Part 31

When he had returned to the Jewess, he had found her leaning against the wall with closed eyes. Her face had been very pale, but she had smiled from time to time. He had asked her why she was smiling and she had not answered, but looked at him most strangely, as though she were trying to remember something. He had gone to her behind the table and she had not stirred, and so he had grasped her shoulders. She had lifted her hands, and then he had seen that, while he was outside, she had severed the veins of both her wrists, and the thick blood was dripping down. She must have done it with a shard of glass that stuck between the bricks of the wall. He had been swept into a storm of madness, as though some one were upon him to rob him of her, and he had caught her by the hair and hurled her on the floor.

And she had uttered one cry, one single, long cry. That cry he still heard, always ... always....

She had become his. He felt no remorse; he would feel none. But that cry--he heard it always and forever.

Silence came upon him. The stillness in that dark chamber was so great that it seemed to gather in the corners and threaten to burst the walls asunder.

XXIV

More than half an hour had passed in this complete stillness when Christian arose to light the lamp. The base and the chimney tinkled in his trembling hands. He feared the very functioning of his senses--sight, hearing, smell. Every perception was like a wound in consciousness and dripped like poison into the core of life. Slowly the turbid outlines reformed an image of reality.

Both from within and from without everything drove and pressed toward a decision.

Convulsively bent over, leaning back in the chair, he saw that man whose face had no colour for which there is a name. The eyes were closed, the mouth half-open. The decayed teeth and the limp droop of the beard gave him an expression of bestiality. The sharp-fingered hands with the blue, swollen veins stirred like reptiles. The forehead was covered all over with sweat. Like drops from the cover of an overheated vessel filled with liquid, thus the sweat oozed out and stood in thick beads on that forehead.

His aspect was so frightful that Christian took his handkerchief, and with a careful gesture wiped that forehead and those temples. And as he did so he felt his own brow become moist. He hesitated to use the same cloth for himself. But at that moment Niels Heinrich opened his eyes and looked at him--sombre, deep, cold. He conquered his aversion, and wiped his own brow with the same cloth.

There came a knocking at the door. Niels Heinrich started as though a heavy blow had struck him, and stared wildly with pale and empty eyes.

Christian opened the door. It was Michael and Johanna who were returning.

Reeling, Niels Heinrich sought his cap with his eyes. Christian gave it to him with all his impenetrable courtesy of demeanour, and prepared himself to accompany Niels Heinrich. The latter had an expression of dullness and of being utterly puzzled. Then he pulled up his shoulders and, followed by Christian, walked first falteringly, then with increasing firmness, toward the threshold.

XXV

The interview with Wolfgang Wahnschaffe made a thoroughly unpleasant impression on Lorm. He had the vexatious feeling that this well-bred young gentleman harboured the very naïve opinion that in the presence of a mere actor he could exhibit his complete ruthlessness and brutal self-seeking. Because what did an actor matter? One need take no trouble and could magnificently show one’s cards.

On that very evening Lorm felt the approaching symptoms of serious illness. He was laconic; what he said was brief and sharp.

It was proposed to him to take part in a conspiracy. The plan was to imprison Christian in a sanatorium by the unanimous decision of the family.

“I can quite imagine what you mean by a sanatorium,” said Lorm, “but what do you gain by it?”

“A clear road,” was the answer, “the immediate setting aside of his troublesome rights and claims as the firstborn. The shame and disgrace that he spreads pass all belief.”

He explained that certain individuals, including physicians, were willing to serve as witnesses and to co-operate. Yet actual internment was an extreme measure. If it should fail or the parental consent to carry it out should be unobtainable, there was another plan which was being prepared with equal care. The ground would be dug away from under his feet; he must be brought to leave the city and, preferably, the country. It was possible to have Christian boycotted at the university, though he rarely appeared there now. Another promising plan was to prejudice against him the people of the quarter where he lived; a beginning in that direction had already been made. But there wasn’t much time; the evil was infectious, and the shameful rumours grew more troublesome daily. It would not do to wait until the murder case with its fatal publicity came to trial; he must be made to disappear before that. There would be good prospects in Judith going to him in a friendly way and persuading him with sisterly kindness to disappear and not compel his relatives to use the force which the law would readily place in their hands. If Judith failed and he refused, everything must be done to send their father on the same errand. He had written to his father; if no decisive measures were taken within a week, he would telegraph. Furthermore, friends had gone to the Privy Councillor to plead for swift action.

There Wolfgang sat, pale with rage, balked in his mean worldliness.

“So far as Judith is concerned, she’s unapproachable in the matter,” Lorm said coldly. “I’ll speak to her once more, but I fear it will be useless. I myself would consider it desirable for her to go to Christian, though my reasons are not yours; but Judith cannot be persuaded. The fate of others, even of her own brother, are mere phantoms to her. A year ago she was still capable of refusing passionately any participation in such a plan; to-day she has probably simply forgotten Christian. She plays and dreams her life away. I am sorry that I do not know Christian myself. But people have come to seek me out for so many years that I have lost the impulse and ability to go to them. I must resign myself to that, though it is an evil, no doubt.”

Wolfgang was surprised at these words and grew quite icy. He asked Lorm whether Judith would receive him, Wolfgang, pleasantly. Lorm thought that she would. Therewith the interview came to an end. They shook hands with conventional indifference.

Lorm did not dare tell Judith of his meeting with Wolfgang. He was afraid of her questions, of her feeling his sympathy with Christian, of clouding the puppet-show of her life. Yet she was gradually draining all the light out of his own existence. Her niggardliness in the household became so extreme that the servants complained of hunger. The baker and the butcher could obtain settlement of their bills only when they threatened to bring suit. Judith intercepted the dunning letters they addressed to Lorm. She sorted the mail every morning. He knew it; one of the maids, whom she had discharged after an ugly quarrel, had flung the information at him. He did not reproach Judith. She began to cut down the expenses for his personal needs too, and he had to eke out his diet in restaurants and wine-rooms. But the sums that she wasted for frocks, coats, hats, and antiquities increased to the point of madness. She bought old cases and chests which she promptly sent to the attic; Chinese vases, Renaissance embroideries, ivory boxes, cut-glass goblets, candelabra of chased metal work. Her purchases were without discrimination, and served only the whim of the moment. The things stood or lay about as in a shop; they served neither use nor adornment. Now and then she had a generous impulse, and presented some object to one of the women who flattered her and whose society had therefore become indispensable to her. Afterwards she would regret her generosity, and abuse its recipient as though a trick had been played on her. In spite of the great number of things about her, she would observe the absence or displacement of any object at once, accuse every one who had entered the room of theft, and know no rest until the lost thing had been found. In her dressing-room there hung dozens of garments and hats and shawls that had never touched her body except when she had tried them on on the day of their purchase. It satisfied her to possess them. They might go out of fashion or be full of moths; to possess them was enough.

Lorm knew this, but he bore her no resentment. He made no objection; he let her do as she desired. He did not or would not see the obvious consequences of his boundless acquiescence--her degeneration and degradation and heartlessness. She was to him still the woman who had sacrificed everything in order to enter his lonely and joyless life. He had condemned his achingly modest soul to permanent gratitude, and had no conviction of any right of protest. He who had thrust so many from him, and had been cold toward so many, and had contemned so much genuine and active love, whose gentlest gesture had not only commanded but entranced thousands of watchers and listeners, this same man endured humiliation and neglect as though to expiate his sins, and was silent and steadfast in undeviating fidelity.

During this period his colleagues in the theatre trembled at his outbursts of irritability; even Emanuel Herbst’s philosophical calm had little power over him. He went to fill engagements in Breslau, Leipzig, and Stuttgart. He impressed people more profoundly than any actor had done for decades. One felt in him the turning-point of an epoch and the ultimate perfect moment of an artist. The public, wrought upon by his spirit to the height of rare perceptions, had a presentiment of the finality of his appearances, and was shaken in the passion of its applause as by the tragic, scarlet glow of a sunset that betokens doom.

He returned home, and took to his bed. After a thorough examination his physician’s face grew serious. He demanded a trained nurse. Judith was at a concert; the housekeeper promised to report to her mistress. When Judith returned, she sat down at his bedside. She was astonished and pouted a little, and talked to Lorm as though he were a parrot who refuses to chatter his accustomed words. It was the housekeeper who received the trained nurse.

“Well, Puggie dear,” Judith said next morning, “aren’t you well yet? Shall I have them cook you a little soup? I suppose the Suabians gave you too many goodies?”

“Puggie” smiled, reached for his wife’s hand, and kissed it.

Judith withdrew her hand in terror. “Oh, you wicked boy,” she cried, “you mustn’t do that! Do you want to infect your sweetheart? Think of it! Puggie mustn’t do that till we know what ails him and that it isn’t dangerous. Understand that?”

Letitia had announced her visit for that afternoon. She came, accompanied by Crammon. Judith’s cordial reception was largely the result of consuming curiosity. The two women, who had not seen each other since their girlhood, regarded each other. Where have you been stranded? And you? Thus their eyes asked, while their lips flowed with flattery. Crammon seemed to curdle of his own sourness.

Fifteen minutes later the maid appeared and announced that Count Rochlitz’s chauffeur was at the door. The count was waiting in the car. “Ask him to come up,” Letitia commanded. “You don’t mind, do you?” She turned to Judith. “An old friend of mine.”

The count obeyed and came up. He was charming and told racing anecdotes.

At the end of another fifteen minutes came the Countess Brainitz with Ottomar and Reinhold. It had been agreed that they were to call for Letitia. They all filled Judith’s drawing-room, and there was a hubbub of talk.

Crammon said to Ottomar, whom his condescension at times permitted to learn his opinions and feelings: “Once when I was in Tunis I was awakened by violent voices in the morning. I thought the native population had risen in revolt and rushed from my bed. But there were only two elderly, dark-brown ladies carrying on a friendly conversation under my window. It is characteristic of women to produce a maximum of din with a minimum of motive. They are constantly saving the Capitol. I am inclined to believe that the Romans, a nation of braggarts and sabre-rattlers, infused a rather ungallant implication into the pleasant fable of the geese. Usually their judgment of female nature was blithely sophomoric. As proof I adduce the story of Tarquin and Lucretia. Monstrous nonsense, penny-dreadful stuff! In my parental house we had a calendar on which the story was related in verse and bodied forth in pictures. This cataract of chastity gave me an utterly perverse notion of certain fundamental facts of human nature. It took years to penetrate the character of the deception.”

Ottomar said: “I grant you what you say of all women except of Letitia. Observe how she moves, how she carries her head. She is an exquisite exception. Her presence makes every occasion festive; she is the symbol of lovely moments. She will never age, and all her actions are actions in a dream. They have no consequences, they have no objective reality, and she expects them to have neither.”

“Very deep and very finely observed,” said Crammon, with a sigh. “But heaven guard you from trying to establish a practical household with such a fairy creature.”

“One shouldn’t, one mustn’t,” the young man replied, with conviction.

Crammon arose, and went over to Judith. “Isn’t Edgar at home, Frau Lorm?” he asked. “Can one get to him? We have not seen each other for long.”

“Edgar is ill,” Judith answered, with a frown, as though she had reason to feel affronted by the fact.

A silence fell on the room. All felt a sense of discomfort. And Crammon saw, as in a new and sudden vision, Judith’s projecting cheek-bones, her skin injured by cosmetics, her morbidly compressed mouth with its lines of bitterness, her fluttering glance, and her restless hands. There was something of decay in her and about her, something that came of over-intensity and the fever of gambling, of a slackening and rotting of tissues. Her cheerfulness arose from rancour, her vivacity was that of a marionette with creaking joints.

Letitia had forgotten to mention Christian. Not until they reached the street did she recall the purpose of her visit. She reproached Crammon for not having reminded her. “It doesn’t matter,” Crammon said. “I’m going back to-morrow and you can come with me. I want to see Lorm. I have a presentiment of evil; misfortune is brewing.”

“O Bernard,” Letitia said, plaintively, “you croak enough to make the sun lose its brightness and roses their fragrance.”

“No. Only I happen to know that a change is coming over the face of the earth; and you poor, lost souls do not see it,” answered Crammon, with forefinger admonishingly raised.

And he departed and went to Borchardt, where he intended to dine exquisitely. Each time he dined there, he called it the murderer’s last meal.

XXVI

When Michael left the church at Johanna’s side he felt profoundly stirred by the experience of the past hour.

They rode as far as Schönhauser Avenue, and from there on they went on foot. The flurries of snow and the drifts on the ground made walking doubly difficult for the limping boy.

During their long ride he had been silent, although his face showed the pathetic eagerness of his thoughts and feelings. He had but recently learned to express himself; formerly he had had to choke everything down. And since he had learned to speak out he seized every opportunity. His words were fresh, and his gestures expressive and extreme. His tone belied his youth. With shrill accents he deadened attacks of timidity. Afraid of not being taken as seriously as seemed to befit him and his confusions and insights and experiences, he would often defend daring assertions stubbornly, while his own conviction of their truth was already wavering. On the way out he had repeatedly begun to talk of Christian. His soul was filled by Christian. His worship, half timid, half full of wild enthusiasm, expressed itself in various ways. His mind had lacked an ideal and the spiritual centres and intoxications of youth; now he gave himself up to these the more gladly. Yet, in conformity to his brooding nature, he tricked out Christian’s simpleness in various mysteries and problems, and on this point Johanna could not set him right. She evaded his remarks. The boy seemed to her too impetuous, too absolute, too eager. He affronted the modesty of her feelings; he was too fond of rending veils. Yet he fascinated her, and kept her in a state of restlessness and gentle pain; and she needed both. She could fancy that she was protecting him, and through this duty she was better protected against herself.

He said it hadn’t been the music that had overwhelmed him. Music of that kind was an expression through difficult forms, and one should not, it seemed to him, let pleasure in the sounds deceive one in regard to one’s ignorance. One must know and learn.

“What was it then? What did impress you?” Johanna asked. But her question showed only a superficial curiosity. The way and the day had wearied her beyond the desire of speech.

“It was the church,” said Michael. “It was the song in praise of Christ. It was the devout multitude.” He stopped, and his head fell. In his childhood and until quite recently, he told her in his hoarse and slightly broken boyish voice, he had not been able to think of Jesus Christ without hatred. A religiously brought up Jewish child out in the country, who had suffered the jeers and abuse of Gentiles, felt that hatred in his very bones. To such a child Christ was the enemy who had deserted and traduced his people, the renegade and source of all that people’s suffering. “I remember how I used to slink past all churches,” Michael said; “I remember with what fear and rage. Ruth never felt so. Ruth had no sense for the reality of bitter things; to her everything was sweet and clear. She left the vulgar far below her. It ate into me, and I had no one to talk to.”

But one evening, a few days before her disappearance, Ruth without his asking her and without any preliminary speech, but simply as though she wanted to get closer to him and release him from his oppressed state, had read him a passage from the Gospel of the Christians. It was the passage in which the risen Lord asks Peter: “Lovest than me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He said unto him, Feed my lambs. He saith to him again the second time, Simon, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep. He saith unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? Peter was grieved that he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.” And later on he said: “Follow me.”

He told how he had torn the book from his sister’s hand and had turned its pages and had not desired to be led astray by it. But one sentence had held his attention, and he had dwelt upon it. It was this: “And he needed not to have knowledge of a man, for he knew what was in man.” At that the hatred of Christ had vanished from his soul. Yet he had not been able to believe in him or to turn to him. He didn’t mean in the way of piety and prayer; he meant the idea which gave men assurance and help to their minds. He had grasped that to-day, during the soaring song, and as he watched the thousand eyes that seemed first extinguished and then lit by a solemn flame. “Lovest thou me, Simon?” He had grasped that utterly, and also the saying: “Follow me.” And his consciousness of being a Jew and having been cast out had been transformed from pain and shame into wealth and pride through the assurance of a certain service and a peculiar power. “It was wonderful, wonderful,” he assured her. “I don’t quite understand it yet. I am like a lamp that has been lit.”

Johanna was frightened at the outburst of a passion so strange and incomprehensible to her.

“Feed my sheep,” Michael almost sang the words out into the snow. “Feed my sheep.”

“It is an awakening,” Johanna thought, with faint horror and envy. “He has been awakened.”

The boy’s impassioned attachment to Christian became ever clearer to her. When they waited at the locked door in Stolpische Street and Christian came out with Niels Heinrich and passed the two without noticing them, without glance or greeting, and went off with that shaking, shuffling, distorted creature, Michael limped behind him for a few paces, stared into the dark yard filled with the whirl of snow, and then returned to Johanna and said beseechingly: “He mustn’t go with that man. Do run after him and call him back. He mustn’t, for God’s sake, go with him.”

Johanna, although she was herself perturbed, soothed the overwrought boy. She remained for half an hour, forced herself to a natural cheerfulness, chatted pleasantly as she made tea and laid the cloth for a cold supper. Then she went home. At eight o’clock the next morning Michael rang the bell at her dwelling. She had scarcely finished dressing. She met him in the hall. He was pale, sleepless, struggling for words. “Wahnschaffe hasn’t come home yet,” he murmured. “What shall we do?”

Fighting down her first consternation, Johanna smiled. She took Michael’s hand and said: “Don’t be afraid. Nothing will happen to him.”

“Are you so sure of that?”

“Quite sure!”

“Why are you?”

“I don’t know. But it would never occur to me to be afraid for him. That would be a sheer waste of emotional energy.”

Her calm and assurance impressed Michael; yet he asked her to come with him and stay with him if she could. After a moment’s reflection she consented. On the way back they entered a bookshop and bought the volumes that Lamprecht had suggested. Christian had given Michael money for the purchase. He wanted to begin his studies alone and at once, but he could not collect his thoughts. He sat at the table, turned the leaves of books, arranged paper, lifted his head and listened, pressed his hands together or jumped up and walked to and fro in the room, looked out into the yard, gazed searchingly at Johanna, who was working at a piece of embroidery and sat shivering and worn in a corner of the sofa, gnawing at her lip with her small white teeth.