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.