Part 11

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

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

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

“In Paris.”

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

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

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

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

“And where are the twins in the meanwhile?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fräulein Stöhr did as she was bidden.

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His talk aroused her scorn and her impatience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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