Part 19

And now things had gone so far with Johanna that she had given herself to him whom she despised. At last she had the valid proof of her own feebleness of soul. She needed no longer to fear an inner voice that would defend her, nor any hope that might counsel her to guard herself. It was superfluous now to spare her body, and no longer necessary to keep up the little self-deceptions that bolstered up her brittle pride. She was unmasked in her own eyes, and, in a sense so different from the ordinary moral one, dishonoured ... dishonoured for all time and all eternity ... branded.... She had become what she had always suspected herself capable of becoming. Things were settled.

From the moment that he had waited for her in the street that day, Amadeus Voss had not left her side. From time to time he had repeated with mad monotony: “I love you, Johanna.” She had made no reply. With compressed lips and lowered eyes she had walked on and on, for more than an hour. The fear of human glances and human presences had kept her from fleeing by tram. Furthermore it was he who chose their path by a silent command. At last he had stopped in front of a little coffee-house. He neither asked her nor invited her in. He took it for granted that she would follow, and she did.

In a dim corner they sat facing each other. He took out a pencil and drew mystic symbols on the marble top of the table. This oppressive state of silence had lasted nearly half an hour. At last he had spoken: “To utter the word ‘love’ is to become guilty of an enormous triviality. It has been flattened out and savours of cheap fiction. Speak it and you become secondhand. The feeling is unique, incomparable, strange, and wondrous--an unheard-of adventure, a dream of dreams. The word is a base sound taken from a tattered reader. But how shall one communicate with another when the feeling strangles and shakes you, and your days are the days of a madman? I came to the age of twenty-six without knowing this magic and this wonder. No hand was stretched out toward me, no eye sought me out, and so I looked with hatred upon all who were in the grip of what seemed to be a blasphemous passion. Among the playmates of my childhood little erotic friendships were common. Every boy had his little sweetheart with whom he flirted instinctively and yet innocently. I excluded myself from all that and hated. On Sunday afternoon they would stroll out beyond the village. I would follow some couple, and if the boy and girl sat down somewhere to chat, I would observe them from some ambush with rage and bitterness. You have a keen enough insight to realize how I felt then and later and until this very day. Longing--yes, well, that’s another of those pale, drained concepts. Occasionally I stretched out my hand in my confusion and my cowardly desire, and trembled when a woman’s sleeve brushed mine. I became the fool of one who sought to trap me, and I let the accursed dancer poison my blood. Sometimes I flung myself into the gutter, and became defiled merely to silence the pitiless voice of nature, which is a heritage of the Evil One and the work of Satan.”

She had not raised her eyes from the table, and the hieroglyphs covered half of its top. “I won’t make any promises in the name of my so-called love,” he continued, and his bowed face became a mask of pain. “I don’t know whither it will lead either me or her who elects to be mine. To be mine--that has a sound of horror, hasn’t it? All I can say is that that woman will contribute to my salvation and redeem me from torment. You may reply: ‘What have I to do with your salvation or with the torments of a lost soul?’ Very well. Let us not bring that in. But consider whether in all the world there is another man whom you can win wholly, utterly, body and soul? Every step and every breath of yours is infinitely precious to me; there is an equal life and loveliness to me in the lashes of your eyes and the hem of your garment. I am within your very body, and throb in the pulsing of your heart. There is a fear that one feels of one’s own heart-beats; and there is one that is felt of another’s. Shall I use more words? These are enough. All words are unholy, and creep on the fringe of experience.”

The woman in Johanna had succumbed. A terrible curiosity had enslaved her. Because all that she was and did seemed unnatural and distorted to her, and because she was weary and sore, she let herself glide into those desperately outstretched arms.

She seemed to fall into a depth where heat and glow corroded what they touched. Shattering ecstasy and crushing weariness alternated. Scenes pallid and terrible flitted by as on the screen of a cinematograph, and the hours raced to their hideous death.

She wrote to her sister in Bucharest: “You’re so very near the Orient, and I’ve always been told that it is full of mighty wizards. Couldn’t you, please, use your well-tried charms to get the better of one of them, and steal from him some magic formula by virtue of which one can lose the consciousness of one’s self? Mine, you see, is quite ragged and tattered. And if I could exchange it for a nice, new, fashionable one, I’d be helped so much! I could marry a nice Jewish manufacturer and have babies and eat chocolates and flirt with the _jeunesse dorée_ and realize similar ideals. I beseech you, Clarisse, find me a wizard--young or old, it doesn’t matter. But I must have a wizard to be saved.”

XX

At eight o’clock in the evening Christian knocked at Ruth’s door again. No one answered. He was surprised.

He knew that the key was put under the door-mat when no one was at home. He raised the mat and saw the key. Then he went back to Karen’s rooms.

She seemed to be sleeping. Her face was like a piece of chalk. Her strawy hair, like a flaming helmet, contrasted in ghastly fashion with that pallor. After she had lain rigid for a while, she had undressed herself and crept back into bed.

Christian listened at the wall again and again, trying to catch some voice, some sign of life from the Hofmann flat. Silence. When two hours had passed, he took a lighted candle and stepped out into the hall. The key was still under the mat.

He thought he heard a sound of lamentation in the air. He did not think he had the right to unlock the door and enter the flat. And yet, after he had stood there for some time in indecision, he slipped the key into the keyhole and opened the door.

A breath of melancholy came from the empty room. He put the candle on the table and caught sight of Hofmann’s letter of farewell. He hesitated to read it. He thought he heard steps and stopped to listen. The feeling that the letter would explain Ruth’s absence finally decided him to read it.

The letter seemed to him to remove all doubt. She had probably thought her father still in the city, and set out to find him and dissuade him from his plan. The acquaintance with whom she had hoped to find him probably lived in Prenzlauer Alley, and Michael, when he had read her message, had probably hurried on to the same place.

Although this reasoning seemed plausible enough, his imagination was unsatisfied. He looked questioningly at the furniture and the walls, and touched with tenderness the books on the table that Ruth had so recently had in her hands. He left the room, locked the door, hid the key under the mat, and returned to Karen’s rooms.

He blew out the light and lay down on the sofa. These nights of brief and light slumber were exhausting him. His cheeks were thin, his profile peaked, his lids inflamed, and his brain morbidly tense.

The house, sunk into the treacherous immobility of its nights, appeared to him in the guise of a monstrous skeleton, consisting of countless walls and beds and doors steeped in malodorous darkness. Yet he loved it--loved the shabby stairs, the weather-beaten walls and posts, the fires in its many hearths that he had seen in passing, the emaciated woman who, in some room, scolded her wailing babe to sleep. He loved the manifold disconsolateness of these tangled lives; he loved the withered, sooty little flowerpots by the court windows, the yellow apples on the shelves, the scraps of paper in the halls, the very refuse that dishevelled women carried in troughs into the street.

But still his inner vision clung to the door-mat of straw and to the key under it, to Hofmann’s letter, the books and papers on the table, the little cotton frock on a nail, the loaf of bread on the side table. And from all these things there emerged in his consciousness the figure of Ruth, as though it were rising from the elements of which it was made.

He remembered accompanying her to one of the great shops, where she bought a pair of cheap gloves. With the crowd they had drifted through the show-rooms and he recalled the very still delight upon her face with which she had regarded the mountains of snowy lingerie and of brilliantly hued silks--the laces and hats and girdles and costumes and all things that enchant and lure a young girl. But she had been content with that strange, still delight that seemed to say: how well it is that such things are! She had had no desire, no reaching out of her own, only a pleasure in the lovely qualities of things that were.

And thus too, without desire and without reaching out, she passed among men, and perceived the festive glitter of the great shops, the radiant wealth of palaces, and the fever of pleasure-seeking that throbbed in the streets when the great city strove to forget its toil. With that same gesture and that still content, she withdrew herself from sharp allurements and the anodynes of a thousand temptations, from all that transcended true measure and her own power; she threw the mantle of her youth over the world and stood in its midst, deeply moved, and yet aloof.

He had been present one day when she was arguing with the student Lamprecht, whose ideas were those of a demagogue. She had a charming lightness of speech, although her opinions were decided enough. Action and sacrifice had been mentioned, and Ruth said that she could not see the difference, that often they were closely akin or even identical. And finally she said: “It is the mind alone that conquers obstacles, and in it action and sacrifice are one.” When her opponent replied that the mind must somehow communicate itself to the world and that this was, in itself, action, she had replied with burning cheeks: “Must one really proclaim and communicate the mind to the world? Then it ceases to be itself. The service of the heart is better than the service of lips or hands.”

Although Christian had listened with the superior smile of one who never engages in argument, he had seen then that this voice had become necessary to his very life, and also this radiant eye and this glowing heart, and this vibrant soul that was so profoundly experienced and yet so incomparably young. She gave him to himself. She was his sister and his friend. He was revealed to himself through her pure humanity. And he could find no sleep, for her shadow appeared to him constantly and yet did not find the courage to address him. Now and then he started suddenly and his heart beat quickly. Once he beheld her in bodily form, and seemed to hear an imploring whisper; and a cold shudder ran over him. He arose and lit the candle again. Karen moaned.

He stepped up to her bed. “Water,” she murmured.

He brought her water, and while she drank he bent affectionately over her. Her eyes were large and looked at him with a great sadness. There were tears in them.

XXI

Amadeus Voss lived in Zehlendorf, near the race track, in the gabled attic of a new house. He had a view of meadows stretching toward a rim of pine-woods. On the green plain projected a huge advertising sign with gigantic letters: Zehlendorf-Grunewald Development Company, Ltd.

“They put that up within the last week so as to keep my soul within proper bounds,” Voss said. “It’s a clever memento, isn’t it? I’m told the company plans to build a church here. Magnificent! In the neighbourhood there is also a bell-foundry.”

Johanna sat at the opposite window, through which the sunlight that she sought shone in. Her little face had grown thin. Her beautifully curved mouth with its sweet sadness lost its charm on account of her homely nose. “You might get employment as a lay reader,” she said impudently, and dangled her legs like a schoolgirl. “Or do you think it’s a Protestant business? Of course, every one is Protestant here. Why don’t you convert the unbelievers? You let your most solid talents go to waste.”

Voss made a grimace. With dragging steps he went through the large studio-like room. “To your kind of free thought all faith is an object of barter,” he said bitterly. “Why do you mock even at yourself? See to it lest the light that is in you be not darkness! That is the monition of the Gospel. But what does that word ‘Gospel’ mean to you? A cultured phrase, or something to buy and sell.”

Johanna, supporting her head on her hand, whispered inaudibly, “No one knows how it came that Rumpelstilzkin is my name.” Aloud she said: “I’m getting a bad report, I see. I’m resuming my seat, teacher. I know that my laziness is obvious even from your exalted seat.”

Amadeus stopped in front of her. “Have you never believed? Has the inscrutable never touched your heart? Have you never trembled before Him? Have you no reverence? What kind of a world do you come from?”

She answered with biting sarcasm. “We spent our days dancing around the golden calf--all of us, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and child. Fancy that! It’s dizzying.”

Impervious to the mockery through which she expressed the fragile charm of her clever mind, Voss fixed on her a look of sombre passion. “Do you at least believe in me?” he asked, and grasped her shoulders.

She resisted and withdrew herself. She thrust her hands against his chest and bent back her head. “I believe in nothing, nothing.” Her whole body throbbed and shook. “Not in myself nor you nor God nor anything. You are quite right. I don’t.” Her brows contracted with pain. Yet she melted, as always, before his glow. It was her ultimate of earth and life, her last anodyne, her weakness yearning for destruction. Her lips grew soft and her lids closed.

With savage strength Amadeus lifted her in his arms. “Neither in yourself nor God nor me,” he murmured. “But in him! Or perhaps you do not believe in him either? Tell me!”

She opened her eyes again. “In whom?” she asked astonished.

“In him!” His utterance was tormented. She understood him, and with an infinitely sinuous movement glided from his arms.

“What do you want of me?” she asked, and rearranged her abundant brown hair with nervous gestures.

“I want to know,” he answered, “to know at last. I cannot bear this any longer. What happened between you two? How do you explain the intimate tone of your letter to him, and your questions whether he had already forgotten you, whether you dared even ask? No doubt you played the well-known game--the dangerous, lecherous game of moths in the lamplight. I am not so stupid as not to have guessed that. But how far did you venture toward the lamp--as far as the chimney or as far as the flame? And when he left you, what demands had you the right to make? What was he to you? What is he?”

It was the first time that Voss had spoken out. The question had been strangling him. He had set little traps for Johanna and searched her expression, resented her evasions and yet respected her delicacy. And all that had heightened his impatience and suspicion. The fingers of one hand clenched under his chin, he stood there lean and rocking strangely to and fro.

Johanna said nothing. A smile, half mocking, half of suffering, hovered about her lips. She wished that she were far away.

Voss gritted his teeth and went on: “Don’t think it’s jealousy. And if it is--perhaps there is no other word--yet I do not mean what you were taught to think it in the poisoned gardens in which you grew up. Why have you not been frank with me? Am I not worthy of so much? Did you not feel my dumb beseeching? I need not tell you what is at stake. If you did not suspect it, you would not fear to speak. From my childhood on I have lived in outer servitude and inner obedience. I have been taught the lofty and sacred ideal of chastity of our faith. Only despair over the unreachable farness of that ideal plunged me into the sinks of the earth’s iniquity. And so I place on innocence and spotless purity quite another value than the sleek little gentlemen, the trained animals, of your world. I who stand before you am sin and the sense of sin, with all its misery and uncleanness; and you can save me by a word. I have confessed to you all the cries of my own breast. Have I not said enough? Yet even what I have said seems shameless beside the vanity of your reserve. Can I do nothing but sting your senses, you heathen girl, and never reach your vitals or your soul? Confess, or I will tear the truth from you with red-hot pincers. Shall I have waited and renounced, to be fed on the leavings of another’s satiety? Did you live with him? Speak! Did he cheat me of your purity--he who has cheated me of everything? Speak!”

Johanna, aflame with indignation, took her hat and coat and left him. He did not move. Scarcely had she closed the door behind her, scarcely did he hear the sound of her retreating steps, when he raced after her. With equal speed he returned for his hat. When she was leaving the house he was beside her. “Hear me,” he stammered. “Don’t judge me harshly.” She quickened her pace to escape him. He would not fall behind. “My words were rough, Johanna, even brutal. But they were inspired by the very humbleness of love.” She turned into the street to the railway station. He blocked her path; he threatened to use force if she persisted. Passers-by turned and looked at them. To avoid a public scandal she had to go back with him. “At least,” she pleaded, “let us not return to the house. I can’t stay in the room. We can talk while we are out. But don’t come so near. People are laughing at us.”

“People, people! The world is full of people. They know nothing of us nor we of them. Say that you forgive me, and I’ll be as calm as though I had come from a card party.” He was pale to his forehead.

They walked in the wet, snowy air and over the soaking earth. The street ran into a field-path. Above the setting sun the sky was full of shredded clouds--red, yellow, green, blue. An express train thundered past them. Electric signals trilled. It was tiring to walk over the slippery leaves, but the damp wind cooled their faces.

Amadeus wore himself out in explanations. In the defence of himself, the rejected and humiliated one, the tormented member of a caste and race of the rejected and humiliated, he found expressions of such power that they oppressed Johanna and bent her will. He spoke of his love for her, of this terrible storm in his blood, from which he had hoped purification and strength and liberation, but which was wasting and crushing him instead. And so his doubt of her was like a doubt of God. If a youth doubts God the world breaks down and sinks into pure agony. And such was his case in the nights in which he panted for alleviation, and the darkness became an abyss filled with a thousand purple tongues of flame.

And like a blinded man turning in a circle, he began again to ask his question, first carefully and slyly, then impetuously and with passion. He pointed out incriminating details and circumstances that poisoned his imagination. He appealed to her pity, her sense of honesty, to some not wholly buried spark of piety within her. And again he painted the state of his soul, besought her with uplifted hands, then became silent, and with his sombre eyes looked helplessly about.

Johanna had been astonished from the beginning that the nature of her brief contact with Christian, which shone to her from the past like a bit of dawn, had not been obvious to him. If he had understood and taken what had happened as a matter of course, she would probably have admitted it quite naïvely. But his savagery and his avidity aroused her defiance and her fear more and more. Every new attack of his made her feel more unapproachable, and she suddenly felt that she had a secret to guard from him, a deep and proud secret, which no assurances and no persecutions would make her yield up. It was a possession that all good spirits bade her keep, that she should never give up to him who would regard it as a shameful thing and into whose unblessed power she had fallen. So she built defences, and was ready to fight and to lie, to endure all that was ugly and repulsive, reproof and degradation.