be changed by that fact.”

The baron’s only answer was a commanding gesture toward the door.

In the room which had been prepared for him, Botho sat down at a table, and by the light of a candle wrote with feverish intensity:

“Dear Wahnschaffe:—My difficult task is accomplished. My grandfather sat before me strong as a cliff; I received his verdict like a shaking coward. The fieriest emotions turn into lies before these inexorable souls, whose prejudices are their laws and whose caste is their fate. Ah, their courage in living themselves out! Their iron souls and foreheads! And I, on the other hand, I am the reductio ad absurdum of my race; I am a prodigal son from top to toe. Somewhere I read about a man who overcame God through the strength of his utter weakness. This sombre landscape, this rigid northern world—what could it produce as an adversary of that old Torquemada of high lineage but an hysterical revolutionary like myself?

“My childhood, my boyhood, my youth, these are but paragraphs in a heartless tract on the art of seeming what one is not, of striving for what is without worth. I knew as little about myself as the nut’s kernel knows of the nut. I idled and drank and gambled, and made a prostitute of time itself, which had to please me or endure my hate. We were all blind and deaf and unfeeling. But it is a crime to gain sight and hearing and a heart. I met Sophie Aurore and loved her. But I loved her imperfectly, for I was a man with crippled senses. One is supposed to sow one’s wild oats, as you know; and one is supposed to do that before uniting one’s life with a being whose image and memory should be too sacred to be dragged through vice and dirt. But some fate in this mad world brought me under the influence of Eva Sorel. For the first time I learned what a woman truly is and what her significance may be. It helped me to understand Sophie and to feel what I must be to her.

“And then I saw you, Christian. Do you recall the day when you read those French verses to Eva and the others? The way you did it forced me to think of you for days and days. And do you remember how in Hamburg you broke the silver handle of the whip with which Eva had struck your friend’s face? The scales dropped from my eyes. I remained on your track; I sought every opportunity of being near you. You did not know it. When you disappeared I looked for you. They told me you were in Berlin, and I sought and at last found you, and under what conditions? My soul was so terribly full that neither then nor later could I explain to you the inexplicable mystery and strange magnetism that drew me to you. To-day I had to speak out to you, and the words that I address to you give me strength.

“I need consolation. I love Sophie Aurore and I shall love her till I die. The letter of parting which I had to write her was the bitterest thing in all my useless and mistaken life. She has not answered it. I have broken her life and trodden on her heart, but I have saved another life and kept another heart from despair. Have I done right? When people used to talk of sacrificing oneself for a cause or for another human being, it always seemed empty verbiage to me. Since I have known you, the thought has acquired a deeply serious significance. All this may sound strange to you and even discordant. You do not brood nor take yourself spiritually to task; and that is the incomprehensible thing about you. Yet I know none but you whom I would make the arbiter of my conscience and whom I would ask: Have I done right?”

XXIII

The latch must have been left open. Isolde Schirmacher had been the last to go out. Twilight had just fallen when the door of the room opened, and Niels Heinrich entered.

Karen did not get up. She looked over at him. She wanted to speak, but the words seemed to perish in the drouth of her throat.

His face had its usual expression of impudent disgust. His flat, eternally sniffing, and inquisitive nose had a yellow tinge. He wore a blue cap, baggy trowsers, and a yellow shawl slung around his neck.

Wrinkling his nose like a dog he looked about him. Then he closed his left eye and spat.

At last Karen murmured: “What do you want?”

He shrugged his shoulders, and showed his neglected teeth. In one, near the corner of his mouth, he had a large gold-filling which was evidently new.

“Well, what is it?” Karen asked again. There was the fear in her voice that she felt so often now.

Again he showed his decayed front-teeth. It might have been a smile. He went up to the chest of drawers and pulled out one of the drawers. Deliberately he rummaged among its contents. He took out under garments, neck-wear, stockings, corsets, and threw them on the floor. He went on to the second drawer, then to the third, and littered the floor with what he found. Then he approached the wardrobe, but it was locked. He stretched out his hand toward her with a speaking gesture of command. Karen saw the destruction and confusion he had caused, and did not respond at once. An hallucination as of renewed impoverishment flamed up in her blunted soul. Niels Heinrich seemed its messenger. She was so in fear of him that she wanted to cry out. He made a grimace and gently swung his hand about on the pivot of his wrist. Karen acknowledged the compulsion of that gesture; she put her hand into her pocket, and gave him the key.

He wrenched open the door of the wardrobe, peered in, hauled out card-board boxes, which he calmly overturned, threw garments on the floor as he had thrown the linen, finally discovered a wooden box, and pried off the cover with his knife. He found a golden brooch, the old brooch with the motto, “Ricordo di Venezia,” and a little silver chain. He slipped these three objects into his pocket. Then he went into the adjoining room, where Karen heard him moving about. There was no expression in her staring eyes. He came back at the end of a few minutes. It had grown dark, and in the inner room a candle which he had lit was left burning. In passing he threw a contemptuous glance at the cradle. He did not take the trouble to close the outer door behind him.

In the dim light that shone in from the inner room, Karen surveyed her scattered possessions. Suddenly she put her hand into her bosom, drew forth the photograph of Frau Wahnschaffe, and lost herself in an absorbed and sombre contemplation of it.

She saw the pearls, only the pearls.

XXIV

At the foot of the stairs by the street door, Niels Heinrich saw the figure of Ruth Hofmann. She was waiting for her brother, who had gone across the street to buy bread. The lad limped a little, and Ruth had never been able to fight off the fear that he would be run over.

She looked at the pavement, glittering under the street lamps, at the light of other lamps in the many windows, and finally higher, where she was accustomed to see the stars, but where now there was only the confused and reddish glow of clouds.

Niels Heinrich stopped. Ruth looked up at him with her large grey eyes. He took in all details of the little figure—the thick hair with its curling ends, the shabby flannel dress, the soiled, worn shoes, and last of all the clear, pale face flooded with an alien spiritual life. His glance clung savagely to her, and ripped the garments from her body. The girl, shuddering as she had never done before, chilled to the marrow by an unknown force, turned away toward the stairs, and hesitantly began to mount them.

Niels Heinrich looked after her. “Jew wench!” he murmured from clenched teeth. A greeting from the home-coming Gisevius awakened him from his thoughts. He lit a cigar, pushed the blue cap down toward the nape of his neck, and slouched down the street.

XXV

Toward the end of May Letitia gave birth to twins—both girls. Stephen had the feeling that this was rather excessive; nevertheless festivities were arranged. The house and garden were hung with gay lanterns, the neighbours were invited, and the common people fed. There was music and dancing and shouting. His brothers got drunk and brawled, and there were wild goings-on.

Letitia lay in her handsome bed under the sky-blue canopy. From time to time she asked to see the twins. Each was presented appetizingly reposing on a pillow. They were mysteriously alike. The nurse, who bore the mellifluous name Eleutheria, brought them in—one on her right arm, one on her left. One had a red riband fastened to its shoulder, the other a green; this was for identification. The red-ribanded baby was to be christened Georgette, the other Christina. Such was Letitia’s wish. Stephen desired each child to have in addition a string of richer and more gorgeous names. Tirelessly he turned the pages of all the novels and chronicles within reach, and finally brought a florilegium of names to his wife: Honorata, Friedegunda, Reinilda, Roswitha, Portiuncula, Symphorosa, Sigolina, Amalberga. Letitia laughed until she cried. She pointed to the ugly nurse and said: “None has so beautiful a sound as Eleutheria. I insist on Georgette and Christina.” And already she knew that Christina was going to be her favourite.

She looked so charming as she lay there that people came to admire her as one admires a painting. These people were all uneducated and stupid, and Letitia was bored. Sometimes she played chess with Esmeralda, and the girl, drunk with curiosity, asked her a thousand questions. When Letitia was in labour, the girl had lain huddled on the verandah, and her crude and sensual imagination was filled with images that both allured and horrified her. Letitia felt that and said: “Go away! I don’t like you to-day.”

She seemed to herself beloved of God and blessed by His angels. She was proud of being what she was—an unusual being chosen for an unusual fate. She seemed new to herself in every way. She loved herself, but there was no raw selfishness nor idle admiration in this love. It was something akin to the gratitude and joy of one who had been found worthy of great gifts.

The fact that she possessed two children, two real children with little hands and feet, who could struggle and cry, who could be dressed and undressed, who could be fed and caressed—no, it was not this fact that filled her so full of happiness. It was the expectation that grew out of the children, the mystery of these unknown personalities whose being and becoming proceeded from her own. And so she lay there, lovely, dainty, serene, given over to her dreams.

In the meantime Stephen and old Gunderam renewed their old fight over the Escurial. “The contract’s a scrap of paper,” the old man jeered. “Two girls don’t make one boy. I’m not looking out for quantity. Two hens don’t make a rooster.” Stephen shouted that he was not going to be cheated of his rightful inheritance, that he would take the matter into court, and make a public scandal of it. The old man, his hands at his hips, had no reply but an evil chuckle. So the quarrelling went on, morning, noon, and night. The old man locked his door, and had the boxes that had stood packed for twenty years gotten into final readiness. Stephen smashed plates and glasses, threw chairs about, cursed and threatened, rode horses half to death, was himself seized with convulsions, sent for a doctor, and had morphine injections prescribed to quiet him.

Partisanship rose high. The old man gained the support of his wife, Stephen that of his brothers. The latter made the servants rebellious, and Doña Barbara shrieked and cursed them. The brawls increased in violence; night was full of ghastly rumours. Once the report of a pistol rang out, and every one rushed into the open. Stephen was missing. He lay abed with a smoking revolver and moaned. He had aimed at his heart and hit a medicine bottle. Its fragments swam in a yellow liquid on the floor. The old man said: “I’m not surprised that a man who’s such a fool as a lawyer can’t shoot straight. But it takes a damned lot of malice to aim as badly as that.” Whereupon Doña Barbara could not help observing: “Only a Gunderam could say anything so vile!” And so the two old people quarrelled until dawn.

Stephen succumbed more and more to the use of morphine. When he was not under its influence he tormented man and beast. His brothers finally rebelled against the insults which he heaped upon them. They laid a plot, and fell upon him and beat him so that he roared like a buffalo. Letitia rushed to help him, and summoned men servants. A regular battle ensued. “Don’t leave me,” Stephen whined, and she had to sit down by him, and offer him consolation from the depths of her contempt. He asked her to read him poetry, and she consented. She did not read poems of her own choice, but easy, sentimental verses by second-rate writers. Among the fifteen or sixteen volumes which formed the family library, there was a greasy copy of an old-fashioned anthology of German verse. She read from it, and Stephen said: “What wonderful words!” And he wept.

But at other times he treated her with coldness and contempt; for, in the last analysis, she seemed to him to bear the guilt of all his failures and troubles. Letitia was quite indifferent; her mind was made up. Strength was given her will by the very horror with which the house and its inhabitants, the family and its life, the land and its whole atmosphere filled her. Whenever Stephen wanted to kiss her, she grew very pale, and looked at him as though he had lost his senses. Then he would rage, and threaten her with the cowhide whip. But she had learned to smile in a way that tamed him and robbed him of inner assurance.

For six weeks Friedrich Pestel had now been in Buenos Ayres. She corresponded with him secretly. The Indian boy who had once accompanied her to the observatory was her faithful and discreet messenger. She promised to take him along to Europe, for this was his great wish. Eleutheria desired the same, and swore eternal devotion when Letitia carefully and gradually gave her her confidence. All details of the flight were discussed with Friedrich Pestel. Letitia was to be in Buenos Ayres on the day of the sailing of the Portuguese steamer Dom Pedro. An intricate intrigue was needed to convey the twins to the city. Letitia thought out a clever plan; it was like the plot of a detective novel.

There lived in the capital city an aged and childless couple, Señor and Señora Herzales. The old man was a brother of Doña Barbara, and his wealth would, upon his death, fall to the Gunderam children. But since both he and his wife were misers of the filthiest kind, there was always the fear lest by some whim or in some rage they should make a will to the disadvantage of their kinsmen. They had not written to the Gunderams in years. There were no personal contacts except visits of state, which Stephen and his brothers occasionally paid them. Letitia was, of course, aware of all this. She forged a letter, supposedly from Señora Herzales, in which the old woman expressed the desire to see the young wife of Stephen and her children, and, in order that the uncle and aunt might get the better acquainted with her, the letter demanded that Letitia come alone, although there was no objection to Stephen’s coming to fetch her home at the end of a week.

This letter, cleverly written by Letitia in a handwriting unlike her own, arrived with the proper postmark from Buenos Ayres and caused a great stir in the Gunderam clan. A solemn family council was held; greed and fear conquered all hesitation. Doña Barbara dictated to Letitia a humble and grateful letter of acceptance, in which she was permitted to announce her arrival on a day set by herself. This letter Letitia succeeded in intercepting.

On the fateful morning her heart beat like an alarm clock. The rickety coach drew up; Eleutheria got in; the slumbering twins were handed to her. Stephen examined the carriage, tested the harness, and graciously patted the horses. The Indian boy brought the hand luggage, stowed it away properly, and calmly mounted the box. Don Gottfried, Doña Barbara, Esmeralda and her brothers solemnly awaited Letitia. Five minutes passed, and ten and twenty, and still Letitia did not come. Stephen grumbled, Don Gottfried laughed a jeering laugh, Doña Barbara glanced furiously up at Letitia’s windows. At last she appeared.

At the last moment she had mislaid the little bag that held her jewels. They were her one possession. She had no money at all.

With a radiant smile she gave her hand to each in turn, permitted her husband to kiss the tip of her chin, and cried out in a slightly husky and long-drawn-out and lamenting voice: “Don’t forget me, and remember me to Father Theodore!” The latter was a Capuchin monk, who occasionally came to the farm to beg. It was a sheer, joyous whim that made her mention him at this moment.

The wintry sun disappeared in the fog. Letitia thought: “Where I am going now it is summer.”

Twenty-four hours later she stood with Friedrich Pestel on the deck of the Dom Pedro, and looked back with happy eyes upon the disappearing shore.

XXVI

The driver roared, but it was too late. An edge of the rattling wagon laden with steel rails caught the limping boy and knocked him down. A crowd gathered, and a helmeted policeman made his way through it.

Christian had just turned the corner when he saw the boy lying there. He approached, and some women made room for him. As he bent over the boy, he saw that the latter had only been stunned; he was stirring and opened his eyes. Nor did he seem to be hurt. He peered anxiously about, and asked after the money that he had had in his hand before he had fallen. It had consisted of twenty or thirty nickel coins, which were now scattered in the mud.

Christian helped the boy get up, and wiped the spattered face with his white handkerchief. But to the boy the recovering of his money was of greater importance, although he could not bend over and could hardly stand. “Have patience until the wagon is gone,” Christian said to him, and motioned the driver to proceed. The latter had become involved in a violent altercation with the policeman. But when the policeman saw that no great damage had been done, he also told the driver to go ahead, and merely took down the man’s name as well as the boy’s. The boy was Michael Hofmann, Ruth’s brother.

Christian bent over, and gathered the coins out of the mire. The spectators were amazed that a well-dressed gentleman should bend over in the street to gather nickel coins. Some recognized him. They said: “He’s the one that lives back there with Gisevius.”

Now at last Ruth came hurrying. She had been frightened from her post by Niels Heinrich Engelschall. She had waited on the stairs until he had disappeared. Then she had come down and heard the hubbub in the street, and had thought that it must be connected with the fellow who had stared at her with such savage impudence. She had hesitated again until a foreboding drove her forth.

She did not make much ado and hid her fright. She questioned her brother in a cheerful voice. Her German was very pure and perfect, and she spoke very swiftly, with a bird-like twitter in her throat.

When he had gathered the coins, Christian said: “Now let us count them to be sure that they are all here.” Taking the boy by the arm, he led him across the street and into the house. Ruth had taken her brother’s other arm, and thus they mounted the stairs. They entered a room which looked empty on account of its size, although it held two beds, a table, and a wardrobe. It was the only room of that dwelling. A kitchen adjoined it.

Michael sat down on the bed, still slightly stunned by his fall. He was about fourteen, but his tense features and his passionate eyes had a maturity far beyond his years.

Christian laid the coins on the table. They made no sound, so encrusted were they with mud. Ruth looked at Christian, shook her head compassionately, and hurried into the kitchen for a wet cloth with which to clean his spattered garments. She kneeled down before him. He drew back, but she did not perceive his motive and followed him on her knees. So he resisted no longer, and felt a little foolish as she eagerly and skilfully brushed his trousers.

Suddenly she raised her face to him. His glance had been resting on the table, which was covered with many books. “Are those your books?” he asked.

She answered: “To be sure they are.” And she looked at him with eyes that were astonishingly bright with a frank spiritual recognition of their inner kinship. The old arrogant expression with which he had been wont to shield his soul melted from his face. But even as it did he became aware of something that made him angry with himself, that seemed unnatural and absurd to him, and filled him with the fear of something evil and ghastly in his own eyes. For it seemed to him that he had seen a bloody mark on the girl’s forehead.

In his fright he turned his eyes away, and resisted the impulse to look again. But when he had regained his self-control and looked upon her, there was nothing to be seen. He sighed with relief, but frowned angrily at himself.

XXVII

When the Dom Pedro had been on the high seas not more than a week, Letitia was forced to the sorrowful conclusion that Friedrich Pestel was not the right man for her.

She desired a man of imaginative ardour and impassioned soul. In face of the unending sea and the starry vault of heaven, a fadeless yearning had reawakened in her, and she told Pestel frankly and honestly that she could not be happy with him. Pestel was overwhelmed with amazement. He did not answer, and became melancholy.

Among the passengers there was an Austrian engineer who had been building railroads in Peru and was on his way home. His boldly romantic appearance and happy faculty of anecdote delighted Letitia. She could not let him perceive it on account of the other passengers who took her to be Pestel’s wife. But the engineer, who was something of an adventurer and courageous, had his own thoughts.

In spite of his genuine pain and disappointment, Pestel reproached himself for having bought the expensive first-cabin tickets for Letitia, the nurse, and the twins, and a second-cabin passage for the Indian boy, out of his own pocket. In addition he had, just before their departure and in all haste, bought several frocks and some linen for the woman whom he had saved from captivity, and to whom, as he thought, he was about to be united for life.

The Indian boy was sea-sick and also home-sick, and Letitia promised to send him back to the Argentine from Genoa.

Among the other passengers who regarded Letitia with a vivid eye was an American journalist who had spent several months in Brazil. He was witty, wrote clever verses, organized parties and dances, and soon seemed as charming to Letitia as the Austrian engineer. Between these two little skirmishes of jealousy took place, and each felt the other to be an obstacle.

One night they were the last guests at the bar; neither wanted to turn in, and they agreed to throw dice for a bottle of claret.

The Austrian lost.

The bottle arrived. The American filled the glasses; they drank, leaned back and smoked, looked searchingly at each other from time to time, and said nothing.

Suddenly the Yankee, still holding his pipe between his teeth, said: “Nice woman.”

“Charming,” the Austrian agreed.

“Has a strong sense of humour for a German.”

The engineer thoughtfully blew rings of smoke. “She is altogether delightful,” he said.

They fell silent again. Then the American said: “Isn’t it rather absurd of us to spoil each other’s chances? Let us throw dice, and abide by that!”

“Very well, let us do so,” the engineer agreed. He took the dice-box, shook it, and emptied it. The little cubes rattled down on the marble. “Eighteen,” the engineer announced, astonished at his own good fortune.

The other gathered up the dice, also shook the box, let the dice glide on the table-top, and calmly announced “Eighteen!” He was equally unable—with more reason of course—to hide his astonishment.

The two men felt rather helpless. They were careful not to repeat their question to fate. They finished their wine, and separated with all due courtesy.

Letitia lay abed with wide-open eyes and listened to the throb of the engines, the soft crashing of the walls of the ship, and the humming of Eleutheria, who was soothing the twins in the adjoining stateroom. She thought of Genoa, the fast approaching goal of her voyage; and her imagination showed her gorgeously clad grandees and romantic conspirators in the style of Fiesco of Genoa, and torch-lit alleys and adventures of love and passion. Life seemed to her aglow with colour, and the future a gate of gold.

XXVIII

The child had disappeared.

Christian asked after its whereabouts. Karen shrugged her shoulders stubbornly. So Christian went to the dwelling of the widow Engelschall, who informed him with harsh brevity: “I put the child in good hands. You’ve got no right to worry. Why do you? It ain’t yours!”

Christian said: “You have no reason not to tell me where it is.”

The woman answered insolently: “Not on yer life! I ain’t got no call to do it. The kid’s well off where he is, and you ain’t going to refuse to pay a bit to his foster-mother, are you? It’s your dooty, and you can’t get out of it.”

Silently Christian regarded the fat moon-like face on its triple chin, from which the voice rumbled like that of an old salt. Then he became aware of the fact that that sweaty mass of flesh was contorting itself to an expression of friendliness. Pointing to the glass door, which separated the hexagonal room in which they were from the other rooms, she asked in sweetish High German whether he wouldn’t come in and partake of a little coffee. Coffee and fine pastry, she said, who would refuse that? She explained that she was expecting a baroness, who was coming from Küstrin especially to see her in order to get advice on important family matters. He could see that she wasn’t born yesterday either, had nice friends of her own, and knew how to treat people of rank. Again she asked him to stay.

In this dim room there were several tables covered with well-thumbed copies of periodicals and comic papers. It looked like a dentist’s reception room. The woman’s fat fingers were covered with rings that had brightly coloured stones. She wore a bodice of red silk and a black skirt, the girdle of which was held by a silver buckle as massive as a door knob.

When Christian came in to see Karen that evening, she sat by the oven resting her head on her hand. Christian had brought her some oranges, and he laid the fruit on her lap. She did not stir; she did not thank him. He thought that perhaps she was longing for her child, and did not break her long silence.

Suddenly she said: “It’s seven years ago to-day that Adam Larsen died.”

“I have never heard of Adam Larsen,” Christian said. Since she made no remark, he repeated: “I’ve never heard of Adam Larsen. Won’t you tell me about him?”

She shook her head. She seemed to crouch as for a leap at the wall under his look. Christian carried a chair close up to Karen. He sat down beside her, and urged her to speak: “What about Adam Larsen?”

She took in a deep breath. “It was the only good time in my life, the time I had with him, the only beautiful time—five months and a half.”

She delved deep, deep into her consciousness. Things there yearned for the light. “It was the time I was expecting my second child,” she said. “We were on the way from Memel to Königsberg, myself and Mathilde Sorge and her intended. Oh, well, intended is what they call it. On the way I noticed that I was going to get into a mess pretty soon. They advised me to leave the train. One station before we got to Königsberg I did get out. Mathilde stayed with me, though she scolded; her intended went on to the city. It was a March evening, cold and wet. There was an inn near the station where they knew Mathilde. She thought we could get lodging there, and there was no time to lose; but they were having a fair in that place, and every room was taken. We begged for a garret or anything; but the innkeeper looked at me, and saw what was the matter. I was leaning against the wall and shaking. He roared, and told us to go to the devil; he didn’t want to have anything to do with such things. I lay down on a low wagon in the yard. I couldn’t have gone on, not if they’d set the dogs on me. The farmer that owned the wagon came, and he wasn’t pleased; but Mathilde, she talked to him a while, and so he drove on slowly toward the city. Mathilde walked beside the wagon. I felt I don’t know how; I thought if I could just be dead—quite dead! The wheels bumped on the stones, and I screamed and shrieked. The farmer said he’d had enough of that. We were in the suburbs by this time, so they tugged me out of the wagon, and held me up. There was a young man who had seen us, and he helped too. The rain fell by the bucket, and I was clean done for. I asked them for God’s sake to get me in anywhere, if it was only a hole or a cellar. At the corner there was a cheap music-hall for working people. They dragged me through the door into a little room, and pushed two benches together, and laid me on them. The room was full of the gay dresses of the lady performers; on one side of the room was the bar, on the other side the auditorium. You could hear the music and the applause and the roars of laughter. Some women, got up in dirty silks and spangles, came in and stood around me, and quarrelled and screamed for one thing or another. Well, there’s no use going on with that part. The child was born there, and it was dead. They’d sent for a policeman and for a doctor too; but it was the young man we had met on the street who was really kind and wouldn’t leave me in my trouble. And that was Adam Larsen.”

“And he continued to help you? And you stayed with him?” Christian asked tensely.

Karen went on: “He was a painter, a real one, an artist. His home was in Jutland; he was lean and very fair. In those days my hair was just the colour of his. He had an aunt living in Königsberg, and he was glad to stay with her a while, because he was hard up. But when I was lying in the charity home to which they’d removed me, he got the news from Copenhagen that he’d been given a stipend by the state of two thousand talers for two years. He asked me if I wouldn’t like to go with him. He meant to go to Belgium to a famous painter who was living somewhere on the French frontier. He wanted to study with him, like others who were already there. Well, he said he was fond of me, and I said that was all very nice, and asked him if he knew the sort of woman I was. He said he didn’t want to know anything, and all I’d have to do was to have confidence in him. So I thought to myself, ‘Here’s one that’s got a heart,’ and I grew to be fond of him too. I’d never cared for any man yet; he was the first, and he was the last too. And so I went away with him. The great painter lived in a French village, and we moved to a little town called Wassigny not far from there. Larsen rented a little house. Every morning he’d ride over to the village on his bicycle; if the weather was bad he walked. It was half an hour’s walk. In the evening he’d come back, and we’d have a nice little dinner and tea and chat. And he’d get real enthusiastic, and tell me how he loved painting here—the trees and the fields and the peasants and the miners and the river and the sky, and I don’t know what all. I didn’t understand that, of course; but what I understood was that I felt as I’d never felt before in life. I couldn’t believe it when I woke up in the morning; I couldn’t believe it when the neighbours smiled at me. Near the village there was a pool with water lilies, and I used to go often and often and look at it. I’d never seen anything like that before, and I couldn’t rightly believe in it. I knew that couldn’t last; it wasn’t possible that it could last long. And sure enough, in August, Adam took to his bed one day. He had a fever, and it got worse and worse; and in six days he was dead. That was the end of everything. That was the end of everything.”

Her hands kept clutching her hair, and for the third time she said: “That was the end of everything.”

“And then?” Christian whispered.

She looked at him, and every muscle in her face quivered: “Then? Oh, the things that happened then ... then...!”

“Couldn’t you somehow find a way of life without ... without ...” Christian stammered, frightened by the blind, white rage in her face. She clenched her fists and cried so loud that her words re-echoed from the walls: “Oh, then! The things that happened then!”

Her whole body quivered. “Don’t touch me,” she said with a nervous start.

Christian had not touched her at all.

“Go on now,” she said. “I’m tired. I’ve got to sleep.” She got up.

He stood at one door, Karen at the opposite one. She lowered her head, and said in a toneless voice: “It’s crazy—me talking to you this way—so familiar and all.” And her face showed both hatred and fear.

When she was alone beside her bed, she lost herself in the contemplation of the picture of the woman with the pearls. Once she turned around, and looked wildly into the other room, to the spot where Christian had stood.

And Christian could not forget her words and the way she had said: “Oh, then....”

XXIX

Weikhardt had been working at his Descent from the Cross for two years, yet he could not finish the picture. No effort, no absorption, no lonely contemplation, no spiritual seeking would bring him the expression on the face of Christ.

He could not create that expression—the compassion and the pain.

He had scratched the face from the canvas a hundred times; he had tried many models; he had spent hours and days studying the old masters; he had made hundreds and hundreds of sketches; he had tried and tried. It was all in vain; he could not create it.

In the spring he had married Helen Falkenhaus, the girl of whom he had once spoken to Imhof. Their married life was a quiet one. Their means were small, and they had to be content with very little. Helen bore every privation with great sweetness. Her piety, which often had a touch of expectant passion, helped her to ease her husband of the consciousness of his burdens and responsibilities.

She had an understanding of art, a high and fine perception of its qualities. He showed her his sketches, and she thought many of them very beautiful. At times he seemed to her to have come near the vision of which she too had a glimpse; but she was forced to admit that he never quite embodied it. He attained compassion and pain, but not the compassion and the pain of Christ.

Just then there arrived in Munich the Polish countess for whom he had copied the cycle of Luini. One evening she gave an entertainment to which Weikhardt was invited, and among the crowd he caught sight of Sybil Scharnitzer. He had seen her years ago in the studio of a fashionable painter. She had been surrounded by admirers and flatterers, and he had carried away only a general impression of her beauty.

This time she inspired him with a strange and magical excitement. He knew at once that he needed her, that between her and his work there was some mystic bond. He approached her and held her by his vivid eloquence. Carefully he revealed his purpose. Absorbing her mien, her gesture, that look of hers that went to the very soul, he saw clearly what he expected of her and what she could give him. In this eye, when it was wide open, he saw that more than mortal look which had hitherto been but dim in his mind. He begged her to sit for him. She thought a little and consented.

She came. He asked her to bare her neck and shoulders, and to swathe her bust in a black shawl of Venetian lace. He stood at his easel, and for ten minutes he gazed at her steadily. Scarcely did his lids stir. Then he took a piece of charcoal, and drew the outlines of the head of Christ. Sybil was astonished. At the end of an hour he thanked her, and that was the first time he had spoken. He begged her to come again. Quite as amazed as she had been at first, she pointed at the canvas. But he smiled secretively, told her that his technical approach was a roundabout one, and asked her to have patience.

When she left, Helen came in. He had told her of his plan, and his confidence had prevailed over her doubts. She knew the history of Sybil Scharnitzer, and had observed her that evening at the countess’s with the cold scrutiny which one woman gives another. She looked at the charcoal sketch, and was silent for many minutes. At last, under his questioning look, casting down her own eyes, she asked: “Did any model ever appear so disguised?”

Weikhardt had recovered his usual, phlegmatic temper. “Very few people will understand my excursion behind the scenes—painters least of all. I can see them crossing themselves and making venomous comments.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Helen. “But what do you mean by an excursion behind the scenes?”

“I mean the scenes set by God.”

Helen thought this over, but his words hurt her. She said: “I could understand that perfectly if Sybil’s face were genuine; but you yourself have told me who and what she is. You know that it is a beautiful screen, with emptiness behind it. And in this vain deception you think you will find what is deepest in the world—the Saviour, your vision of the Saviour? Isn’t it as though you had delivered yourself into the power of falseness itself?”

“No,” Weikhardt answered, “it is not. You don’t see far enough. Things cohere together far more closely than you think. One body, one element, one stream—each is more interwoven with all things than you realize. The soulless emptiness in Sybil Scharnitzer’s breast is the reflection of some light, and to me personally it is a concrete thing. If a form deceives me, I am still grateful to it, for it forces me to create its content from within myself; and the creative dream is the greater thing. Can a blade of grass be a lie? Or a shell by the shore? And if I were strong enough and guiltless enough and devout enough, it would be given me to find in every blade and shell the compassion and the pain of Christ. There is an element of chance in these things, or else some dispensation.”

Helen did not contradict him.

XXX

That word of Karen’s, that desperate “then!” gave Christian no rest.

He had worked hard all day. He had not left the Physiological Institute until seven o’clock. Then he had eaten a frugal evening meal, and had gone home on foot. Thoroughly tired, he had thrown himself on the sofa, and fallen asleep.

When he woke up it was dark night. The house was quite silent. He lit a light, and looked at his watch; it pointed to half-past eleven. He considered for a little, and then determined to go across the courtyard to see Karen. He was sure to find her awake; sometimes she kept her lamp burning until two o’clock. For some time she had been doing embroidery work; she said she wanted to earn some money. So far she had not succeeded, but she had taken no great pains to sell her work.

He crossed the dark court, and mounted the dark stairs. He stopped at the open hall window of the third floor. The night was sultry. On one side, through a canyon between the black and lifeless brick walls of two houses, he saw smoke stacks project into the darkness. They came from the earth itself and overtopped the roofs. They were tipped with lightning-rods, and from some of them came thick fumes shot with the quiver of flames. Below was blackness, empty land hedged in by wooden fences, rough beams piled in heaps, low isolated huts, sand-pits and mortar-pits, and darkness and silence over all.

To the left of the stairs was the door to the Hofmanns’ flat. When he was letting himself into Karen’s rooms, he still gazed back at that door. He thought he was being called thither, but it was a delusion.

Karen was in bed. “Why, what do you want so late?” she grumbled. “I’d like a little quiet sometime.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said courteously. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I thought we might chat for a little while.”

“I’d like to know the good of all this talking, day and night.” She was annoyed, and even her laugh showed it.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You must tell me what happened to you after Adam Larsen’s death,” he said. “I can’t get rid of the impression of your words: the things that happened then.... Of course, I can imagine in a general way. I have insight enough into life now to make a guess....”

She interrupted him with a note of contempt in her voice. “No, you can’t guess nothing and you can’t imagine nothing. I’d bet my last rag on that.”

“That’s all the more reason why I’d like you to tell me about it,” he urged her. “You have never done so.”

There was an hostility in her silence, and it suddenly became clear to him that some stubborn instinct in her refused to initiate him wholly into her world. All that he had done for her had not sufficed to conquer the distrust of him and his kind that was bred into her very bone. The realization of this fact made him feel sad and helpless.

“I went to bed at seven to-day,” she said, blinking her eyes. “I wasn’t feeling a bit well. I believe I’m going to be sick.”

Christian looked at her, and he could not keep the disquietude and urgency out of his eyes.

Karen closed her lids. “Nothing but torment, torment, torment,” she moaned.

Christian was frightened. “No, no. Forgive me. I’ll go.”

“You might as well stay.” She laid her cheek on her folded hands, and drew up her limbs under the covers. A common but not disagreeable odour came from her hair and skin.

Wearily and idly she talked into the pillow. “It’s the common, ordinary thing, always the same. Women that tell you something else are liars. Of course, a good many will invent long romances to seem interesting, but I can’t do that. What do I care about it? No, it’s always the same story, common and horrible and filthy from A to Z. Oh, yes, you might as well stay now and sit down. I’ll tell you what I can. If you’ve just got to know, I might as well tell you, but it’s hard. I don’t know where to begin. There is no beginning. There’s nothing definite,—no romance nor nothing.”

Christian sat down again. “When Adam Larsen died,” he said, “was there no path for you? Was there no one among his friends or relatives who paid any attention to you or helped you?”

She laughed a sarcastic laugh. “Hell! You’re all off there. His friends didn’t hardly know about me. His brother came to the funeral, but I didn’t dare so much as speak to him. He was one of the righteous kind, with a golden watch-chain and a tip of five sous for the servants. And I was in a strange country, and didn’t know the language, and had to see about getting away. I had thirty francs in cash, and the question was: where could I go? I tried to get work once or twice. But what sort of work was I to do? I hadn’t learned nothing. Was I to go as a servant, and black boots and scrub floors? No, thank you! I was used to something different now, and I thought I could get along somehow. Anyhow I didn’t give a damn what became of me; I didn’t matter so much. In Aachen I took a job as a waitress. Nice occupation! I can’t give you an idea of that—the tiredness in your legs, the abuse you got to take! For food they give you the scraps; the bed ain’t fit for a dog. What they expect of you makes you crazy mad.

“Well, when you live that way you’re open to all sorts of swindling talk. I went into a house; stayed there four months, and then went into another. I had debts, too. Suddenly you’re in debt, you can’t figure out why. Board and lodging and clothes—they charge you three times over for everything: you got to pay for the air you breathe. All you think of is how to get out, or something awful will happen. Well, then maybe some fellow comes along in high feather, throws money out of the windows, pays for you, and gets you out. You go with him, and on the third morning somebody knocks at the door. Who’s there? Police! Your man’s a thief, and you have the devil’s own time clearing yourself of complicity. What now? You have to have a roof and a bed, and some one to talk to; you want a warm bite and a cool drink. You’ve got the mark of the trade on you, and no one trusts you. You’re shoved and you’re pulled, and you go down and down, day by day, step by step. You hardly notice it, and suddenly you’re at the bottom.”

She curled herself up more compactly under the covers, and continued in a blunter tone. “It’s easy to say that—at the bottom; but really there’s no such thing. There’s a lower depth under every depth; and there ain’t no words to tell you how it is down there. No one can imagine it who hasn’t been there. No seeing from the outside and no knowing will make people realize it. You live in a place for which they charge you five times as much as is fair and decent. You’re common property, and everybody gets out of you all he can. You don’t care if the place is elegant or like a pigsty. It gives you the horrors to open the door of it. It ain’t yours; it’s everybody’s. It’s the place where everybody sort of sheds his filth, and you know them all and remember them all. It does you no good to go to bed and try to sleep. Another day is bound to come. There are the same greasy public houses and the same faces, always the same crowd. And then there’s the street—what you call your territory. That’s where you go by night. You know every window and crossing and lantern: you stare and turn and ogle and grin, and open your umbrella if it rains, and walk and stand around and keep a sharp eye on the police, and make up to any man if he’s got torn shoes or sports a fur ulster. And then you promise him God knows what; and all the time you’d like to scratch his heart out if he walks off, or spit in his face if he condescends to you. There it is! That’s the main thing. Pain and worry—Lord, all people have them. But what you get to find out about men there—oh, I tell you!”

Her last words were a cry again, a great cry, such as that other cry which Christian had not been able to forget. He sat very straight, and looked past the lamp to a certain spot on the wall.

Karen seemed, as she went on, to be addressing the floor. “Then there’s the lodging-house keeper, who steals and cheats. There’s the owner of the house, who acts by daylight as if he wanted to kick you, and comes slinking to your door at twilight. There’s the shop-keeper, who overcharges you, and acts as if he was doing you a favour by giving you rotten stuff for your good money. There’s the policeman that grudges you every step you take. If you don’t slip him a bribe, he pulls you in and you go to jail. There’s the innkeeper; maybe you owe him a bit. He torments you if you got no brass, and wheedles and flatters when you have a little. I don’t mention your own man; but you got to have one if you want to or not, otherwise you’ve got no protection. When he’s sent to the penitentiary, you got to get another. They’re all handy with their knives, but Mesecke was the worst of the lot. But I tell you what’s hell—hell like nothing else in the whole, wide world—that’s your business and your customers. It don’t matter if they’re elegant or common, young or old, skinflints or spendthrifts—when they get to you they’re no better than carrion on a dung-heap. There you see what hypocrisy is and rascality; there you see the dirty souls as they are, with their terror and their lies and their lusts. Everything comes out. It comes out, I tell you, because they ain’t ashamed to let it. They don’t have to be. You get to see human beings without shame, and what you see is the miserable, hideous flesh. Would you like to know how it is? Drink of a cess-pool and you’ll know! It don’t matter if it’s a man that beats his wife when she’s with child, or lets his children starve, or a student or an officer that’s gone to the dogs, or a frightened parson, or a merchant with a huge belly—it’s the same, the same—man without shame and the hideous flesh.”

She laughed with tormented scorn, and went on: “I met Mesecke when I was discharged from the hospital. I had no one then. Before that I’d been in jail three weeks on account of a scamp named Max. He was bad enough, but he was a sweet innocent compared to Mesecke. A young man happened to turn up in the café, a college student or something like that. He treated us to one bottle of champagne after another, day in and day out. You knew right away that there was something rotten about it. And he always wanted me, just me, and he made the money fly. So one day Mesecke took him aside, and said to him right out: ‘That money comes out of your father’s safe. You stole it.’ The boy owned right up, and his knees just shook. So Mesecke got his claws into him, and showed him how to get more. And he and a skunk named Woldemar promised to take him to an opium den that was, they told him, just like heaven on earth. That night, when the boy was with me, he began to cry and whine like everything. I felt sorry for him, ’cause I knew he’d come to a bad end; and I told him so, and told him straight and rough. Then he emptied his pockets, and I’d never seen that much money in my life; and it was all stolen money. I got kind of dizzy, and told him to take it and put it back; but he wanted me to have it and buy myself something for it. I trembled all over, and told him for God’s sake to take it home; but he cried and fell on his knees and hugged me, and suddenly Mesecke was in the room. He’d been hidden and heard everything, and I hadn’t had an idea. But the boy’s face turned as grey as a piece of pumice stone; he looked at me and at Mesecke, and of course he thought it was a plot. I was glad when Mesecke crashed his fist into my temple, so that the air seemed to be full of fire and blood, and then kicked me into a corner. That must have made the boy see I was innocent. Then Mesecke took hold of Adalbert—that was his name—and went off with him. Adalbert said nothing, and just followed. He didn’t turn up the next day nor the next nor the day after that, so I asked Mesecke: ‘What did you do to Adalbert?’ And he said: ‘I put him on board a ship that was going overseas.’ Yes, I thought to myself, that’s a likely story. So I asked him again; and this time he said if I didn’t hold my tongue he’d scatter my bones for me. Well, I kept still. Maybe Adalbert did take passage on a ship; it’s possible. We didn’t ever hear no more about him. And I didn’t care so much, for there was something else every day. I had to be careful of my own skin, and get through the night somehow, and through the day. And it was always the same, always the same.”

She sat up, and took hold of Christian’s arm with an iron grip. Her eyes sparkled, and she hissed out through clenched teeth: “But I didn’t really know it. When you’re in the thick of it you don’t know. You don’t feel that it’s no life for a human being; and you don’t want to see, and you don’t dare to know that you’re damned and in a burning hell! Why did you take me out of it? Why did things have to happen this way?”

Christian did not answer. He heard the air roar past his ears.

After a while she let his arm go, or, rather, she thrust it from her, and he arose. She flung herself back on her pillows. Christian thought: “It has been in vain.” The dread that he had felt turned to despair. In vain! He heard the words in the air about him: “In vain, in vain, in vain!”

Then, in a clear voice that he had never heard her use before, Karen said: “I’d like to have your mother’s rope of pearls.”

“What?” Christian said. It seemed to him that he must have misunderstood her.

And in the same, almost childlike voice, Karen repeated: “Your mother’s pearls—that’s what I’d like.” She was talking nonsense, and she knew it. Not for a moment did she think it conceivable that her desire could be fulfilled.

Christian approached the bed. “What made you think of that?” he whispered. “What do you mean by that? What?”

“I’ve never wished for anything so much,” Karen said in the same clear voice. She was lying very still now. “Never, never. At least, I’d love to see them once—see how things like that look. I’d like to hold them, touch them, just once. They don’t seem real. Go to her and ask for them. Go and say: ‘Karen wants so much to see your pearls.’ Maybe she’ll lend them to you.” She laughed half madly. “Maybe she’d let you have them for a while. It seems to me that then”—she opened her eyes wide, and there was a new flame in them—“that then things might be different between us.”

“Who told you of them?” Christian asked as though in a dream. “Who spoke to you of my mother’s pearls?”

She opened the drawer of the little table beside her bed, and took out the photograph. Christian reached out for it eagerly, although she was going to give it to him. “Voss gave it to me,” she said.

Christian looked at the picture and quietly put it away.

“Yes, that’s what I’d like,” Karen said again; and there was a wildness in her face, and a childlikeness and a pathos and a greed, and a certain defiance which was also like a child’s. And her smile was wild, and her laughter. “Oh, there’s nothing else I’d want then. I would taste the pearls with my tongue and bury them in my flesh; and I’d let no one know and show them to no one. Yes, that’s what I want, only that—your mother’s pearls, even if it’s for just a little while.”

Nothing could so have pierced the soul of Christian as this wild stammering and this wild begging. He stood by the window, gazing into the night, and said slowly and reflectively: “Very well, you shall have them.”

Karen did not answer. She stretched herself out and closed her eyes. She didn’t take his words seriously. When he left her, there was a silent mockery in her mind—of him, of herself.

But the next morning Christian took the underground railway to the Anhalter Station, and bought a third-class ticket to Frankfort. In his hand he carried a small travelling bag.

XXXI

“Come on then, let’s see what you know!” Niels Heinrich said to his mother, the fortune-teller Engelschall.

They were in her inner sanctum. Attached to the ceiling by a black cord hung a stuffed bat with outstretched wings. Dark, glowing glass-beads had been set in its head. On the table, which was covered with cards, lay a death’s head.

It was Sunday night, and Niels Heinrich came from his favourite pub. He only stopped here on his way to a suburban dancing-hall. He wore a black suit and a blue and white linen waistcoat. He had pushed his derby hat so far to the back of his head that one saw the whole parting of his hair. In his left arm-pit he held a thin, little stick. He see-sawed on the chair on which he had slouched himself down.

“Come on now, trot out your tricks,” and he flung a five-mark piece on the table. In his dissipated eyes there was a shimmer as of some mineral and an indeterminate lustfulness.

The widow Engelschall was always afraid of him. She shuffled her cards. “You seem to be well fixed, my lad,” she fawned on him. “That’s right. Cut! And now let’s see what you let yourself in for.”

Niels Heinrich see-sawed on his chair. For many days his throat had been on fire. He was sick of his very teeth and hands. He wanted to grasp something, and hold it and crush it in his fist—something smooth and warm, something that had life and begged for life. He hated all things else, all hours, all ways.

“A ten and a ace o’ diamonds,” he heard his mother say, “the king o’ clubs and the jack o’ spades—that don’t mean nothing good. Then another ten and a grey woman”—consternation was on her face—“you ain’t going to do nothing awful, boy?”

“Aw, don’t get crazy, ol’ woman,” Niels Heinrich snarled at her. “You’d make a dog laugh.” He frowned, and said with assumed indifference, “Look and see if the cards say something about a Jew wench.”

The widow Engelschall shook her head in astonishment. “No, my boy, nothing like that.” She turned the cards again. “No. Another ten and a queen o’ hearts—that might mean a money order. Lord love us—three more queens. You always was a great one for the women. And that reminds me that red Hetty asked after you to-day. She wanted to know if you’d come to the Pit to-night.”

Niels Heinrich answered: “Gee, I just kicked her out a day or two ago. Her memory must be frozen. Gee!” He leaned back and see-sawed again. “Aw, well, if you can’t tell me nothing pleasant, I’ll take back my fiver.”

“It’s coming, my boy, it’s coming,” the old woman said soothingly. She shuffled the cards again. “Have patience. We’ll get that business with the Jew wench yet.”

Niels Heinrich stared into emptiness. Wherever he looked he had seen the same thing for days and days—a young, smooth neck, two young, smooth shoulders, two young, smooth breasts; and all these were strange, of a strange race, and filled with a strange sweet blood. And he felt that if he could not grasp these, grasp them and smell and taste, he would die the death of a dog. He got up and forced himself to a careless gesture. “You can stop,” he said. “It’s all a damn’ swindle. You can keep the tip too. I don’t give a damn.” He passed his stick across the cards, jumbled them together, and went out.

The widow Engelschall, left alone, shook her head. The ambition of her calling stirred in her. She shuffled and laid down the cards anew. “We’ll get it yet,” she murmured, “we’ll get it yet....”

RUTH AND JOHANNA

I

It was in the Hotel Fratazza in San Martino di Castrozza that, at the end of years, Crammon and the Countess Brainitz met again.

The countess sat on the balcony of her room, embroidering a Slavonic peasant scarf, and searching with her satisfied eyes the craggy mountains and the wooded slopes and paths. As she did so, a dust-covered motor car stopped at the entrance below, and from it stepped two ladies and two gentlemen in the fashionable swathings of motoring. The gentlemen took off their goggles, and made arrangements with the manager of the hotel.

“Look down, Stöhr,” the countess turned to her companion. “Look at that stoutish man with a face like an actor. He seems familiar to——” At that moment Crammon looked up and bowed. The countess uttered a little cry.

That evening, in the dining-hall, Crammon could not avoid going to the countess’ table and asking after her health, the length of her stay here, and similar matters. The countess rudely interrupted his courteous phrases. “Herr von Crammon, there’s something I have to say to you privately. I’m glad to have this opportunity. I have been waiting for it very long.”

“I am entirely at your service, countess,” said Crammon, with ill-concealed vexation. “I shall take the liberty of calling on you to-morrow at eleven.”

At ten minutes past eleven on the next day he had himself announced. In spite of the energetic way in which she had demanded this interview, he felt neither curiosity nor anxiety.

The countess pointed to a chair, sat down opposite her guest, and assumed the expression of a judge. “My dear sister, whom you, Herr von Crammon, cannot fail to remember, passed from this world to a better one after a long illness eighteen months ago. I was permitted to be with her to the end, and in her last hours she made a confession to me.”

The sympathy which Crammon exhibited was of such obvious superficiality that the countess added with knife-like sharpness of tone: “It was my sister Else, Herr von Crammon, the mother of Letitia. Haven’t you anything to say?”

Crammon nodded dreamily. “So she too is gone,” he sighed, “dear woman! And all that was twenty years ago! It was a glorious time, countess. Youth, youth—ah, all the meaning in that word! Don’t remind me, dear countess, don’t remind me!

“‘Even the beautiful dies, though it conquer men and immortals,

Zeus of the iron breast feels no compassion within.’”

“Spare me your poetical quotations,” the countess replied angrily. “You shan’t get the better of me as you did once upon a time. In those days the mask of discretion was the most convenient and comfortable for you to assume; and I don’t deny that you assumed it with the utmost skill. But let me add this at once: One may be as discreet as a mummy, yet there are situations in life in which one is forced to follow the call of one’s heart, that is, if one is provided with such a thing. A momentary hoarseness, a quiver of the lips, a moisture of the eye—that would have sufficed. I observed nothing of the kind in you. Instead you stood by quite calmly, while that poor girl, your daughter, your own flesh and blood, was sold to a filthy maniac, a tiger in human form.”

Crammon’s answer was temperate and dignified. “Perhaps you will have the kindness, dear countess, to recall my sincere and insistent warning. I came to you late at night, tormented by conscience, and made the most weighty and solemn representations to you.”

“Warning! Fudge! You told me wild stories. You cheated me right and left.”

“Those are strong expressions, countess.”

“I mean them to be!”

“Too bad! Ah, well! The dewy moisture of the eye, countess, is the sort of thing you mustn’t expect of me; I haven’t the required gift. I found the little girl sympathetic, very sympathetic, but merely as a human being. You mustn’t expect paternal emotions of me. Frankly and honestly, countess, I consider those emotions vastly overestimated by sentimental people. A mother—ah, there the voice of nature speaks. But a father is a more or less unlucky accident. Suppose you had planned to overwhelm me with an effective scene. Let us picture it. Yonder door opens, and there appears a young gentleman or a young lady armed with all necessary documents or proofs. Such proper documents and proofs could be gathered against any normal man of forty-three like the sands of the sea. And so this young man or young lady approaches me with the claims of a son or a daughter. Well, do you really believe that I would be deeply moved, and that the feelings of a father would gush from my heart like waters from a fountain? On the contrary, I would say: ‘My dear young man, or my dear young lady, I am charmed to make your acquaintance,’ but that exhausts the entire present possibilities of the situation. And wouldn’t it, by the way, be most damnably uncomfortable, if one had to live in the constant expectation of meeting one’s unpaid bills of twenty years ago in human form? Where would that lead to? The offspring in question, whether male or female, if possessed of any tact, would thoroughly consider such a step, and pause before using an ill-timed intrusion to burden a man who is busy stirring the dregs in the cup of life for some palatable remnants. The conception of our charming Letitia, my dear lady, was woven into so peculiar a mesh of circumstance, and so evidently due to the interposition of higher powers, that my own service in the matter shrinks into insignificance. When I met the dear girl, I had the feeling of a wanderer who once thoughtlessly buried a cherry kernel by the roadside. Years later he passes the same spot, and is surprised by a cherry tree. Delightful but quite natural. But do you expect the man to raise a cry of triumph? Is he to haunt the neighbourhood, and say: ‘Look at my cherry-tree! Am I not a remarkable fellow?’ Or would you expect him to go to the owner of the land and demand the tree and uproot it, or even steal it by night in order to transplant it he knows not where? Such a man would be a fool, countess, or a maniac.”

“I didn’t suspect you of having much spirituality, Herr von Crammon,” the countess replied bitterly, “but I thought a little might be found. I confess that I’m dumbfounded. Pray tell me this: Do all men share your views, or are you unique in this respect? It would console me to believe the latter, for otherwise humanity would seem to cut too sorry a figure.”

“God forbid, dearest countess, that I should be guilty of disturbing the admirable equilibrium of your mind and soul,” Crammon returned eagerly. “God forbid! By all means consider me an exception. Most of the people I know are quite proud of their productions, whether the latter take the form of verse, or a new fashion in waistcoats, or a quite original way of preparing the livers of geese. They are insatiable for the fame of authorship. When you see them from afar, you feel yourself forced to invent compliments; and there is no lie that they do not swallow with a greed that makes you ashamed for them. And no chef, no poet, and no tailor is so puffed up with creative vanity as your common bourgeois progenitor. Compared to him the rhinoceros is a delicate and sensitive creature. My dislike of the institution of the family was heightened by an incident that illustrates my point. I once asked a man, who was a notorious cuckold, how his two boys happened to be so extraordinarily fair, since both he and his wife were very dark. He replied with the utmost impudence that his ancestors had been Norman knights. Norman knights, of all things in the world! And the man was a Jew from Prague. Norman knights!”

The countess shook her head. “You’re telling me anecdotes again,” she said, “and I’m not fond of them, least of all of yours. So you repudiate all responsibility? You consider Letitia a stranger, and deny the darling child? Is that, in a word, the meaning of all your discourse?”

“Not at all, countess. I am ready for any amicable rapprochement; only I refuse to be nailed down, and have a sentimental moral responsibility foisted on me. Were that attempted, I should be apt to flee, although I am by nature calm and deliberate. But let us not waste the time discussing theories. Tell me the precise nature of little Letitia’s misfortunes.”

Mastering the horror with which Crammon filled her, the countess related how she had received a telegram from Genoa a month ago. The message had been: “Send money or come immediately.” She had hastened to Genoa, and found the poor child in a pitiful condition. Letitia had so little money that she had to pawn her jewels to pay her hotel bills; she was tyrannized and cheated by the Argentinian nurse whom she had brought over; one of the twins had a touch of intestinal catarrh, the other of inflammation of the eyes——”

“Twins? Did you say twins?” Crammon interrupted her in consternation.

“Twins. Precisely what I said. You are the grandfather of twins.” The countess’s reply reeked with malicious satisfaction.

“The ways of Providence are indeed wonderful,” Crammon murmured, and his eyes dulled a little, “grandfather of twins.... Extraordinary, I confess. I must say that the affair doesn’t look humorous. Why did she leave her husband? Why didn’t you stay with her?”

“You shall hear all. The man maltreated her—actually and physically. She fell into the hands of drunkards, robbers, poisoners, horse-thieves, forgers, and slanderers. She was a prisoner in the house; she suffered hunger; they tormented her body and soul, and made cruel threats; she was in fear of her life; they trained wild animals to terrorize her, and hired escaped convicts to watch her. Fear and horror brought her to the brink of the grave. It was unspeakable. Without the interposition and noble-hearted assistance of a German captain, who offered her passage to Europe, she would have perished miserably. Unhappily I could not even thank her unselfish friend; he had left Genoa when I arrived. But Letitia gave me his address, and I shall write him.”

“It’s all very regrettable,” said Crammon, “and yet it is what I expected. I had a foreboding, and thence my prophecy. I thought this Stephen Gunderam odious from the start. He was like a cheap showman blowing a tin trumpet. I wouldn’t have trusted him with an old umbrella, not to speak of a young girl whose exquisite qualities were patent to all the world. Nevertheless I disapprove of her flight. If the conditions were demonstrably insufferable, she should have sought her freedom through the appropriate legal methods. Marriage is a sacrament. First she jumps at it, as though it were a well-warranted seventh heaven. Next, having experienced the discomforts which a very imbecile would have expected under the circumstances, she takes French leave, and steams off to Europe with two helpless and unsheltered babes. That is neither consistent nor prudent, and I must distinctly withhold my approval.”

The countess was indignant. “It’s your opinion that the poor child should rather have let them torment her to death?”

“I beg your pardon. I merely point out her unfortunate way of seeking redress; beyond that I do not presume to judge. I consider it a wrong step to break the union sanctified by the Church, and desert both hearth and country. It is a godless thing, and leads to destruction. And what happened while you were with her? What did she determine on? Where is she now?”

“In Paris.”

“In Paris! Is that so? And the purpose of her visit?”

“She wants to recuperate. I don’t grudge her the chance. She needs it.”

“I don’t question it, countess. But Paris seems an unusual place for such a purpose. And did she directly refuse the pleasure of your society, or do you merely fail to share her taste for recuperating in Paris?”

The countess was visibly embarrassed. She wrinkled her brow, and her little red cheeks glowed. “In the hotel she made the acquaintance of a Vicomte Seignan-Castreul, who was staying there with his sister,” she said hesitantly. “They invited Letitia to be their guest in Paris and afterwards at their château in Brittany. The child wept, and said to me: ‘Auntie, I’d love to go, but I can’t because I haven’t a cent.’ It cut me to the heart, and I scraped together what I could—five thousand francs in all. The darling thanked me from the heart, and then left with the vicomte and vicomtesse, and promised to meet me in Baden-Baden in October.”

“And where are the twins in the meanwhile?”

“She took them with her, of course—the twins, and their Argentinian nurse, an English maid, and her own maid.”

“I honour your generosity, countess, but I don’t somehow like either your vicomte or your vicomtesse.”

The countess suddenly gave a loud sob. “I don’t either!” she cried, and pressed her hands to her face. “I don’t either. If only the dear child does not meet with new misfortunes! But what was I to do? Can one resist her pleading? I was so happy to have her back; I felt as though she’d risen from the grave. No, the vicomte is not sympathetic to me at all. He has a dæmoniac character.”

“People with dæmoniac characters are always swindlers, countess,” Crammon said drily. “A decent man is never that. It’s a swindle in itself, that word.”

“Herr von Crammon,” the countess announced with decision, “I expect of you now that you show character in the other and beautiful sense of the word, I expect you to come to Baden-Baden when Letitia has arrived, to interest yourself in her who is closer to you than any one else on earth, and to make up for your wrong and your neglect.”

“For the love of all the saints, not that!” Crammon cried in terror. “Recognition, deep emotion, father and daughter fall into each other’s arms, remorse and damp handkerchiefs! No! Anything you want, but not that.”

“No excuses, Herr von Crammon, it is your duty!” The countess had arisen, and her eyes were majestic. Crammon writhed and begged and besought her. It did no good. The countess would not let him go until he had pledged her his word of honour to be in Baden-Baden by the end of October or, at latest, the beginning of November.

When the countess was alone, she walked up and down for a little, still hot and gasping. Then she called her companion. “Send me the waiter, Stöhr,” she moaned, “I’m weak with hunger.”

Fräulein Stöhr did as she was bidden.

II

Frau Wahnschaffe was on one of her rare outings. She was driving in her electric car toward Schwanheim, when she caught sight of a group of young men at the entrance to the polo-grounds. Among them was one who reminded her strongly of Christian. His slenderness and noble grace of gesture gave her so strong an illusion of Christian’s presence that she bade her chauffeur halt, and requested her companion to walk to the gate and inquire after the young man’s identity.

The companion obeyed, and Frau Wahnschaffe, still watching the group, waited very quietly. The companion had no difficulty in getting the information, and reported that the young man was an Englishman named Anthony Potter.

“Ah, yes, yes.” That was all Frau Wahnschaffe said, and her interest was extinguished.

That very evening a special delivery letter was brought her. She recognized Christian’s handwriting, and everything danced before her eyes. The first thing she was able to see was the name of a small, third-rate Frankfort hotel. Gradually her sight grew steadier, and she read the letter: “Dear Mother: I beg you to grant me an interview in the course of the forenoon to-morrow. It is too late for me to come to you to-day; I have travelled all day and am tired. If I do not hear from you to the contrary, I shall be with you at ten o’clock. I am confident that you will be so good as to see me alone.”

Her only thought was: “At last!” And she said the words out loud to herself: “At last!”

She looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock. That meant twelve hours. How was she to pass those twelve hours? All her long life seemed shorter to her than this coming space of time.

She went downstairs through the dark and empty rooms, through the marble hall with its great columns, through the gigantic, mirrored dining-hall, in which the last, faint light of the long summer evening was dying. She went into the park, and heard the plaint of a nightingale. Stars glittered, a fountain plashed, and distant music met her ear. She returned, and found that only fifty minutes had passed. An expression of rage contorted her cold and rigid face. She considered whether she should drive to the city to that shabby little hostelry. She dismissed that plan at once. He was asleep; he was weary with travel. But why is he in such a place, she asked herself, in a humble house, among strange and lowly people?

She sat down in an armchair, and entered upon her bitter duel with the slothfulness of time, from eleven to midnight, from midnight to the first grey glint of dawn, from that first glint to the early flush of the young morning, thence to full sunrise, and on to the appointed hour.

III

Wherever Johanna Schöntag went she was treated with loving-kindness. Even her relatives with whom she lived treated her with tender considerateness. This tended to lower rather than to raise her in her own self-esteem. She considered subtly: “If I please these, what can I possibly amount to?”

She said: “It is ever so funny that I should be living in this city of egoists. I am the direct antithesis of such brave persons.”

Nothing seemed worth doing to her, not even what her heart demanded loudly—the setting out to find Christian. She waited for some compulsion, but none came. She lost herself in trivial fancies. She would sit in a corner, and watch things and people with her clever eyes. “If that bearded man,” she thought, “had the nose of his bald neighbour he might look quite human.” Or: “Why are there six stucco roses above the door? Why not five or seven?” She tormented herself with these things. The wrongly placed nose and the perverse number of the stucco roses incited her to plan the world’s improvement. Suddenly she would laugh, and then blush if people looked her way.

Every night, before she fell asleep, she thought, in spite of herself, of Amadeus Voss and of her promise to write him. Then she would take flight in sleep and forget the morrow. His long letter weighed on her memory as the most painful experience of her life. Words that made her restless emerged from it in her consciousness—the saying, for instance, concerning the shadow’s yearning for its body. The words’ mystery lured her on. All voices in the outer world warned her. Their warning but heightened the sting of allurement. She enjoyed her fear and let it grow. The reflection of mirrored things in other mirrors of the mind confused her. At last she wrote; an arrow flew from the taut string.

They met on Kurfürsten Square, and walked up the avenue of chestnut trees toward Charlottenburg. In order to limit the interview, Johanna announced that she must be home at the end of an hour. But the path they chose robbed her of the hope of a quite brief interview. She yielded. To hide her embarrassment, she remarked jestingly on the trees, houses, monuments, beasts, and men. Voss preserved a dry seriousness. She turned to him impatiently. “Well, teacher, aren’t you going to talk a bit to the well-behaved little pupil with whom you’re taking a walk?”

But Voss had no understanding of the nervous humour of her gentle rebuke. He said: “I am an easy prey; you have but to mock, and I am without defence. I must accustom myself to such lightness and smoothness. It is a bad tone for us to use. You keep looking at me searchingly, as though my sleeve might be torn or my collar stained. I had determined to speak to you as to a comrade. It cannot be done. You are a young lady, and I am hopelessly spoiled for your kind.”

Johanna answered sarcastically that at all events it calmed her to see her person and presence extorting a consideration from him which she had not always enjoyed. Voss started. Her contemptuous expression revealed her meaning to him. He lowered his head, and for a while said nothing. Then bitterness gathered on his features. Johanna, gazing straight ahead, felt the danger to herself; she could have averted it; she knew that a courteous phrase would have robbed him of courage. But she disdained the way out. She wanted to defy him, and said frankly that she was not in the least hurt by his disappointment in her, since it was scarcely her ambition to impress him. Voss endured this in silence, too, but seemed to crouch as for an attack. Johanna asked with an innocent air whether he was still in Christian Wahnschaffe’s apartment, and still had charge of his friend’s private correspondence.

Voss’s answer was dry and objective. He said that he had moved, since his means did not permit him such luxury. The mocking smile on Johanna’s lips showed him that she was acquainted with the situation. He added that he had better say that the source of his income had given out. He was living, he told her, in quarters befitting a student in Ansbacher Street, and had made the acquaintance of poverty again. He was not yet so poor, however, that he had to deny himself the pleasure of a guest; so he asked her whether she would take tea with him some day. He did not understand her laughter. Ah, yes, she was a young lady; he had forgotten. Well, perhaps she would condescend to the shop of a confiseur.

His talk aroused her scorn and her impatience.

It was Sunday, and the weather was gloomy. Night was falling. Music resounded from the pavilions in the public gardens. They met many soldiers, each with his girl. Johanna opened her umbrella and walked wearily. “It isn’t raining,” said Voss. She answered: “I do it so as not to have to think of the rain.” The real reason was that the umbrella widened the distance between them. “When do you see Christian?” she suddenly asked in a high-pitched voice, and looked away from him to the other side. “Do you see him often?” She regretted her question at once. It bared her heart to these ambushed eyes.

But Voss had not even heard her. “You still resent the matter of your letter. You can’t forgive me for having spied upon your secret. You have no notion of what I gave you in return. You waste no thought on the fact that I revealed my whole soul to you. Perhaps it wasn’t even clear to you that all I wrote you in regard to Wahnschaffe was a confession such as one human being rarely makes to another. It was done by implication, and you, evidently, do not understand that method. I probably overestimated both your understanding and your good will.”

“Probably,” Johanna replied; “and likewise my good nature, for here you’ve been as rude as possible again. You would be quite right in what you said, if you didn’t leave out one very important thing: there must first be a basic sympathy between two people before you can expect such demands to be honoured.”

“Sympathy!” Voss jeered. “A phrase—a conventional formula! What you call sympathy is the Philistine’s first resort—tepid, flat, colourless. True sympathy requires such delicate insight of the soul that he who feels it scorns to use the shop-worn, vulgar word. I did not reckon on sympathy. A cleft, such as the cleft between you and me, cannot be bridged by cheap trappings. Do you think I had no instinctive knowledge of your coldness, your aloofness, your irony? Do you take me for the type of pachydermatous animal that leaps into a hedge of roses, because it knows the thorns cannot wound him? Oh, no! Every thorn penetrates my skin. I tell you this in order that you may know henceforth just what you are doing. Each thorn pierces me till I bleed. That was clear to me from the beginning, and yet I took the risk. I have staked all that I am on this game; I have gathered my whole self together and cast it at your feet, careless of the result. Once I desired to deliver myself utterly into the hands of fate.”

“I must turn back,” Johanna said, and shut her umbrella. “I must take a cab. Where are we?”

“I live on Ansbacher Street, corner of Augsburger, in the third story of the third house. Come to me for one hour; let it be as a sign that I am an equal in your eyes. You cannot imagine what depends on it for me. It is a wretched and desolate hole. If ever you cross its threshold, it will be a place in which I can breathe. I am not in the habit of begging, but I beg you for this favour. The suspicion which I see in your eyes is fully justified. I have planned to beg you for this, to bring it about. But this plan of mine did not originate to-day or yesterday. It is weeks old; it is older than I know. But that is all. Any other distrust you feel is unjustified.”

He stammered these words and gasped them. Johanna looked helplessly away. She was too weak to withstand the passionate eloquence of the man, repulsive and fear-inspiring as he was. Also there was a fearful lure in the daring, in the presence of a flame, in fanning it, in danger, and in watching what would happen. Her life was empty. She needed something to expect and court and fear. She needed the brink of some abyss, some bitter fume, some transcendence of common boundaries. But for the moment she needed to gain time. “Not to-day,” she said, with a veiled expression, “some other time. Next week. No, don’t urge me. But perhaps toward the end of the week; perhaps Friday. I don’t see your purpose, but if you wish it, I’ll come Friday.”

“It is agreed then. Friday at the same hour.” He held out his hand. Hesitatingly she put hers into it. She felt imprisoned in her own aversion, but her glance was firm and almost challenging.

IV

When Christian entered, Frau Wahnschaffe stood massively in the middle of the room. Her arms were lightly folded below her bosom. A wave of pallor passed over her, and she felt chilled. Christian approached. She turned her face, and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. She sought to speak, but her lips twitched nervously. Christian suddenly lost the simple assurance born of his swift and unreflective action. He suddenly realized the monstrousness of his errand, and stood quite silent.

“Will you stay with us for some time?” Frau Wahnschaffe asked hoarsely. “Surely you will. I have had your room made ready; you will find everything in order. It was unnecessarily considerate of you to spend the night at an hotel. Do you not know your mother well enough to take it for granted that the house is always ready to receive you?”

“I am sorry, mother,” answered Christian, “but I can stay only a few hours. I must not and dare not delay. I have to return to Berlin on the five o’clock train. I am sorry.”

Frau Wahnschaffe now turned her full face upon Christian so slowly that the motion had the air of marionette’s. “You are sorry,” she murmured. “Ah, yes. I scarcely expected even that much. But everything is ready for you, Christian, your bed and your wardrobes. You have not been here for very long, and it is very long since I have seen you. Let me think: it must be eighteen months. Pastor Werner told me some things about you; they were not pleasant to hear. He was here several times. I seemed unable to grasp his report except in small doses. It seemed to me the man must have had hallucinations, yet he expressed himself very carefully. I said to him: ‘Nonsense, my dear pastor, people don’t do such things.’ You know, Christian, that I find matters of a certain sort difficult to understand.... But you look strange, Christian.... You look changed, my son. You’re dressed differently. Do you no longer dress as you used to? It is strange. Do you not frequent good society? And these fancies of the pastor concerning voluntary poverty and renunciations that you desire to suffer ... and I hardly recall what—tell me: is there any foundation of truth to all that? For I do not understand.”

Christian said: “Won’t you sit down beside me for a little, mother? We can’t talk comfortably while you stand there.”

“Gladly, Christian, let us sit down and talk. It is nice of you to say it in that way.”

They sat down side by side on the sofa, and Christian said: “I know I have been guilty of neglect toward you, mother. I should not have waited to let strangers inform you of my decisions and actions. I see now that it makes a mutual understanding harder; only it is so unpleasant and so troublesome to talk about oneself. Yet I suppose it must be done, for what other people report is usually thoroughly wrong. I sometimes planned to write to you, but I couldn’t; even while I thought the words, they became misleading and false. Yet I felt no impulse to come to you without any other motive than to give you an explanation. It seemed to me that there should be enough confidence in me in your heart to make a detailed self-justification unnecessary. And I thought it better to risk a breach and estrangement caused by silence, than to indulge in ill-timed talk, and yet avoid neither because I had not been understood.”

“You speak of breach and estrangement,” Frau Wahnschaffe replied, “as though it were only now threatening us. And you speak as calmly as though it were a punishment for children, and you were quite reconciled to it. Very well, Christian, the breach and the estrangement may come. You will find me too proud to struggle against your mind and your decision. I am not a mother who wants her son’s devotion as an alms, nor a woman who would interfere in your world, nor one who will stoop to strive for a right that is denied her. Nothing that breaks my heart need stop your course. But give me, at least, one word to which I can cling in my lonely days of brooding and questioning. The air gives me no answer to my questions, nor my own mind, nor any other’s. Explain to me what you are really doing, and why you are doing it. At last, at last you are here; I can see you and hear you. Speak!”

Her words, spoken in a monotonous and hollow voice, stirred Christian deeply, less through their meaning than through his mother’s attitude and gesture—her stern, lost glance, the grief she felt, and the coldness that she feigned. She had found the way to his innermost being, and his great silence was broken. He said: “It isn’t easy to explain the life one lives or the events whose necessity is rooted uncertainly in the past. If I search my own past, I cannot tell where these things had their beginning, nor when, nor how. But let me put it this way: He whom a great glare blinds, desires darkness; he who is satiated finds food distasteful; he who has never lost himself in some cause feels shame and the desire to prove himself. Yet even that does not explain what seems to me the essential thing. You see, mother, the world as I gradually got to know it, the institutions of men, harbours a wrong that is very great and that is inaccessible to our ordinary thinking. I cannot tell you exactly in what this great wrong consists. No man can tell us yet, neither the happy man nor the wretched, neither the learned nor the unlettered one. But it exists, and it meets you at every turn. It does no good to reflect about it. But like the swimmer who strips before he leaps, one must dive to the very bottom of life to find the root and origin of that great wrong. And one can be seized by a yearning for that search, which sweeps away all other interests and ambitions, and masters one utterly. It is a feeling that I could not describe to you, mother, not if I were to talk from now until night. It pierces one through, all one’s soul and all one’s life; and if one strives to withdraw from it, it only becomes keener.”

He rose under the impression of the unwonted excitement that he felt, and continued speaking more swiftly. “That wrong does not consist in the mere contrast between poor and rich, between arbitrary licence on the one hand and enforced endurance on the other. No, no. Look, we’ve all grown up with the view that crime meets its expiation, guilt its punishment, that every human deed bears its reward within itself, and that, in a word, a justice rules which compensates, orders, avenges, if not before our eyes, then in some higher region. But that is not true. I believe in no such justice; it does not exist. Nor is it possible that such a justice exists in the universe, for if it did, the lives men lead could not be as they are. And if this superhuman justice of which men speak and on which they rely does not exist, then the source of that great wrong that is in the world must be within the life of man itself, and we must find that source and know its nature. But you cannot find it by observing life from without; you must be within it, within it to the lowest depths. That is it, mother, that is it. Perhaps you understand now.”

A measureless astonishment spread over Frau Wahnschaffe’s features. She had never heard such things, she had never prepared her mind to hear them, and least of all to hear them from him, the beautiful, the ever festive, the inviolable by any ugliness. For it was that vision of him which she still nursed within. She meant to answer, she almost thought the words had escaped her: “That search is not your function in the world, yours less than any other’s!” The desperate words had already shadowed her face, when she looked upon him, and saw that he was rapt not from the sphere she hated, avoided, and feared for him, but from herself, her world, his world and former self. She beheld one almost unknown in a ghostly shimmer, and a presage stirred in her frozen soul; and in that presage was the yearning of which he had spoken, although its very name was strange to her. Also the fear of losing his love utterly let all the years behind her seem but wasted years, and she said shyly: “You indicated, did you not, that a particular purpose had brought you here? What is it?”

Christian sat down again. “It is a very difficult and delicate matter,” he answered. “I came without realizing its exact nature, of which I seem but now to become aware. The woman whom I am taking care of, Karen Engelschall—you have heard of her, mother—desires your pearls; and I, I promised to bring them to her. Her desire is as strange as my request. The whole thing, put bluntly, sounds like madness.” He smiled, he even laughed, yet his face had grown very pale.

Frau Wahnschaffe merely pronounced his name: “Christian.” That was all. She spoke the word in a toneless, lingering voice, almost hissing the s.

Christian went on: “I said I was taking care of that woman ... that isn’t the right expression. It was a critical moment in my life when I found her. Many people were astonished that I didn’t surround her with splendour and luxury, when that was still in my power. But that would have availed nothing. I would have missed my aim utterly by such a method; and she herself did not dream of demanding it. If it weren’t for her relatives, who constantly urge her to rebellion and desire, she would be quite contented. People chatter to her too much. She, of course, doesn’t understand my purpose; often she regards me as an enemy. But is that strange after such a life as hers? Mother, you may believe me when I assure you that all the pearls in the world can not bring a soul forgetfulness of such a life.”

He spoke disconnectedly and nervously. His fingers twitched, his brow was wrinkled and smooth in turn. The words he spoke and must yet speak pained him; the monstrousness of his demand, which he had but now fully realized, and the possibility that his request might be refused—these things drove the blood to his heart. His mother neither stirred nor spoke. Within a few minutes her features seemed to have shrunk into the crumpled mask of extreme old age.

Christian’s fright stung him to further speech. “She is an outcast, one of the despised and rejected. That is true; or rather, that is what she was. But it is not permitted us to pass judgment. An accident placed a photograph of you, wearing your pearls, in her possession; and perhaps she felt as though you stood before her in person, and there came over her a sudden sense of what it means to be an outcast and despised. You and she—perhaps the world should hold no such contrasts; and the pearls became to her confused and half-mad vision a symbol of compensation, of moral equilibrium. She will not keep the pearls, by the way, nor would I permit her to do so. I pledge myself that they shall be returned, if you will accept my mere word as a pledge. I shall return the pearls, and you yourself may set the date. Only please don’t disappoint me in my quandary.”

Frau Wahnschaffe took a deep breath, and her tone was harsh: “You foolish boy.”

Christian lowered his eyes.

“You foolish boy,” Frau Wahnschaffe repeated, and her lips trembled.

“Why do you say that?” Christian asked softly.

She arose, and beckoned him with a weary gesture. He followed her into her bed-chamber. She took a key out of a leather-case, and unlocked the steel door of the safe built into the wall. There were her jewels—diadems and clasps, bracelets, brooches, pins, rings and lavallières studded with precious stones. She grasped the rope of pearls, and, as she took it out, its end trailed, on the floor. The pearls were almost equal in magnificence and of uncommon size. Frau Wahnschaffe said: “These pearls, Christian, have meant more to me than such things usually do to a woman. Your father gave them to me when you were born. I always wore them in a spirit of thankfulness to God for the gift of you. I am not ashamed to confess that. They seemed, I thought, to form a circle within which you and I alone had being. I have neither touched them nor looked at them since you started on your strange wanderings, and I believe that the pearls themselves have sickened. They are so yellow, and some have lost their lustre. Did you seriously think I could deny you anything, no matter what it is? It is true that your ways are too strange for me now. My brain seems befogged when I try to grasp all that, and I feel blind and lame. Yet to-day some voice has spoken for you, and I would not lose that voice. So far I have heard only vain lamentations. My whole soul shudders, but I begin to see you again, and whatever you ask I must give you. You are to know that, and indeed, you must have known that or you would not have come. Take them!” She turned aside to hide the pain upon her face, and with outstretched arm held out to him the rope of pearls. “But your father must never know,” she murmured. “If you desire to return the pearls, bring them yourself if possible. I would not know for whom they are. Do with them as though they were your property.”

Property! Christian listened to the word, but it did not penetrate his consciousness. It fell and disappeared like a stone in water; for him it had lost all meaning. And he looked upon the pearls with surprise and indifference, as though they were a toy, and it were strange to talk and trouble so much about them. Their preciousness, the value which amounted to millions, was no longer a living fact of consciousness to him, but like a dim memory of something heard long ago. Therefore he did not feel the burden of his mother’s trust and his possession. The way in which he tucked the pearls into a case his mother had found, had something so carelessly business-like, and his word of thanks so obvious a formality, that it was clear he had forgotten the obstacles to his errand which he had felt so keenly a little while before.

He remained with his mother for another hour. But he spoke little, and the environment, the splendour of the room, the air of the house, the solemnity and sloth, the emptiness and aloofness, all this seemed to disquiet him. Frau Wahnschaffe was unconscious of that. She talked and became silent, and in her eyes flickered the fear over the passing of her hour. When Christian arose to bid her farewell, her face became ashen, and she controlled herself with extreme difficulty. But when she was alone she reeled a little, and grasped for support one of the carven columns of her bed and gave a cry. Then suddenly she smiled.

Perhaps it was a delusion that caused her to smile; perhaps it was a flash of insight like lightning in a dark sky.

V

After his return from Africa, Felix Imhof was practically a ruined man. Unfortunate mining speculations had swallowed up the greater part of his fortune. But his attitude and behaviour were unchanged.

Exposure to the sun and air had almost blackened his skin, and his bohemian friends called him the Abyssinian prince. He was leaner than ever, his eyes protruded more greedily, his laughter and speech were noisier, and the tempo of his life was more accelerated. If any one asked after his well-being, he answered: “There’s two years’ fuel left in this machine. After that—exit!”

He had one dwelling in Munich and another in Berlin, but his numerous and complicated undertakings drove him to a different city every week.

Some political friends persuaded him to join in the founding of a great daily representing the left wing of liberalism, and he consented. A new catchword arose, a People’s Theatre; and it was his ambition to be named among those who furthered the new panacea. He caused the publishing house that he had financed to issue a new edition of the classics, distinguished by tasteful editing and exquisite bookmaking. He received twenty to thirty telegrams daily, and sent between forty and fifty; he kept three typists busy, and suffered from the lack of a telephone while he was in motor cars or on express trains. He discovered the value of a half-forgotten painter of the Quattrocento for modern connoisseurs, and by means of literary advertisements caused fabulous prices to be offered for the painter’s few and faded works. He gambled on the American stock exchange, and made four hundred thousand marks; next week he lost double the amount in a deal in Roumanian timber.

Sitting in his steam-bath, he sketched the plan of a mock-heroic poem; between three and five at night he dictated in alternation a translation of a novel by Lesage and an essay in economics; he carried on an elaborate correspondence with the chief of a theosophical society; drank like an aristocratic fraternity student, spent money like water, subsidized young artists, was constantly on the trail of new inventions, and fairly pursued promising engineers, chemists, and experts in aeronautics. One of his boldest plans was the founding of a stock company for the exploitation of the hidden coal-fields of the Antarctic regions. He assured all doubters that the profits would run to billions and that the difficulties were trifling.

One day he made the acquaintance of a technical expert named Schlehdorn. The man hardly inspired confidence, but Imhof overlooked that as well as his shabbiness. As though by the way Schlehdorn mentioned the difficulty caused the German marine by the fact that all glass for ships’ port-holes had to be imported from Belgium and France. The secret of its manufacture was stringently guarded by certain factories in those countries. Whoever succeeded in unearthing it was a made man. Imhof swallowed the bait. He let the man inform him in regard to possible plans, agreed with him upon a special telegraphic code, and financed him generously. The telegrams he received sounded hopeful. Schlehdorn, to be sure, demanded larger and larger sums. He explained that he had had to bribe influential persons. Imhof deliberately silenced his suspicions; he was curious what the end would be.

One day he received a telegram from Schlehdorn demanding that he come at once to Andenne with fifty thousand francs. The matter was as good as settled. Imhof took fifty thousand francs as well as his revolver, and followed the summons. Schlehdorn was waiting for him, and conducted him through the darkness to a suspicious looking inn. He was led to a room at the end of a long hall, and the moment he had entered it, Imhof recognized the situation for what it was. He had hardly looked about when two elegantly dressed gentlemen appeared. The company took seats about a round table. Schlehdorn spread out some documents in front of him, and looked significantly at one of his accomplices. At that moment Imhof leaped up, backed against the wall, drew his revolver, and said calmly: “You needn’t take any further trouble, gentlemen. The fifty thousand francs are deposited in my bank in Brussels. The trick was too obvious and this place too suspicious. If any one stirs, he’ll have to have his tailor mend small, round holes in his suit to-morrow.” His cool determination saved him. The three men were intimidated, and let him take his travelling bag and slip out. They themselves, of course, escaped as swiftly as possible after that.

But this experience, though he gave a humorous description of it, had a paralysing effect on Imhof. Considering the causes of his inner tension, this incident was trivial, yet it somehow brought into relief symptoms of weariness and satiety that multiplied and became noticeable. His cynicism would rise to the point of savagery, and then break down into sentimentality. “Give me a little garden, two little rooms, a dog and a cow, and I won’t look at the scarlet woman of the world’s Babylon again,” he perorated insincerely. A violent illness seized upon him. Theatrically he made his final dispositions, and summoned his friends to hear his last words. When he recovered, he gave a feast that was the talk of all Munich for three weeks and cost him sixty thousand marks.

On this occasion he met Sybil Scharnitzer and fell in love with her. It was like an inner explosion. He acted like a madman; he declared himself capable of any crime for this woman’s sake. Sybil was asked how she liked him. Her answer was quite laconic: “I don’t like niggers.”

Her words were reported to him by three different witnesses. The sting of them went deep. He stood in front of his mirror in the night, laughed bitterly, and smashed the glass with his fist so that the blood flowed.

The image of Sybil pursued him. He went wherever he was likely to meet her. In the girl’s presence he became a boy again. He found no words, blushed and stammered, and became the laughing stock of those who knew him. One evening he ventured most shyly to speak to her of his feelings. She looked at him coldly, and her eyes said; “I don’t like niggers.” They were hard, selfish, stubborn eyes.

“I don’t like niggers.” The words became furies that pursued him. A month later business took him to Paris, and in a cabaret he saw a young Negro woman dancing a snake dance. An impulse of revenge urged him to make advances to the girl. The revenge was directed less against the unfeeling woman who had repulsed him so pitilessly than against himself. It was the defiant rage of his own desires. He boasted of his relations with the Negro woman, and appeared with her in public. What drove him thereafter from dissipation to dissipation was the terror of emptiness, the excess at the edge of life, where nature itself demands the final fulfilment of human fate.

And his fate was fulfilled.

VI

“Oh, you’re lying to me!” Karen screamed, as Christian handed her the jewel-box. He had not even spoken, but his gesture had promised her the incredible; and she screamed to guard herself against the ravage of a premature delight.

The greed with which she opened the little lock and lifted the top of the box was indescribable. Her blood fled from beneath her skin. She felt throttled. There lay the lustrous pearls, with their faint tints of pink and lilac. “Latch the door!” she hissed, and raced to do it, since he seemed too slow. She shot the bolt and turned the key. For a moment she stood still and pressed her hands to her head. Then she went back to the jewels.

She touched the pearls with timid finger-tips. She had two fears: the pearls seemed as warm as living flesh; her own touch, though so gentle, might have been too rough. The glance she turned upon Christian faltered like a wounded bird. Suddenly she grasped his left hand brutally with both of hers, bowed deep down, and pressed her mouth to it.

“Don’t, Karen, don’t,” Christian stammered, but he sought in vain to draw his hand from her furious clasp. More than a minute she crouched there on her knees, over his hand, and he saw the flesh of her back quiver under the cloth of her garment. “Be sensible, Karen,” he begged her, and tried to persuade himself that he neither felt a profound stirring of the soul nor gazed into the depth of another. “What are you doing, Karen? Please don’t!”

She released him, and he left her. Behind him she locked the door again. It was a curious circumstance that she took off her shoes and thus approached the treasure. When she was not beholding it, she still doubted its presence. With disconnected gestures, full of fear, she finally lifted the pearls from their case. At every soft clink she sighed and looked around. The unexpected length and weight of the chain amazed her utterly. Gently she let it glide upon the floor, then followed it first on her knees, then with her whole body, until she had brought her lips, her breath, her eyes as near as possible to that gleaming splendour. She counted the pearls, and counted them again. She made an error. Once she counted one hundred and thirty-three, and another time one hundred and thirty-seven. Then she counted no more, but looked at single pearls and breathed upon them, or moistened her finger and touched them.

She started at a rustling in the outer hall; then she again sunk her whole self into the act of seeing. She dreamed herself into rooms which had known the glow of these marvels, into the bodies of women whom they had adorned, into coils of events in which they had played a part. Shivers ran over her body. She fought with the desire to place the pearls about her own neck. First it seemed blasphemous rashness; then it seemed conceivable after all. She arose softly, held the necklace in her hand, and slipped it over her head. On tip-toe she walked to the mirror, and peered at her image from half-closed lids. It was here, here with her, and she wore it like that woman in the picture. The pearls were on her body—the pearls!

Evening came upon her, then night, but it brought no sleep. The pearls were in bed with her, close to her breast, warm by her skin. She felt them to assure herself of their presence; she listened to vague noises in the house, which were like threats of robbery to her. Then she lit a lamp and gazed at the pearls, and already she knew some of them. They turned faces upon her, and whispered to her, and were distinguishable through a warmer glow or a more pallid tint. Some of these were familiar and some quite strange, but they were all here—a shimmering wonder and a new life.

Thus too she passed the day that came and the night that followed the day. She knew that disease was burrowing in her body. She had expected it to show; but when it came, it was not with sudden violence but with treacherous sloth. One part of her after another was affected, and at last she could move freely no longer. She knew, too, that it was no ordinary indisposition from which one recovers within a few days. She felt it to be a process as of ripening which brings a fruit to its fall, as a concentration of the hostile forces that had before been scattered in effectiveness and in time. The life she had lived demanded a reckoning. The physician in the Hamburg hospital had foretold it all months before; now the time had come. She was very undemonstrative about her condition. She lay quietly in bed. She suffered no pain, and had but little fever.

Lying still there did not make her impatient. She was glad of the necessity; there was no better way of guarding the pearls. People might come and go. She had her treasure next her body, beside her very breast. She was sure of it at every moment and with every movement, and no one was the wiser. She pictured to herself what they would say and do, if she were to show them her secret treasure, if she were to call in one of those who all unconsciously passed her door or climbed the rickety stairs, or some one from the street or the tavern or the grog-shop—a poor fellow who had slaved all week, or a woman who sold her body for three marks, or another who had seven children to feed. In concentrated triumph she looked through the window at the rows of windows across the street. There lived the others whom misery throttled and in whom suffering whined. Like ants they crept about in the tall houses from cellar to garret, and had no suspicion of Karen’s pearls. Karen’s pearls! How that sounded and sang and glowed and glimmered—Karen’s pearls....

At last the secrecy became a burden. She did not enjoy her great possession as she would have done, had but one other shared the knowledge of it. She needed at least one other pair of eyes. She thought of Isolde Schirmacher, but the girl was too talkative and too stupid. She thought of the wife of Gisevius, of a seamstress on the fourth floor, of the huckstress in the street, of Amadeus Voss.

At last she hit upon Ruth Hofmann. The girl seemed the least harmful of all, and she determined to show her the pearls.

Under the pretext of asking the girl to fetch her something from the apothecary’s, she sent a message to the Hofmanns, and Ruth came in. Karen waited until Isolde had left the room; then she sat up and asked the girl to lock the door. Then she said: “Come here!” She turned the coverlet aside, and there lay the great heap of pearls upon the linen. “Look at that,” she said. “Those are real pearls, and they’re mine. But if you mention it to anybody, God help you, or my name ain’t Karen Engelschall.”

Ruth was amazed. Yet she looked on the pearls not with womanish desirousness, but like an imaginative soul beholding a marvel of the natural world. There was tension in her face, but it was wholly pleasurable. “Where did you get them?” she asked naïvely. “How wonderful they are. I’ve never seen anything like them. Are they all yours? They remind me of the Arabian Nights.” She kneeled down beside the bed, and surrounded the heap of pearls with her hands and smiled. The hanging lamp burned, and in the dim light of the room the pearls had an almost purple glow, and seemed animated by some dusky blood that pulsed within them.

Karen was annoyed by Ruth’s question, and yet she was almost as happy as she thought she would be in the surprise of another beholder. “Stupid! ’Course they belong to me. D’you think I’d steal them? They’re his mother’s pearls,” she added mysteriously, and bowed her head to Ruth’s ear. She was startled for a moment as she did so by the fragrance as of grass or the moist earth of February that emanated from the girl. “They’re his mother’s pearls,” she repeated, “and he brought them to me.” She did not know in what a deeply moved and reverential tone she spoke of Christian. Ruth listened to that tone, and doubts and guesses of her own were hushed.

“What ails you?” she asked, as she arose from her knees.

“I don’t know,” Karen answered, covering the pearls again. “Maybe nothing. I like to rest; sometimes it does a person good.”

“Is any one with you at night? It might happen that you need something. Have you no one?”

“Lord, I don’t need anything,” Karen answered with as much indifference as possible. “And if I do, I can get out o’ bed and fetch it. I’m not that bad yet.” The coarseness vanished from her face, and yielded to an expression of helpless wonder as she went on hurriedly: “He offered to stay up here at night. He wanted to sleep on the sofa, so I could wake him up if I felt bad. He said he wouldn’t mind and it’d be a pleasure. He spends his whole evenings here now, and sits at the table studying in his books. Why does he study so much? Does a man like him have to do that? But what do you think of him wanting to sleep there and watch me? It’s foolish!”

“Foolish?” Ruth answered. “No, I don’t think so at all. I was going to suggest doing the same thing. He and I could take turns. I can work while I watch too. I mean, of course, if it is necessary. But it won’t do to leave any one who is sick alone at night.” She shook her head, and her ash-blond hair moved gently.

“What funny people you are,” Karen said, and thrust her disordered hair almost to her eyes. “Real funny people.” She feigned to be looking for something on the bed, and her eyes that refused to look at Ruth seemed to flee.

Ruth determined to consult Christian concerning the night-watches.

VII

She spoke to Christian, but he said that her services as a night nurse were not necessary. He could not bring himself to assign such a task to her. She amazed him by her inner clarity and ripeness of character, yet he saw the child in her that should be spared all the more because she was not willing to spare herself.

She herself had thought a great deal about him, and had arrived at definite conclusions which were not very far from the truth. To be sure, she had heard gossip in the house, both from Karen Engelschall and from others, but her own vision and instinct had taught her best. What seemed mysterious to all others revealed itself as simple and necessary to her. It was never the rare and beautiful that astonished her in life; it was always the common and the mean.

At first she had been badly frightened of Karen. The poverty in which her family had always lived had brought her into familiar contact with the ugly things beneath the surface of society, yet she had never met a woman like Karen—so degraded and so sunk in savagery. To approach her had cost her each time a pang and a struggle.

But she had helped when Karen’s child was born; and on the following morning she had been there when Christian was in the room too. She had seen him bring the woman a glass of wine on an earthenware plate. He had smiled awkwardly, and his gestures had been uncertain; and in a flash she had comprehended everything. She knew whence he came and whence the woman came, and what had brought them together, and why they were living as they were. The truth which came to her seemed so beautiful a one to her that she flushed and hurried from the room; for she was afraid of laughing out in her joy, and seeming frivolous and foolish.

From that day on she no longer regarded Karen shyly or with aversion, but with a sisterly feeling that was quite natural, at least, to her.

Then came the incident of the pearls. She suspected their value only from Karen’s feverish ecstasy, her infinitely careful touch, the morbid glitter of her eyes. But what impressed her most was not the pearls, nor Karen, nor Karen’s horrible happiness, but what she guessed of Christian’s action and its motives.

One Saturday night, when Isolde Schirmacher had gone out with one of her father’s journeymen, Christian rang the bell of the Hofmann flat, and begged Ruth to go to a nearby public telephone and summon a physician. Karen was evidently worse. She complained of no pain, but she was approaching a state of exhaustion. Ruth hastened to a certain Doctor Voltolini in Gleim Street who was known to her, and brought him back with her. The physician examined Karen. He was frank concerning his uncertainty with regard to her symptoms, and gave some general advice. Afterward Ruth and Christian sat together beside the bed. Karen stared at the ceiling. Her expression changed continually; her breathing was regular but rapid. At times she sighed; at times her glance sought Christian, but flitted past him. Once or twice she gazed searchingly at Ruth.

Next day Christian came to see Ruth. She was alone; she was usually alone. When she unlatched the door which gave immediately upon the public hall she held a pen-holder in her hand. Her eyes still held the absorption of the occupation from which she had come. But when Christian asked whether he was interrupting her, she answered “No” with quieting assurance.

He held out his hand. With a gently rhythmic gesture she put her smooth, young hand into his.

She was voluble. Everything about her was touched with swiftness—her walk and glance, her speech and decisions and actions.

“I must see the place where you live,” she announced to him, and on the next forenoon she visited his room. She was a little breathless, because, according to her custom, she had run down the stairs. She looked about her very frankly, and hid her seriousness under a cheerful vividness of behaviour. With boyish innocence of movement she sat down on the edge of the table, took an apple from her pocket, and began to nibble at it. She said she had mentioned Karen to an assistant whom she knew at the Polyclinic, and the lady had promised to come and examine Karen.

Christian thanked her. “I don’t believe that medical help can do much for her,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you the reason. But where Karen is concerned, nature pursues a quite logical method.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Ruth answered. “But that sounds as though you had little confidence in science. Am I right? Why, then, are you studying medicine?”

“It’s the merest accident. Some one happened to call my attention to it as one of a hundred possible doors into the open. It seemed to me that it might lead to a very early usefulness. It offers a definite aim, and it is concerned with people—with human beings!” More pertinent reasons that stirred within him, and that he might have given her, were not yet ripe for speech, so he clung to a banality.

“Yes, people,” said Ruth, and looked at him searchingly. After a while she added: “You must know a great deal; there must be a great deal in you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She was the first human being in whose presence he felt wholly free of the compulsion to feign and to guard himself. In her there was a pure element that was frank and enthusiastic, that lived and vibrated with the souls of others. Her instincts had freedom and sureness, and her whole inner life radiated an irresistible intensity. The very stones gave up their souls to her. She was the seeing friend of inanimate things. She forgot neither words nor images, and her impatience to communicate what she had felt and the courage she had to acknowledge and follow her own heart surrounded her with an atmosphere as definite as the strong, sanative fragrance of plants in spring.

Life and its law seemed simple to her. The stars ruled one’s fate; that fate expressed itself through the passions of our blood; the mind formed, illuminated, cleansed the process.

She told Christian about her father.

David Hofmann was a typical Jew of the lower middle-classes from the eastern part of the country. He had been a merchant, but his business had failed, and he had left home to begin life over again. By indomitable toil he had saved up a few thousand marks; but a sharper had done him out of his savings, and in poverty and debt he had renewed the struggle for a third time. His industry was tireless, his patience magnificent. From Breslau he had moved to Posen, from Posen to Stettin, thence to Lodz, and from Lodz to Königsberg. All winter he had tramped the country roads from village to village and from manor-house to manor-house. He had seen his wife and his youngest child sicken and die, and had finally set his last hope on the life and opportunities of the metropolis. Eighteen months ago he had come to Berlin with Ruth and Michael, and here too he was on his feet day and night. With mind exhausted and enfeebled body, he still dreamed of some reward and success to ease his approaching latter years. But failure was his portion, and in hours of reflection he would yield to despair.

She told Christian about her brother.

Michael was taciturn. He never laughed; he had no friend, sought no diversions, and avoided the society of men. He suffered from his Jewishness, shrank nervously from the hatred that he suspected everywhere, repelled every advance, and felt all activity to be futile. During the forenoon he would lie on his bed for hours with his hands behind his head and smoke cigarettes; then he strolled to the little restaurant where he met his father for their midday meal. When he returned he would loiter in the yard and the alleys and at the factory gates, beside fences or public-houses. With hat pulled down and hunched shoulders, he observed life. Then he returned home and sat around, brooding and smoking. He tried to avoid being seen in the evening, when Ruth sat down to her work or their father sighed with weariness.

His eyes, which seemed to lift their gaze from a great depth, were of a golden brown, and their irises, like Ruth’s, contrasted strongly with the brilliant whiteness of the eye-ball.

Ruth said: “The other day I happened to come up when half a dozen street Arabs were following him and crying: ‘Sheeny!’ He slunk along with bowed back and lowered head. His face was terribly white; he twitched every time he heard the word. I took him by the hand, but he thrust me back. That evening father complained that business had been poor. Michael suddenly leaped up, and said: ‘What does it matter? Why do you try to do anything in such a world as this? It is too loathsome to touch. Let’s starve to death and be done with it. Why torment ourselves?’ Father was horrified, and did not answer. He thinks that Michael hates him because he has not been able to keep us from poverty and want. I do my best to talk him out of it, but he feels himself guilty, guilty toward us, his children; and that is hard, harder than penury.”

She felt it to be her duty to try to sustain the poor man, who tormented himself with reproaches, and to renew his hope. She consoled him with her lovely serenity. It was her pleasure to clear difficulties from his path, and then to declare that they had been negligible.

When she had been a little girl of seven she had nursed her mother through her last illness. She had done the work of a servant, and cooked at the great stove, when she could hardly reach the lids of the pots. She had watched over her brother, gone errands, put off creditors, and gained respite from sheriffs. She had collected money that was due; and at each change of dwelling she had created order in the house, and won the good-will of those on whom her family would be dependent. She had mended linen and brushed clothes, driven care away, caused insults to be forgotten, and brought some cheer into the darkest hours. She had found some sweetness in life, even when bitterness rose to the very brim.

Christian asked her what she was working at. She answered that she was preparing herself to take her degree. She had been relieved of all fees at the gymnasium. To help her father, whose earnings decreased steadily, she gave private lessons. To prolong her efforts far into the night cost her no struggle; five hours of sleep refreshed her and renewed her strength. In the morning she would get breakfast, set the room and kitchen to rights, and then start upon her path of work and duty with an air and mien as though it were a pleasure trip. She carried her dinner in her pocket. If it was too frugal, she would run to an automatic restaurant late in the afternoon.

One evening she returned from a charity kitchen, where twice a week she helped for half an hour to serve the meals. She told Christian about the people whom she was accustomed to see there—those whom the great city had conquered. She imitated gestures and expressions, and reported fragments of overheard speech. She communicated to him the greed, disgust, contempt, and shame that she had seen. Her observation was of a marvellous precision. Christian accompanied her on the next occasion, and saw little, almost nothing. He was aware of people in torn and shabby garments, who devoured a stingy meal without pleasure, dipped the crusts of bread into soup, and surreptitiously licked the spoon that had conveyed their last mouthful. There were hollow faces and dim eyes, foreheads that seemed to have been flattened by hydraulic pressure, and over it all a lifelessness as of scrapped machinery. Christian was teased as by a letter in an unknown tongue, and he began to understand how little he had learned to feel and see.

Although he had tried in no way to call attention to his presence, and had seemed at first glance but another wanderer from the street, a strange movement had passed through the hall. It had lasted no longer than three seconds, but Ruth, too, had felt the vibration. She was just filling one hundred and twenty plates, set in a fourfold circle, with vegetables from a huge cauldron. She looked up in surprise. She caught sight of the distinguished, almost absurdly courteous face of Christian, and she was startled. With mystical clarity she perceived the radiation of a power that wandered through the air without aim and lay buried in a soul. She bent her head over the steaming cauldron, so that her hair fell forward over her cheeks, and went on ladling out the vegetables. But she thought of the many unhappy creatures who waited for her on some hour of some day—suffering, confused, broken men and women—whom she desired so passionately to help, but to whom she could never be or give the miracle which had suddenly been revealed in that all but momentary vibration.

In a wild enthusiasm that was foreign to her nature she thought: “One must kneel and gather up all one’s soul....”

The one hundred and twenty tin plates were filled.

She thought of her poor. There was a young girl in a home for the blind, to whom she read on Sunday evenings. There was an asylum for the shelterless in Acker Street. She would look over the inmates and then ask help for them from charitable men and women who had come to expect her on this errand. In Moabit she had by chance come upon a woman with a baby at her breast; both were near starvation. She had saved them, had procured work and shelter for the woman, and taken the child to a home for infants. But these external things did not suffice her. She sought the establishment of human relations and the gift of confidence. She wrote letters for people, mediated between those whom life was threatening to divide, and thus, by giving her very self, she had also earned the fanatical devotion of that young mother.

She knew the names of many who were in great danger, and she knew many houses in which want was bitter. Once her interest had been excited by some children cowering in a corner during a socialistic women’s meeting. Another time chance had led her into the home of a striker. She had been present when a poor woman had been dragged from the canal, and hastened to the suicide’s family. On her way from giving a lesson to an errand of charity in a hospital, she had met an expelled student named Jacoby at the greasy table of a coffee-house, where he had begged her to meet him. Bad company and want threatened him with destruction. She had argued with him concerning his beliefs and principles and friends, and persuaded him into new courage and another attempt.

In the street that ran parallel to her own, there lived a machinist by the name of Heinzen with his family. An accident in a factory had robbed the man of both his legs, and the frightful nervous shock had reduced him to a paralytic condition. He usually lay in a state of convulsive rigour. One day a neighbour who was plagued with rheumatism had visited him; and this man had become aware of the fact that if Heinzen touched any part of his body the pain there was alleviated at once. The rumour had spread like fire. People talked of the miracle of magnetic healing, and a great many sick men and women came to Heinzen to be cured. He would take no money from them; but those who believed—and their numbers increased daily—brought his wife food and other gifts.

Ruth had heard of this. She had been in Heinzen’s flat. She was filled by what she had seen, and gave Christian a vivid account of her impressions.

Christian looked at her wonderingly. “Ruth,” he said, “little Ruth, those are such difficult matters. If you once begin to be absorbed by them, life itself is too short. I always thought that if one succeeded in quite exhausting but a single human soul, one would know a great deal and could well be content. But life is like the sea. Don’t you have to think of it every minute? And how is it that you are always so full of brightness? I don’t understand that.”

With radiant eyes Ruth looked into space. Then she arose, and from her single shelf of books she took down a narrow yellow volume, turned to a familiar page, and read out with childlike emphasis: “Concerning the joy of the fishes. Chuang-tse and Hui-tse stood on a bridge that spans the Hao. Chuang-tse said: ‘Look how the fishes dart. It is the joy of the fishes.’ ‘Thou art no fish,’ said Hui-tse, ‘how canst thou know wherein the joy of the fishes consists?’ And he continued: ‘I am not like thee and know thee not, but this I know, that thou art no fish and canst know naught of the fishes.’ Chuang-tse answered: ‘Let us return to thy question, which was: How can I know wherein the joy of the fishes consists? In truth thou didst know that I knew and yet thou askedst. It matters not. I know from my own delight in the water.’”

Christian pondered the parable.

“Don’t you know it, you of all people, from your delight in the water?” asked Ruth, and bent her head forward to catch his look.

Christian smiled an uncertain smile.

“Won’t you go with me to Heinzen’s house to-morrow?”

He nodded and smiled again. He understood suddenly what manner of human being sat beside him.

VIII

It was two o’clock at night when Christian got up from the table in Karen’s room and closed his books. He went to the sofa to lie down as he was. Toward evening Karen had been seized by a violent fever. The woman physician to whom Ruth had appealed had been there at noon, and had spoken of tuberculosis of the bones.

Curled up in a wooden chair by the oven lay a small, white cat. She had run in a few days before, and had made herself at home since no one drove her out. Christian had always disliked cats intensely. He stopped a moment and considered whether he shouldn’t drive the cat out. Observing the animal he reconsidered.

Ruth, little Ruth.... The words ran through his head.

Karen slept heavily. On her dim face the muscles were taut. A dream raged behind her forehead. In her throat a fearful cry was gathering.

A dream! She stood in front of a barn which had a little window in its slanting roof. A man and a woman had just disappeared through that window. She knew their purpose at once. In the darkness, half-invisible, stood two lads, and it enraged the dreamer that the lads were eagerly listening. She herself was tormented by the sensual envy and hatred that arises in people when they see others in the throes of passion. Her blood tingled and her heart throbbed. Suddenly the barn seemed to have swung around, or she to have insensibly changed her station. The barn was open; one whole wall had disappeared. But the couple were not above, where they had entered; they were down in the depths. The man was fully clothed, but nothing was visible of the woman except her black stockings in the straw. From them both streamed forth something unspeakably disgustful—a heated, sweetish air. The two lads, as though seized by St. Vitus’ dance, hurled themselves at each other. Then Karen felt her bodily personality dissolve. She was no longer Karen; she was that sensual miasma, she was the woman with the man. She lost herself in the straw, in its reddish-brown light, in those black stockings; and as she lay there, her body swelled and expanded and became a gelatinous, greyish-yellow ball, and reached even to the roof of the barn. Then the ball became transparent, and she saw within it lizards and toads and tiny, scarlet horses, on which tiny horsemen were riding, and soldiers and spiders and worms, a loathsome swarm. The horrible passions that penetrated everything turned into a throttling torment. The ball burst. A corpse fluttered about like charred paper. A white shadow expanded. Karen gave a shriek, and started from her sleep.

Her first gesture was to grasp the pearls.

Christian went up to the bed.

She murmured wildly: “Are you still here? What are you doing?”

He gave her water to drink. “I’ve been dreaming,” she said, and touched the glass with trembling lips. The elements of her dream were already dissolving in her mind and escaping a formulation in speech. But the sense of that dream’s frightfulness increased; in the depth of her consciousness flickered the terror of death.

“I’ve been dreaming,” she repeated and shook. After a while she asked: “Why are you up so late? What did you do all day that you’ve got to work till late at night? Why do you work so hard? Tell me!”

He shook his head and the words, “Ruth, little Ruth,” passed through his head. “Didn’t your mother visit you to-day?” he asked, and smoothed her pillows.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing all day!” she persisted.

“In the forenoon I went to lectures.” “And then?” “Then I went to see Botho Thüngen, who was very anxious to talk something over with me.” “And then?” “Then I went to court with Lamprecht and Jacoby. A servant girl in Kurfürsten Street gave birth to a child and strangled it to death immediately after birth.” “Did they send her up?” “She was condemned to five years in the penitentiary. Her counsel took us to her, and Lamprecht talked to her. She was half-clad, and kept staring at me.” “And where were you then?” “I went to meet Amadeus Voss. He wrote me.” “Did he ask you for money?” “No, he begged me to come and meet Johanna Schöntag in his room.” “Who is she?” “An old friend.” “What does she want of you?” “I don’t know.” “And then?” “Then I came back by way of Moabit and Plötzensee.” “On foot? All that distance? And then?” “Then I came here.” “But you didn’t stay!” “I went over to see Ruth.” “Why do you always go to see the Jewess?” Karen murmured, and her face was sombre. “Give me your hand,” she suddenly said roughly, and stretched out her right hand, while her left clawed itself into the pearls under the coverlet. She had hurt her left hand. When the widow Engelschall had been there she had dug her nails into her own palm, so convulsively had she grasped her treasure.

The widow Engelschall had written a blackmailing letter to Privy Councillor Wahnschaffe, and had read it to Karen. Niels Heinrich had stolen two thousand marks; the money had to be found or he would be apprehended. In the letter she had shamelessly demanded ten thousand. Karen had tried to prevent her mother from sending the letter, and the old woman had raised a terrible outcry.

Karen thought it was almost pleasant to be ill. But why did he not give her his hand?

The little cat had jumped from the chair. With tail erect she stood in front of Christian, and blinked her eyes and mewed very softly. She seemed undecided, then suddenly took heart and jumped on his knee. For a moment he struggled with his old aversion. Then the soft white fur and the grace of the little body tempted him. Timidly he touched the little animal’s head and back, and bent over it and smiled. The kitten pleased him.

“What’ve you done with my child?” Karen had asked her mother. The answer had been a rowdy laugh. If he knew that she had asked after her child, perhaps he would look at her more kindly. But she could not tell him; and the memory of the old woman’s laughter had left a dread.

For a while she held out her hand dumbly. Then she let it fall, and folded back the covers and crept out of bed. She whimpered strangely. Sitting on the edge of the bed opposite Christian, she had an icy stare and went on whimpering. One could scarcely hear her words. “He don’t touch a person’s hand,” she whispered. Barefoot, in her long night-dress, with bowed back she crawled to the oven, crouched down beside it, hid her head in her hands and howled.

With increasing astonishment Christian had observed her behaviour. The kitten had snuggled into his hands and purred and thrust her rosy little nozzle against his breast. This awakened a sense of pleasure in him such as he had not felt for long, and he wished secretly that he could be alone with the little beast and play with it. But Karen’s doings horrified him. He got up, carrying the kitten with him, and went to Karen and kneeled down beside her. He asked her what ailed her, and begged her to return to bed. She paid no attention to his words, but writhed there on the floor and howled.

And it was chaos that was howling there.

IX

Among the boon companions of Niels Heinrich Engelschall was Joachim Heinzen, the son of the crippled machinist. The fellow was a simpleton. His indiscriminate pursuit of every woman subjected him to malicious practical jokes. Since, on account of his absurdity, no woman wanted to be seen with him, he was gradually obsessed by a silent rage which made him really dangerous, although his original nature had been kindly enough.

Among other women, the one called Red Hetty had attracted him. He followed her in the dark streets; in public houses he sat near her and stared. She mocked at his attempts to become friendly with her. Moreover, so long as she was the mistress of Niels Heinrich, he dared to undertake nothing further, and his interest seemed gradually to subside. When Niels Heinrich, however, had cast the woman off, Heinzen began to pursue her again, but his efforts were fruitless.

But Niels Heinrich himself came to his aid, and promised to help him for a certain sum. Joachim Heinzen hesitated to risk so much. At last they agreed that half of the price was to be paid at once, the other half later and in instalments. Red Hetty, badly frightened by Niels Heinrich, became friendlier with Joachim; but after her breach with her former lover she got drunk daily, and made fearful and disgusting scenes. Joachim declared that Niels had cheated him, refused to pay the instalments, and demanded the return of his original fifty marks. Thus a quarrel arose.

Niels Heinrich did not fear the simpleton, and it would have been easy for him to rid himself of the fellow. But since he had unbounded influence over Joachim and had found him a useful tool on many occasions, he did not want a definite breach, and sought ways and means of soothing him. He flattered him by his attentions, permitted him to be his neighbour in public places, and took his part in quarrels and fights. Something loathsome and frightful was gathering gradually in his brain. Dark plans employed his mind, though they had taken yet no definite shape or form. He chose his creature, though he knew not yet what for. But he did know that Joachim could be used for all things, no matter how infamous, and had nevertheless a degree of inner innocence. Perhaps a plan, with which his thoughts played only cynically and indefinitely, gained form and certainty from the simpleton’s slavish devotion. Perhaps it fired him, gave him courage, and stung his imagination to enter the abyss of the unspeakable.

He assured Joachim that Red Hetty didn’t amount to much, that she was a withered drab and a stinking carrion. He might have others, if he would only open his eyes. There were some that made a fellow’s mouth water; a count would be glad of ’em. In such and such places there were some—ah, that was different. The poor fool asked where and who. Then Niels Heinrich gave an evil chuckle, and said he was thinking of a Jewess. You had to see her, that was all! Like a peeled egg. Firm on her legs. Not too fat, not too lean. Eyes like the Irishwoman’s in the pub. Hair like the tail of a race-horse. Ready to bite. Ah! “Hold on now,” Joachim Heinzen answered, taken aback. “Hold on!”

It gave Niels Heinrich a bitter pleasure to tell the fellow of the girl over and over again. He filled him with the image and goaded his senses. He directed all the idiot’s desires upon a being he had not even seen. But also he described her for his own benefit, and heightened and stung his own appetites, and made himself impatient and jeered at himself in order to test the possibility of their realization by his rage over the apparently unattainable products of his fancy. He took Joachim with him to Stolpische Street, and they lay in wait for Ruth’s home-coming. Then he showed her to him, and they followed her up the stairs. Ruth felt nervous and frightened.

It so happened that at this time a fellow student called her attention to the curious healings accomplished by old Heinzen. When she went there she did not know, of course, that it was Joachim Heinzen who had followed her, nor did she recognize him when she saw him in the room. But his stupid, steady glare disquieted her.

In great excitement Joachim announced to his patron that he had seen the Jewess, whom he already regarded as his property, in his father’s flat. “That’s rot,” said Niels Heinrich coldly. He had before this jeered venomously at the cures old Heinzen performed. He repeated that jeer now, and added that if the Jewess had gone to the old man’s, there was no doubt but that she had done so because she had taken a liking to Joachim. The fellow grinned. In the drinking den where they spent many of their nights, Niels Heinrich had craftily arranged that the prospective affair of Joachim and the Jewess should be frequently discussed and commented. Joachim did not know that he and his affair were a joke. He took Niels Heinrich aside, and asked how he could get at the girl most quickly. Niels Heinrich looked at him mockingly, and told him he had better put off all attempts for a while yet; this was a matter in which one had to proceed cleverly; the Jewess was distrustful, and was furthermore one of those new-fangled student wenches. You couldn’t go at her with a club; you had to be elegant and considerate. But the simpleton was not to be persuaded. He said he wanted to go to her and invite her to a ball on the following Sunday. Niels Heinrich laughed uproariously. “I guess you’re crazy,” he said. “Your head must’ve gone addled.” He paled and laughed anew, and said: “You got to wait and see. I’ll lay ten to one the girl will turn up at your old man’s pretty soon. I’ll have some one watching, and you stay home so you don’t miss her.”

He slapped Joachim’s shoulder. He stood there like a pole—lean, dry, pointed. In the embankment on the road to Weissensee the wheels of an express train thundered on the rails.

X

Ruth and Christian entered a dim, stuffy room. The door to the little hall was open, as well as the door to the adjoining room. There were a good many people in the flat. Careless of all these strangers, Mother Heinzen sat at her table and pared potatoes. The table was covered with innumerable things—files, boxes, ink-bottles, even a pair of shoes. In the background, at a second table which was as narrow as a carpenter’s bench, Joachim and an apprentice were making metal stoppers with a hand machine. Old Heinzen leaned in a wicker chair. A shabby black cloth hid the lower part of his body and concealed its mutilation. His lean and almost rigid face, with its thick, inflamed lids, its yellowish beard, and its sharp, straight nose, expressed no inner participation in what went on around him.

A few whispering women stood nearest to him. A little beyond there was a group consisting of a sergeant, a journeyman butcher with a blood-stained apron and naked arms, a salvation army lass with blue spectacles, and the porter of a business house in a fancy uniform. Behind Christian and Ruth appeared a man whose head was swathed in bandages, another who looked frightened as he leaned on his crutches, and a woman whose face was a mass of repulsive sores. Other figures emerged gradually into that narrow circle.

While no one dared yet to approach the miracle worker, a woman rushed panting and moaning into the room. In her arms she carried a child between three and four years old. The child’s face was like lead, its eyes were convulsively turned outward, and its neck and limbs were unnaturally contorted. The woman was trembling all over, and seemed not to know where to turn, so Ruth took the child from her and carried it to old Heinzen. The people willingly made way for her. On her face was a radiance of sweet serviceableness.

Joachim Heinzen got up. The apprentice poured a mass of finished stoppers into a basket filled with saw-dust, and shook the stoppers down. Joachim, his arms akimbo, approached his father’s chair, and devoured Ruth with his eyes. His mouth was open, his head craned forward, his whole person quivered with excitement. Ruth held the child out toward old Heinzen, and spoke words that could not be heard for the rattle of the metal stoppers. Joachim made a threatening gesture toward the apprentice, who stopped the noise.

Old Heinzen opened his eyes and raised his right arm. This was his miraculous gesture, and a silence fell upon the room. Christian watched the devotion, the utter loving-kindness with which Ruth held out the epileptic child to the stricken man. Her grace pierced him, and he asked himself with amazement: “Does she believe in it? Is it possible to believe in such things?” But even as his amazement increased, there seemed to arise in him the presentiment of something unknown and incomprehensible; and as often before in moments of extraordinary feeling, he had to fight down a secret desire to laugh.

Suddenly Heinzen dropped the raised arm. He seemed confused. He moved his head and shoulders, and said wearily: “I can do nothing to-day. There’s somebody here who takes my power from me. I can do nothing.”

His words made a deep impression, and all eyes sought the disturber. They glided from one to another. Heads turned and pupils shifted. Before a minute had passed the eyes of all the people in the room were fixed on Christian. Even Mother Heinzen had stopped paring the potatoes and had arisen and was staring at him.

Christian had heard Heinzen’s words. What did those glances demand of him? What was their meaning? What did they desire? Were they angry? Was there something in him or about him that affronted or disturbed them? Yet they seemed timid and wondering rather than hostile. That old seal of his silence, his equivocal little smile, hovered about his lips. He looked up as though asking for help, and his eyes met Ruth’s; and in her eyes he saw that radiant understanding, that silvery, spiritual love that animated her wholly and at all times.

The mother of the child uttered a cry. “How do you mean—takes your power? Pull yourself together, old man, for God’s sake!”

“I can’t say nothing different,” murmured Heinzen. “There’s somebody here that takes my power away.”

“And has he got the power?” the Salvationist cried shrilly.

“I don’t know,” Heinzen answered, in an oppressed manner. “Maybe, but I don’t know.”

Slowly Christian went up to Ruth, who was still holding the child in her arms, and bent over and gazed at the apparently lifeless form. At once the epileptic rigour relaxed, flecks of foam appeared on the child’s lips, and it began to weep softly.

The emotion that passed through the room was like a great sigh.

But noises from without broke in upon the silence here. Laughter and curses had been heard a while before. Now the sounds came nearer, and Niels Heinrich and Red Hetty appeared in the doorway.

He tugged the woman into the room. She reeled drunkenly, waved her arms, and laughed shrilly. Pushed forward by Niels Heinrich, she stretched out her fingers for some support; but the people whom she touched drew back in vexation. Niels Heinrich caught her by the shoulders, and shoved her at Joachim Heinzen. He chuckled as he did so, and the noise he made was like the clucking of a hen. Joachim was scared, and gazed stupidly and angrily at the wild looking creature. She wound her arms about his neck and clung to him and babbled drunkenly. Her black, wide-brimmed hat, with its huge green feather, slipped grotesquely to the back of her head. Joachim tried to shake her off, fixing his half-crazed eyes on Ruth. But as the woman clung the more tenaciously, he struck her a blow full in the breast, so that she fell to the floor with a moan and lay there in an absurd posture.

People hurried to and fro protesting. A few bent over the drunken woman, who at once began to hiccough and babble again. Others threatened Joachim with their fists. Mother Heinzen tried to calm the tumult, Ruth sought refuge near Christian and took his hand. Then an uncanny thing happened. Joachim Heinzen grasped her arm, and pulled her roughly toward him. Perhaps it was a weak-minded jealousy that impelled him, or else a brutal and stupid attempt to convince her that he cared nothing for Red Hetty and was guiltless of the incident. With glassy eyes he stared at Ruth; a vicious grin was on his face. Ruth gave a soft cry, held up her hand to shield herself, and struggled gently. Her lids were lowered. Her attitude went to Christian’s heart. He went up to the fellow, and said very quietly: “Let her go.” Joachim hesitated. “Let her go,” Christian repeated, without raising his voice. Joachim obeyed and snorted.

Niels Heinrich seemed to be immensely entertained by it all. He urged those about him to watch what was going on, laughed his clucking laugh, and sought to encourage the simpleton. “Go ahead, Joachim,” he cried. “You got to take what you want!” But while he laughed and goaded Joachim on, his brows remained knit, and the upper part of his face seemed rigid with some horror. He had recently grown a little, pointed, goat-like beard which had a reddish colour. When he spoke or laughed it moved stiffly up and down, and gave his head the appearance of a marionette’s.

When he saw that Christian had restrained Joachim’s impudent roughness, he came and stood before him, and said in an insolent, knife-like voice: “Mornin’. I should think you’d know me.”

“I do,” Christian answered courteously.

“An’ I said good mornin’ to you!” Niels Heinrich said, with an unconcealed jeer. His little beard twitched. The horror seemed to spread over his whole face.

“Good evening,” said Christian courteously.

Niels Heinrich gritted his teeth. “Mornin’!” he yelled, livid with rage. All those present gave a start and became silent.

Christian looked at him quietly. Then he turned quite deliberately to Ruth, and said: “Let us go, little Ruth.” With the bow of a man of the world he let her precede him. He also bowed courteously to those about him. He might have been leaving a drawing-room.

Niels Heinrich, bent far forward, stared after him. He clenched his fist, and went through the pantomime of pulling a cork-screw out of a bottle.

XI

“Were you frightened?” Christian asked, when they were in the street.

“A little,” Ruth answered. She smiled, but she was still trembling.

They did not turn homeward. They walked in the opposite direction and passed through many streets. Christian walked swiftly, and Ruth had difficulty in keeping up with him. A sharp wind blew, and her shabby little cloak fluttered.

“Are you cold?” Christian asked. She said “No.” A cloud of yellow leaves whirled up in front of them; and Christian strode on and on.

“The stars are coming out,” he said, and looked fleetingly at the sky.

They came to a wide, desolate street. A line of arc-lamps seemed to stretch into infinity, but the houses looked empty.

They walked on and on.

“Say something,” Ruth begged. “Tell me something about yourself. Just this once. Just to-day.”

“There’s little good to be told about myself,” he said into the wind.

“Whether it’s good or not, I’d like to know it.”

“But what?”

“Anything.”

“I must think. I have a poor memory for my own experiences.” But even as he spoke there emerged the memory of a night which he had thought quite faded. What had happened then seemed menacing now, and seemed in some mysterious way related to Ruth; and the need of confession came upon him like hunger.

“Don’t search in your mind,” said Ruth. “Tell what happens to occur to you.”

He walked more slowly. Poor in words as he was, he strove first to gather the bare facts in his mind.

Ruth smiled and urged him. “Just start. The first word is the hardest.”

“Yes, that is true,” he agreed.

“Did the thing you’re thinking of happen long ago?”

“You are right,” he said. “I am thinking of something definite. You have clear perceptions.” He was surprised. “It’s four years ago. I was motoring with two friends in the south of Italy.” He hesitated. The words were so lame. But the lovely compulsion of Ruth’s glances drew them from their hiding-places, and they gradually came forth more willingly.

On a beautiful day of May he and his friends had reached the city of Acquapendente in the Abruzzi. They had really intended to proceed to Viterbo, but the little mountain town pleased his friends, and they persuaded him to stay. He stopped in his story. “I seemed always to want to race from one spot to another,” he said. His friends kept on urging him, but when they stopped in front of the inn, it seemed so dirty that he hated to think of passing the night there. At that moment there came down the steps of the near-by church a girl of such majestic loveliness as he had never seen before; and that vision determined him to stay. The innkeeper, when he was asked who the girl was, pronounced her name full of respect. She was the daughter of a stone-mason named Pratti. Christian bade the innkeeper get ready a supper and invite Angiolina Pratti to it. The innkeeper refused. Thereupon Christian bade him invite the girl’s father, and this the man agreed to do. His friends sought to dissuade Christian, telling him that the women of this land were shy and proud, and that their favours were not easily won. He would, at least, have to go about the business more delicately than he was doing. Christian laughed at them. They reasoned and argued, so that finally he grew stubborn, and declared to them that he would bring about what they held to be quite impossible—that he would accomplish it without artfulness or adroitness or exertion, but simply through his knowledge of the character of these people.

The girl’s father came to wait upon the foreign gentlemen. He had white hair and a white beard and a noble demeanour. Christian approached and addressed him. He said that it would give him and his friends pleasure if the Signorina Pratti would sup with them. Pratti wrinkled his forehead and expressed his astonishment. He had not, he said, the honour of the gentleman’s acquaintance. Christian looked sharply into his eyes, and asked for how much money he would, that evening at eight, conduct his daughter Angiolina naked into their room and to their table. Pratti stepped back and gasped. His eyes rolled in his head, and Christian’s friends were frightened. Christian said to the old man: “We are perfectly decent. You may depend on our discretion. We desire merely to admire the girl’s beauty.” With wildly raised arms Pratti started to rush at him. But he was prepared for that, and said: “Will five thousand suffice?” The Italian stopped. “Or ten thousand?” And he took ten bank notes of a thousand lire each out of his wallet. The Italian grew pale and tottered. “Twelve thousand?” Christian asked. He saw that the sum represented an inconceivable treasure to the old man; in a long life of toil he had never had so much. The perception increased Christian’s madness, and he offered fifteen thousand. Pratti opened his lips, and sighed: “Oh, Signore.” The sound should have touched him, Christian said to Ruth. But nothing touched him in those days; all that he cared for was to have his will. The man took the money, and went away falteringly.

That evening the young men took their places at the charmingly arranged table in some suspense. The innkeeper had brought forth old silver vessels and cut-glass goblets. Roses were placed in vases of copper, and thick candles had been lit. The room was like one in a castle. Eight o’clock came, and then a quarter past eight. The conversation lagged; they gazed at the door. Christian had commanded the innkeeper not to appear until he was summoned, so that the promised discretion should be observed. At last, at half-past eight, old Pratti appeared carrying his daughter in his arms. He had wrapped her in a cloak. He beckoned the young men to close the doors. When they had done so, he pulled the cloak away and they beheld the naked body of the beautiful girl. Her hands and feet were fettered. Her father placed her on the empty chair beside Christian. Her eyes were closed; she was asleep. But it was no natural sleep; she had been drugged, probably with the juice of poppies. Pratti bowed and left.

The three friends looked at that lovely form, the gently inclined head, the rosy face, the streaming hair. But their triumph and arrogant delight had died within them. One went into the bed-room, fetched a coverlet, and covered the girl with it; and Christian was grateful to him for the action. Hastily they ate a few bites; the wine remained untouched. Then they went down, paid their reckoning, summoned their chauffeur, and drove through the night along the road to Rome. No one spoke during the drive; none of them ever mentioned Angiolina Pratti later. But Christian found it difficult to escape the picture in his mind—the fettered, drugged girl alone in the room with the roses and the yellow candle-light. But at last he forgot, for so many other images crowded the old one out. “But just now,” he said, “as we left the house, that image was as clear to me as it was that day in Acquapendente. I had to keep thinking of it, I don’t know why.”

“How strange,” Ruth whispered.

They walked on and on.

“Where are we going?” Ruth asked.

Christian looked at her. “What is so strange? That I told you about it? It really seemed superfluous, quite as though you knew it without being told.”

“Yes,” she admitted shyly. “I often seem to stand within your soul as within a flame.”

“It is brave of you to say a thing like that.” He disliked swelling words, but this thing moved him.

“You must not be so ashamed,” she whispered.

He answered: “If I could talk like other people, much would be spared me.”

“Spared you? Would you be a niggard of yourself? Then it would no longer be you. That’s not the question. One should be a spendthrift of oneself—give oneself without stint or measure.”

“Where have you learned to make such judgments, Ruth? To see and feel and know, and to have the courage of your vision?”

“I’d like to tell you about something too,” said Ruth.

“Yes, tell me something about yourself.”

“About myself? I don’t think I can do that. But I will tell you about some one to whom I felt very close. It was a sister; no bodily sister, for I haven’t one. The reason I said ‘strange’ just now was because this Angiolina Pratti seemed like a sister to me too. Suddenly there seemed to be three sisters: Angiolina and I and the one I shall tell you about. It is a rather sad story. At least, it is at first. Afterwards it is no longer quite so sad. Oh, life is so wonderful and so deeply moving and so rich and so full of power!”

“Ruth, little Ruth,” said Christian.

Then she told her story. “There was a little girl, a child. She lived with her parents at Slonsk, far in the eastern part of the country. Five years have gone since it all happened. Her father was very poor; he was assistant bookkeeper in a cotton mill, but he was so poorly paid that he could hardly scrape together the rent of their wretched dwelling. His wife had been ailing for long. Sorrow over their failure and suffering had robbed her of strength, and in the winter she died. These people were the only Jews in Slonsk, and in order to bury the body they had to take it to the nearest Jewish cemetery at Inowraztlaw. Since no railroad connects the towns, they had to use a wagon. So at seven o’clock in the morning—it was toward the end of December—the wagon came, and the coffin with the mother’s body was lifted on it. The father and the brother and the little girl followed on foot. The girl was eleven years old and the boy eight and a half. Thick flakes of snow fell, and soon the road had disappeared, and you could tell it only from the line of trees on either hand.

“It was still dark when they started, and even when day came there was only a murky twilight. The girl was unbearably sad, and her sadness increased at every step. When day had fully come, a dim, misty day, the crows flew thither from all directions. It may be that the body in the coffin brought them. But the girl had never seen so many; they seemed to pour from the sky. On great black wings they flew back and forth, and croaked uncannily through the icy, murky silence. And the girl’s sadness became so great that she wished to die. She lagged behind a little, and neither her father nor her brother noticed it in the snow-flurries, nor yet the man who led the horses. So she crossed a field to a wood, and there she sat down and made up her mind to die. Soon her senses were numbed.

“But an old peasant, who had been gathering wood, came from among the trees, and when he saw her and perceived that she did not move and was asleep, he first looked at her a while, and then he started to strip her body of all she had, her cloak, her shoes, her dress, her stockings, and even her shift; for the peasants are very poor thereabouts. She could not resist. She felt what was happening only as from the depth of a dream. So the peasant made a little bundle of her things, and left her naked body there as dead and limped away. He marched along for a while, and came upon the wagon with the coffin and the two men and the boy. The wagon had stopped, for the child had been missed. On the edge of the road a crucifix had been set up, and that was the first thing that gave the peasant pause. It did not seem to him to be chance that Christ was standing there beside the wagon with the coffin. He confessed that later. Also he saw the hundreds of crows that croaked wildly and hungrily, and he was frightened. Then he saw how desperate the father was, and that he was preparing to turn back and gazed in all directions and tried to halloo through the mist.

“The peasant’s conscience began to burn. He fell on his knees before the cross and prayed. The father asked him whether he had seen the child. He pointed and wanted to run away, and he did run across the fields. But something within him forced him to run to the very spot where he had robbed and abandoned the girl. He lifted her in his arms, wrapped his coat about her, and held her to his breast. The father had followed and received the child, and did not ask why she was naked and bare. They rubbed her skin so long with snow till she was warm and opened her eyes. Then the peasant kissed her forehead, and made the sign of the cross over the Jewish child. The father rebuked him for that, but the peasant said: ‘Forgive me, brother,’ and he kissed his hand. From that time on no sadness of the old kind ever came to the girl again. She had only a very faint recollection of the moment when the peasant wrapped her in his coat and held her to his breast. But I believe that she was born again in that moment, born better and stronger than she had been before.”

“Ruth, little Ruth,” said Christian.

“And perhaps Angiolina, that other sister of mine, also awakened to a happier life from that hour of dimness and of death.”

Christian did not answer. He felt as though a light were walking by his side.

At a corner of that desolate street they came upon a very brilliant show-window. They went up to it and stopped as by a common impulse. The shop had long been closed, but in the window was draped a magnificent coat of Russian sable, a symbol of wealth and warmth and adornment. Christian turned to Ruth, and saw the threadbare little cloak in which she shivered. And he saw that she was poor. Then it came into his mind that he too was poor, poor like her, and irrevocably so. He smiled, for the fact seemed significant to him, and he felt a joy that was secret and almost ecstatic.

XII

Johanna Schöntag’s first visit to Voss passed off in a very commonplace manner. Trying to let him forget that she was a young lady made her more and more conventional. To hide her embarrassment, she was half capricious and half critical in mood. It amused her that there was a rocking-chair in the room. “It reminds one of one’s grandmother,” she said, “and gives one an anachronistic and homelike feeling.” Then she sat down in it and rocked, took candied fruits from her little beaded bag and crushed them on her tongue, which gave her a comical and pouting expression.

On the table there was a tea-urn, two cups, and plates with pastry. Voss’s demeanour seemed to say that narrow means did not prevent one from entertaining properly. It amused Johanna. She thought to herself: “If he brings out a photograph album with pictures of himself as a child, I shall giggle right into his face.” And at the same time her heart throbbed with quite other fears.

Voss spoke of his loneliness. He alluded to experiences of his own that had made him shy. There were people, he said, who seemed fated to suffer shipwreck in all matters where their hearts were involved. They had to grow calluses of the soul. He was busy doing that. He had never had a friend, though the illusion of friendship often enough. To realize the futility of some great longing was bitterer than to discover the insufficiency of a human being.

Johanna’s secret fears grew as she heard him wax sentimental. She said: “This rocking-chair is the nicest thing I’ve come across for long. It gives me a queer, pleasant little sea-sickness. Are you sure the people under you won’t believe that you’ve become a father and are rocking your offspring to sleep?” She laughed and left the chair. Then she drank tea and nibbled at a piece of pastry, and quite suddenly said good-bye and left him.

Voss gritted his teeth. His hand was as empty as before. He took a piece of soft cake, formed it into the rude image of a girl, and pierced it with the pin that Christian had given him. The room still held the faint aroma of a woman’s body and garments and clothes and hair. He rocked the empty chair, and talked to an invisible person who was leaning back in it and coquettishly withdrew from his glance. For a while he worked. Then his work wearied him, and his thoughts were busy laying snares.

All he did and thought showed the sincerity of his feeling of loneliness. His soul exuded poisonous fumes.

He opened a drawer of his desk, and took out the letters of the unknown lady who had signed herself F. He read them through, and then took pen and paper and began to copy them. He copied them word for word, but whenever Christian’s name occurred he substituted dots for it. There were twenty-three of these letters, and when he had finished dawn was rising.

He slept a few hours, and then wrote to Johanna as follows: “I propose this riddle to you: Who is F. and who is the thief and robber who took French leave with such a treasure of enthusiasm and devotion? Perhaps it is only a product of my fancy or a by-product of my morbid imagination. I leave you to guess. Has there been an attempt here to substitute a magnificent invention for the unromantic sobriety of real life, or did this rare and miraculous thing really form a part of human experience? It seems to me that something in the modulation and tone-colour, something subtle but unmistakable, points to the latter conclusion. Where is the man who could invent such pain and such delight? Who would have the courage to represent the life of the senses as so blended of shamelessness and of a primal innocence? Compared to such an one our most vaunted poets would be the merest tyros. I have, of course, never admired poets inordinately. They falsify appearances, and, in the last analysis, they are but rationalists in whose hands our dreams become transparent and two-dimensional. There is a verbal veraciousness which is as penetrating as the glow of living flesh. Here is an example of it. It is a miracle to be adored, a thing of envy to all hungry souls. It is life itself, and since it is life, where are the living two that begot it? She, the marvellous author of the letters, is probably dead—consumed in the glow of her own soul. Her very shadow bears the stigmata of doom. But her ecstatic pen paints the picture of him whom she loved. I know him, we both know him. He stands at the gate of the penitents, and offers for old debts a payment that no one wants. To love as she loved is like worship; to be so loved and not to value it, to let its evidence rot in the dust of a library—that is a sin which nothing can wipe out. If one whom God himself pampered spews the food of angels out of his mouth, nothing but carrion remains for the step-children of fate. And yet we know: not wholly hopeless is the cry of the blood’s need. Come to me soon; I have much to ask you and to say to you. I was like stone yesterday; the happiness of your presence drugged me. I shall be waiting for you. Each day I shall be at home at five o’clock and wait for you for three hours. Is there not some compulsion in that? When would you like to see Wahnschaffe? I shall tell him and arrange the meeting.”

Johanna felt the same consternation this time that she had felt months before when Voss had written her in Christian’s stead. First she thought he had perpetrated a hoax. But when she read the letters she was convinced of their authenticity and deeply moved. Voss’s indications left no doubt as to their origin; again he had stolen another’s secret in order to make use of it. His motives seemed inexplicable to her. But she promised herself not to see him again, whatever happened. The very thought of him made her freeze. The morbid and heated hatred of Christian which he always manifested made her reconsider. At moments she nursed the flattering delusion that she might be the means of saving Christian from a great danger. And yet, somehow, the man himself exerted the stronger lure. There was a will in him! A strange temptation—to feel the compulsion of an alien will! Whither would it lead?

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.”

Johanna changed colour and wrinkled her childlike forehead. “Will you kindly tell me what you want of me?”

“That is a question of remarkably—shall we call it innocent frankness? What I want would seem to be sufficiently clear. Or can you accuse me of a lack of plain speaking? Am I a very deft and crafty wooer? I should rather expect you to reprove me for my impetuousness; that would be reasonable. But I cannot play at games; I have no skill in sinuous approaches. I cannot symbolize my feelings through flowers, nor have I learned to set springs of words or feign a bait upon the waters or make sweetish speeches. If I could do these things I might be more certain of reaching my goal. But I have no time; my time is limited, Fräulein Johanna. My life is crystallizing to a catastrophic point. Its great decision is at hand!”

“Your frankness leaves nothing to be desired,” Johanna replied, and looked coolly and firmly into his eyes. She waited for a few seconds; then she asked, with a forced smile, concealing both her dread and her curiosity: “And why am I the arbiter in that great decision? What qualities have attracted your attention toward me? To what virtue or to what vice do I owe such an honour?” Awaiting his reply, she all but closed her eyes; and that gave her face a melting charm. She knew the danger of such coquettishness, but the abysses lured her.

But to Amadeus Voss she was exactly what she seemed to be. He gazed ecstatically at her face, and asked: “May I be frank?”

“You frighten me. Can one be more so than you have already been?”

“You see—it is your race. It is, I do not deny it, the same race which I have always.... Well, it’s speaking mildly to say that I’ve always hated the Jews. Merely to scent a Jew was always to me like having an explosive stuck into my nerves. An immemorial crime is symbolized there, an ancient guilt; the Crucified One sighs across lands and ages to my ear. My blood rebels against the noblest of your race. It may be that I am the tool of an age-long lie; it may be that he who lacks the love that makes a priest acquires the stupidity and intolerance that mark the parson; it may be that our apparent enemies shall prove at last to be our brothers, and that Cain and Abel will clasp hands on Judgment Day. But it is part of my very being to nourish hatred when the roots of my life under the earth beyond my reach are crippled by the insolent growth of alien seedlings. And when one proposes to be my comrade and my neighbour, and yet meets me with the reserve of an alien soul—am I not to feel it and not to pay him back in the same coin? That is the way I’ve always felt. I never before knew a Jewish woman; and I cannot say that my feeling has undergone any essential change. Had it done so, I should suffer less. Oh, you are quite right to despise me on account of what I am saying; and, indeed, I am prepared to hear your contempt often. That is a part of my suffering. The first time I saw you I thought at once of Jephtha’s daughter. She was, you remember, sacrificed by her father, because she happened to be the first to welcome him on his return home; for he had made a vow, and his daughter came to meet him with cymbals and with dancing. It is a profound notion—that notion of sacrificing the first one who comes to bid you welcome. And she must have been sweet and dainty—the daughter of Jephtha. She is to-day—experienced in dreams; rash where it is a matter of mere dreams; spoiled, incapable of any deed, submerging all enthusiasm and initiative in an exquisite yearning. The long wealth gathered by her ancestors has made her faint-hearted. She loves music and all that flatters the senses—delicate textures and beautiful words. She loves also the things that arouse and sting, but they must neither burden nor bind her. She loves the shiver of fear and of small intoxications; she loves to be tempted, to challenge fate, to put her little hand into the tiger’s cage. But everything within her is delicate and in transition toward something—blossoming or decay. She is sensitive, without resistance, weary, and so full of subtle knowledge and various gropings that each desire in her negates another. Inbreeding has curdled her blood, and even when she laughs her face is touched with pain. And one day her father Jephtha, Judge in Israel, returns, home and sacrifices her. Oh, I am sure he went mad after that.”

Johanna’s face was as pale as death. “That, I suppose, was a lesson in your admired science of psychiatry?” She forced herself to mockery.

Voss did not answer.

“Good-bye, you learned man.” She walked to the door.

Voss followed her. “When are you coming again?” he asked softly.

She shook her head.

“When are you coming again?”

“Don’t torment me.”

“Wahnschaffe will be here the day after to-morrow. Will you come?”

“I don’t know.”

“Johanna, will you come?” He stood before her with uplifted hands, and the muscles of his cheeks and temples twitched.

“I don’t know.” She went out.

But he knew that she would come.

XIII

Between the acts of a dress rehearsal Lorm and Emanuel Herbst walked up and down in the foyer, discussing Lorm’s rôle. “Hold yourself a little more in reserve.” Herbst talked slightly through his nose. “And at the climax of the second act I expected a somewhat stronger emphasis. There’s nothing else to criticize.”

“Very well,” said Lorm drily. “I’ll stick on a little more grease-paint.”

Many of the invited guests also walked through the curved passage way. Admiring glances followed Lorm. A girl approached him determinedly. She had evidently struggled with herself. She handed him a bunch of carnations, and silently withdrew, frightened by her own temerity.

“How nice of you!” Lorm exclaimed with kindliness, and stuck his nose into the flowers.

“Well, you old reveller, do the broken hearts taste as well as ever?” Herbst asked mockingly. “One is served at breakfast, too, isn’t it? Or more than one? It makes an old codger like me feel sad.”

“You can get too much of a good thing,” said Lorm. “The poor dears go to excesses. Yes, early in the morning one will be trying to bribe the house attendants. When my chauffeur appears they flutter about him. Many of them know how I’ve planned my day and turn up at unexpected places—in an art dealer’s shop, at my photographer’s studio. I’ve been told of one poor girl who spent nights promenading in front of the house. When I was on tour there was one who followed me from town to town. And then there are all those unhappy letters. The amount of feeling that goes to waste, the confessions that are made, the intricate problems that are presented—you would be astonished. And all make the same naïve presumptions. I shouldn’t care very greatly if this whole business didn’t have its serious aspect. All these young creatures put their capital into an undertaking doomed to failure. It’s bound to revenge itself. Clever people say that it doesn’t matter what the young are enthusiastic about, if only they’re enthusiastic about something. It isn’t true. Decent young people shouldn’t rave about an actor. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to belittle our profession; it has its definite merits. I don’t want to display any false modesty about myself either. I know precisely what I am. The point is that those young people do not. They want me to be what I only represent. That is the height of absurdity. No, decent young people shouldn’t adore an actor who is only a caricature of a hero.”

“Well, well, well,” said Emanuel Herbst, in a tone of soothing irony. “You’re too severe and too pessimistic. I know a few rather authoritative persons who sincerely assign to you quite a high position among mortals. I’ll not mention immortals in deference to your mood. And in your really lucid moments you’re proud of your position, which is quite as it should be. What attitude does your wife take to your attacks of hypochondria? Doesn’t she scold you?”

“It seems to me,” Lorm said impassively, “that Judith has arrived on the other shore of her disillusion. In this dispute she would hardly take your side. My convictions have fallen on fertile ground in her case.”

Emanuel Herbst rocked his head from side to side and protruded his nether lip. Lorm’s tone made him anxious. “How is she anyhow?” he asked. “I haven’t seen her for a long time. I heard she was ill.”

“It’s hard to say how she is,” Lorm answered. “Ill? No, she wasn’t ill, although she did spend a great deal of time in bed. There are a few middle-class women who’ve formed a kind of court about her. They give her all their time, and she’s trained them marvellously. She says she’s losing her slenderness, so she got a fashionable physician to prescribe a hunger cure. She follows the directions religiously. But my house is in splendid condition. Tip-top. Why shouldn’t it be? It’s cleaned to the last corner twice a week. The cuisine is excellent, and I’ve got some rather nice things in my cellar. You must come and try them.”

“All right, old man, you can count on me,” said Emanuel Herbst. But his anxiety for his friend had grown with each word that Lorm had uttered. He knew that coldness which hid the most quivering sensitiveness, that princely smoothness beneath which great wounds were bleeding, that indeterminate element which was half spiritual malady, half an ascetic impulse. He was afraid of the destruction wrought by a worm in a noble fruit.

The signal sounded. A new act began. From the stage that voice of steel exerted its compelling resonance once more.

XIV

Johanna did come.

She had waited until it was quite late, in order to avoid waiting for Christian alone with Voss. When, after, all, she found only Voss, she could not conceal her contempt. Her vexation made her face look old and peaked.

The weather was cold and wet. She sat down near the oven and put her hands against the tiles. She did not take off her coat. It was an ample, fur-trimmed garment with large buttons. She looked in it like a thin and hiding child. Nor did she raise her veil, which extended rather tautly from her wide-brimmed hat to her chin and accentuated the whiteness of her skin.

“You lied to me,” she said harshly. “It was mere bait. You knew he wouldn’t be here.”

Voss answered: “What you have just said relegates me pretty clearly to a mere means to an end. What do you expect of a meeting with him anyhow? What is it to serve? Is it to revive memories or give the opportunity for an explanation? No, I know you’re not fond of explanations. You like tension, provided your way of escape is ready for you. Very clever. I am to be at once the opportunity and the way of escape. Very clever. But why don’t you simply go to him? Because, of course, you don’t want to assume the psychical obligation implied in such a step. It might look as though you meant something; you are not sure how it would be interpreted. Your cowardice is almost funny. When it’s convenient, you’re a sensitive plant; when it’s not, you’re quite capable of putting your heel on some defenceless neck.”

“This is intolerable,” Johanna cried, and arose. “Don’t you know that my being here compromises me more, especially in my own eyes, than anything else I could do?”

Voss was frightened. “Calm yourself,” he said, and touched her arm. Recoiling from his touch she sank back into her chair. “Calm yourself,” Voss repeated. “He promised definitely to be here; but he has many errands nowadays and has to meet many people and is constantly on the way from one place to another.”

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.

“Don’t ... don’t ... don’t,” Johanna implored him, almost as softly. “Tell me about him,” she went on hastily. “Does he really live in complete poverty? One hears so many things. Last week I was invited by some people, and the company talked of nothing else. Impudent and stupid as these parvenus of yesterday always are, they fairly outdid themselves. They joked about him and pitied his family, or even suggested that the whole thing was an imposture. My gorge rose. But I ask you this one thing: Why haven’t I heard from you a single cordial word about him? Why nothing but venom and slander? You must know him. It is unthinkable that you really entertain the opinion of him by which you try to add to your self-importance in my eyes, and no doubt in the eyes of others. I assure you that there isn’t the remotest chance of our really becoming friends, unless you’re candid with me on this point.”

For a long time Voss was silent. First he passed his handkerchief across his damp forehead. Then, bending far forward, he leaned his chin upon his folded hands, and looked upward through his glasses as though he were listening. “Friendship,” he murmured in a sarcastic tone. “Friendship. I call that pouring water into the wine before the grapes have gone to the winepress.” After a pause he spoke again. “I am not called to be his judge. At the beginning of our acquaintance it was given me to behold him with astonishment upon his pedestal. I kneeled in the mud and lifted my eyes as to a demigod. Then I kindled a little fire, and there was considerable smoke. But I would be a liar to assert that he did not stir me to the innermost soul. At times he so mastered my evil and common instincts that when I was left alone I cast myself down and wept. But love surrounded him and hate surrounded me. Wherever he appeared love burst into bloom; whatever I touched turned upon me in hatred. Light and beauty and open hearts were about him; blackness and humiliation and blocked paths were my portion. All good spirits guarded him; I was fighting Satan, and out of my darkness crying to God, who cast me off. Ay, cast me off and rejected me, and set a mark of shame upon me, and pursued me ever more cruelly, as my self-humiliation deepened and my penitence grew tenser and my roots emerged more energetically from the earth. Then it came to pass that he recognized a brother in me. We passed an unforgettable night, and unforgettable words were exchanged between us. But love remained about him, and about me hate. He took my flame from me, and carried it to men; and love was about him, and about me was hate. He made a beggar of me, and gave me hundreds of thousands; and love was about him, and about me was hate. Do you think me so dull that I cannot measure his deeds or their heavy weight and cost? The consciousness of them steals into my sleep, and makes it terrible as an open wound, so that I lie as among stinging nettles without heaven or aspiration. Who would be so accursed a traitor to himself that he would neither hear nor see the truth when it roars like a flame of fire? But how about that brother in the dust? The contrast was easier to bear while he dwelt amid the splendours of the world. Now he goes and renounces, lives amid want and stench, nurses a woman of the streets and mingles with outcasts; and what is the result? Love grows about him like a mountain. It is necessary to have experienced and to have seen it. He comes into rooms out there, and all glances cling to him and touch him tenderly; and each creature seems fairer and better to itself while he is there. Is it magic? But that mountain of love crushes me where I lie.”

Again he dried his forehead. Johanna observed him attentively; at last an insight into his nature dawned in her.

“It is they who take the last step who are the chosen,” Amadeus Voss continued. “Those like myself stop at the step before the last, and that is our purgatory. Perhaps Judas Iscariot could have done what the Master did, but the Master preceded him, and that doomed him to crime. He was alone. That is the solution of his mystery: he was alone. Just now, before you came, I was reading in a book the story of the marriage of Saint Francis to the Lady Poverty. Do you know it? ‘Woe to him who is alone,’ it says there. ‘When he falls, he has no one to lift him up.’”

The book lay on the table. He took it up, and said: “Saint Francis had left the city, and met two old men. He asked them whether they could tell him the abode of Lady Poverty. Let me read you what the two old men answered.”

He read aloud: “We have been here for a long time, and we have often seen her passing along this road. Sometimes she was accompanied by many, and often she returned alone without any companions, naked, devoid of dress and adornment, and surrounded only by a little cloud. And she wept very bitterly, and said: ‘The sons of my mother have fought against me.’ And we made answer: ‘Have patience, for those who are good love thee.’ And now we say to thee: Climb that high mountain among the holy hills which God has given her as a dwelling-place because He loves it more than all the dwelling-places of Jacob. The giants cannot approach its paths nor the eagles reach its peak. If thou wouldst go to her, strip off thy costly garments, and lay down every burden and every occasion of sin. For if thou art not stripped of these things, thou wilt never rise to her who dwells upon so great a height. But since she is kind of heart, they who love her see her without trouble, and they who seek her find her with ease. Think of her, brother, for they who yield themselves to her are safe. But take with thee faithful companions, with whom thou mayest take counsel when thou climbest the mountain, and who may be thy helpers. For woe to him who is alone. When he falls he has no one to lift him up.”

His manner of reading tormented Johanna. There was a fanaticism in it from which her soul, attuned to semitones, shrank.

“Woe to him who is alone,” said Voss. He kneeled down before Johanna. All his limbs trembled. “Johanna,” he implored her, “give me your hand, only your hand, and have pity on me.”

Her will failed her. More in consternation than obedience, she gave him her hand, which he kissed with a devouring passion. What he did seemed blasphemous and desperate after his words and his reading; but she dared not withdraw her hand.

Her watchful ear caught a noise. “Some one is coming,” she whispered faintly. Voss arose. There was a knock at the door, and Christian entered.

He greeted them in a friendly way. His calm contrasted almost resonantly with Amadeus’s wild distraction, for Voss could not control himself wholly. While Christian sat down at the table with the lamplight full upon his face, and looked now at Johanna, now at Voss, the latter walked excitedly up and down, and said: “We have been talking about Saint Francis, Fräulein Johanna and I.”

Christian looked his surprise.

“I know nothing of him,” he said. “All I remember is that once in Paris, at Eva Sorel’s, some verses about him were read. Every one was delighted, but I didn’t like the poem. I have forgotten why, but I recall that Eva was very angry.” He smiled. “Why did you two talk about Saint Francis?”

“We were talking of his poverty,” replied Voss, “and of his marriage to the Lady Poverty, as the legend has it. And we agreed that such things must not be translated into actual life, for the result would be falsehood and misunderstanding....”

“We agreed about nothing,” Johanna interrupted him drily. “I am no support for any one’s opinions.”

“Never mind,” said Voss, somewhat depressed. “It is a vision, a vision born of the sufferings of religious souls. That poverty, that sacred poverty is unthinkable except upon a Christian foundation. Whoever would dare to attempt it, and to turn backward the overwhelming stream of life in a distorted world, amid distorted conditions, where poverty means dirt and crime and degradation—such an one would only create evil and challenge humanity itself.”

“That may be correct,” said Christian. “But one must do what one considers right.”

“It’s cheap enough to take refuge in the purely personal when general questions are discussed,” Voss said rancorously.

Johanna rose to say good-bye, and Christian prepared himself to follow her, since it was on her account that he had come. Voss said he would walk with them as far as Nollendorf Square. There he left them.

“It is hard for us to talk,” said Christian. “There is much for which I should ask you to forgive me, dear Johanna.”

“Oh,” said Johanna, “it doesn’t matter about me. I’ve conquered that. Unless I probe too deeply, even the pain is gone.”

“And how do you live?”

“As best I can.”

“You don’t mind my calling you Johanna still, do you? Won’t you come to see me some day? I’m usually at home in the evening. Then we could sit together and talk.”

“Yes, I’ll come,” said Johanna, who felt her own embarrassment yielding before Christian’s frank and simple tone.

While she was walking beside him and hearing and answering his direct and simple questions, all that had happened in the past seemed a matter of course, and the present seemed harmonious enough. But when she was alone again she was as vexed with herself as ever; the nearest goal seemed as irrational as the farthest, and the world and life shut in by dreariness.

Two days later she went to Christian’s dwelling. The wife of the night watchman Gisevius ushered her into Christian’s room. Shivering and oppressed by the room, in which she could not imagine him, she waited for over an hour. Frau Gisevius advised her to look in at Karen Engelschall’s or the Hofmanns’ flat. To this she could not make up her mind. “I’ll come again,” she said.

When she stepped out into the street she saw Amadeus Voss. He greeted her without words, and his expression seemed to take it for granted that they had agreed to meet here. He walked on at her side.

“I love you, Johanna,” he said.

She did not answer, nor turn her eyes toward him. She walked more swiftly, then more slowly, then more swiftly again.

“I love you, Johanna,” said Amadeus Voss, and his teeth rattled.

XV

On the alabaster mantelshelf candles were burning in the silver Renaissance candlesticks. The more salient light of the burning logs reached only far enough to envelop the figures of Eva and of Cornelius Ermelang in its glow. It did not penetrate as far as the porphyry columns or the gold of the ceiling. A dim, red flicker danced in the tall mirrors, and the purple damask curtains before the huge windows, which shut in the room more solemnly than the great doors, absorbed the remnants of light without reflection.

The tea-gown of white lace which the dancer wore—experts declared each square inch of it to have the value of a provincial governor’s annual pay—was vivid as a fantastic pastel on the side turned to the fire.

“You have been very kind to me,” said Eva. “After you had been here so many times in vain, I was afraid you would leave without having seen me. But Susan probably told you how my days are spent. Men and happenings whirl through them so that I find it hard to retain a consciousness of my own self. Thus friends become estranged, and the faces about me change and I hardly notice it. A mad life!”

“Yet you summoned me in spite of that,” Ermelang whispered, “and I have the happiness of being with you at last. Now I have attained everything that my stay in Russia promised. How shall I thank you? I have only my poor words.” He looked at her with emotion, with a kind of ecstasy in his watery blue eyes. He had a habit of repeating the formula concerning his poor words; but despite the artifices of his speech, his feeling was genuine. Indeed, there was always a trifle too much feeling, too much soulfulness in his speech. Sometimes the impression arose that he was in reality not quite so deeply stirred, and that, if necessary, he could well limit his emotional expansion.

“What would one not do to please a poet?” Eva said with a courteous gesture. “It is pure selfishness too. I would have the image of me made perpetual in your mind. Both ancient and modern tyrants assure us that the only man whom they strove to please is the poet.”

Ermelang said: “A being like you exists in so elemental a fashion that any image is as negligible in comparison as the shadow of a thing when the sun is at its zenith.”

“You are subtle. Yet images persist. I have so great a faith in your vision that I should like you to tell me whether I am really so changed as those friends assert who knew me in my Parisian days. I laugh at them; but in my laughter there is a little rebellion of my vanity and a little fear of withering and fading. Don’t say anything; a contradiction would be trivial. Tell me, above all, how you came to be travelling in Russia, and what you have seen and heard and experienced.”

“I have experienced very little. The total impression has been so unforgettable that details have faded into insignificance. Various difficulties made Paris unpleasant to me, and the Princess Valuyeff offered me a refuge on her estate near Petrograd. Now I must return to the West—to Europe, as the Russians mockingly say. And they are right. For I must leave my spiritual home-land, and people who were close to me, although I did not know them, and a loneliness full of melody and presage, and return to senseless noise and confusion and isolation. I have spoken to Tolstoi and to Pobiedonostzev; I have been to the fair at Nijni-Novgorod, and been driven across the steppe in a troika. And about all—the people and the landscape—there is a breath of innocence and of the times to come, of mystery and of power.”