Part 5

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

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

The spark crimsoned and died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVII

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

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

Christian shook his head.

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