Part 16

Amadeus Voss sat by his lamp and read in an old book. Through the second door of the room the shadow of his mother slipped away.

After a while he asked: “Will you go with me to-morrow to Nettersheim?”

“What am I to do there?” Christian questioned in his turn.

Amadeus raised his face, and his spectacles glimmered. He murmured: “She may be dead by this time.”

He drummed on his knees with his fingers. Since Christian said nothing, he began to tell him the story of the woman Walpurga, who was in the service of his uncle, the wealthy farmer Borsche.

“She was born in the village, a cottager’s daughter. At fifteen she went to the city. She had heard of the fine life one leads there and had great ambitions. She was in service here and there. Last she was in the house of a merchant whose son seduced her; and of course, when it was discovered, she was driven out. So it comes to pass that those who are by nature the victims must bear a punishment in addition.

“She bore a child, but the child died. She fell deeper and deeper, until she became a street-walker. She practised this calling in Bochum and in Elberfeld. But the life wore on her, and she fell ill. One day a great home-sickness came upon her. She mustered her last strength, and returned to her native village. She was penniless and weak, but she was anxious to earn her bread, no matter at what wage or through what labour.

“But no one would hire her. Her parents were dead and she had no relatives, so she became a public charge. She was made to feel it grievously. One Sunday the minister inveighed against her from the pulpit. He did not mention her name, but he spoke of vile lives and sinks of iniquity, of visitations and punishments, and of how the anger of the Lord was visible in an example that was before the eyes of all. Thus she was branded and publicly delivered over to the scorn of all people, and she determined to put an end to her life. One evening, as Borsche was returning from his inn, he saw a woman lying in the road in dreadful convulsions. It was Walpurga. No man was near. Borsche lifted her on his broad back, and carried her to his farm. She confessed that she had scraped the phosphorus from many matches and eaten it. The farmer gave her milk as an antidote. She recovered, and was permitted to stay on the farm.

“On some days she could work, and then she dragged herself to the fields. On others she could not, and lay in a remote corner. The men servants, of whom there were many, regarded her body as common property. Resistance was useless. Not until Borsche learned this, and blazed out in anger, did things get better. She was only twenty-three, and despite her illness and the wretchedness of her life, she had preserved much of her youthful good looks. Her cheeks had a natural glow and her eyes were clear. So whenever she could not work, the other maids fell upon her, and called her a malingering bawd.

“Two weeks ago I happened to be wandering in the neighbourhood of Nettersheim, and stopped at Borsche’s house. I was well received there, for the family think highly of me as a future priest. They talked about Walpurga. The farmer told me her story, and asked me to have a look at her and give my opinion as to whether she was really ill. I objected, and asked why a physician had not seen her. He said that the doctor from Heftrich had examined her and could find nothing wrong. So I went to her. She lay in a shed, separated from the cows only by a wooden partition. She was wrapped in an old horse-blanket, and a little straw kept the chill of the earth from her body. Her healthy colour and her normal form did not deceive me. I said to the farmer: ‘She’s like a guttering candle.’ He and his wife seemed to believe me. But when I demanded of them that they give the sick woman decent lodging and care, they shrugged their shoulders, and said that it was as warm in the stable as anywhere, and that there was no sense in taking trouble or undergoing discomfort on account of a creature who had fallen so low.

“On the third day I saw her again, and I have seen her on every other day since then. My thoughts could not get rid of her any more. In all my life no human creature has so tugged at my heart. She could no longer get up; the most malevolent had to admit that. I sat with her in the evil smelling shed on a wooden bench near where she lay. Each time I came she was happier to see me. I picked wild flowers on the way, and she took them in her hands and held them against her breast. They told her who I was, and gradually she put many questions to me. She wanted to know whether there really was an eternal life and eternal bliss. She wanted to know whether Christ had died on the cross for her too. She was afraid of the torments of purgatory, and said if they were as bad as the torments men could inflict she was sorry for the immortal part of her. She meant neither to revile men nor to complain of them. She merely wanted to know.

“And what answer could I give her? I assured her that Christ had taken her cross upon Him too. Her other questions left me silent. One is so dumb and desperate when a living heart thirsts after truth, and the frozen Christ within would melt into a new day and a new sun. They are even now in purgatory and ask when it will begin. Hidden in blackness, they do not see the dark; consumed by flames, they are unaware of the fire. Where is Satan’s true kingdom--here or elsewhere? And can that elsewhere be upon any star more accursed than this? The poor man is thrust from the wayside, the oppressed of the land creep into hiding; from the cities come the moans of the dying, and the souls of those who are wounded to death cry out. Yet God does not put an end to the iniquity. And is it not written that the Lord said to Satan: ‘From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth and from walking up and down in it.’

“She confessed her sins to me, and begged me to grant her absolution. But nothing that seemed sinful to her seemed so to me. I saw the desolateness and loneliness of the world. I saw the bleak rooms and the barren walls, the streets by night with their flickering lamps, and the men with no compassion in their eyes. That is what I saw and what I thought of, and I took it upon my conscience to absolve her from all guilt. I set her free and promised her Paradise. She smiled at me and grasped my hand, and before I could prevent her she had kissed it. That was yesterday.”

Amadeus was silent. “That was yesterday,” he repeated, after a long and meditative pause. “I did not go to-day, out of fear of her dying. Perhaps she is dead even now.”

“If you still want to go, I am ready,” said Christian timidly. “I’ll go with you. It’s only an hour’s walk.”

“Then let us go,” said Amadeus, with a sigh of relief, and arose.

XX

An hour later they were in Borsche’s farm yard. The stable door was open. The men servants and the maid servants stood in front of it. An old man held a lantern high up, and they all stared into the shed. In the dim and wavering light, their faces showed a mixture of reverence and amazement. Within, on a pallet of straw, lay the body of Walpurga. Its cheeks were rosy. Nothing in that countenance recalled death, but only a peaceful sleep.

On the wooden bench a single candle was burning; but it was near extinction.

Amadeus Voss passed through that group of men and women, and kneeled at the dead woman’s feet. The old man who held the lantern whispered something, and all the men and women kneeled down and folded their hands.

A cow lowed. After that there was no sound save from the bells of the unquiet cattle. The darkness of the stable, the face of the dead woman, which was like a face in a painting, the faces of the kneeling people, with their blunted foreheads and hard lips, in the yellow glimmer of the light--all these things Christian beheld, and something melted in his breast.

He himself watched it all from the darkness of the yard behind.

When Amadeus Voss joined Christian, the village carpenter came to measure the dead woman for her coffin. They started on their homeward way in silence.

Suddenly Christian stopped. It was near a tall mile-post. He grasped the post with both hands, and bent his head far back, and gazed with the utmost intensity into the drifting clouds of the night. Then he heard Amadeus Voss say: “Is it possible? Can such things be?”

Christian turned to him.

“I have a strange feeling in your presence, Christian Wahnschaffe,” Voss said in a repressed and toneless voice. And then he murmured to himself: “Is it possible? Can the monstrous and incredible come to pass?”

Christian did not answer, and they wandered on.

XXI

Crammon gave a dinner. Not in his own house; meetings of a certain character were impossible there, on account of the innocent presence of the two old maiden ladies, Miss Aglaia and Miss Constantine. The disillusion would have been too saddening and final to the good ladies, who were as convinced of the virtue of their lord and protector as they were of the emperor’s majesty.

In former years it had indeed sometimes seemed to them that their adored one did not always tread the paths of entire purity. They had closed an eye. Now, however, the dignity and intellectual resonance of his personality forbade any doubt.

Crammon had invited his guests to the private dining-room of a well-known hotel, in which he was familiar and esteemed. The company consisted of several young members of the nobility, to whom he was under social obligations, and, as for ladies, there were three beauties, entertaining, elegant, and yielding, in the precise degree which the occasion required. Crammon called them his friends, but in his treatment of them there was something languid and even vexed. He gave them clearly to understand that he was only the business manager of the feast, and that his heart was very far away.

No one, in fact, was present to whom he was not completely indifferent. Best of all he liked the old pianist with long, grey locks, who closed his eyes and smiled dreamily whenever he played a melancholy or languishing piece, just as he had done twenty years ago, when Crammon was still fired by the dreams and ambitions of youth. He gave the old man sweets and cigarettes, and sometimes patted his shoulder affectionately.

The table groaned under its burden of food and wine. Pepper was added to the champagne to heighten every one’s thirst. There were cherries in the fruit bowls, and the gentlemen found it amusing to drop the pits down the semi-exposed bosoms of the ladies. The latter found it easier and easier, as the evening advanced, to resist the law of gravitation, and to display their charming shoes and the smooth silks and rustling laces of their legs in astonishingly horizontal attitudes. The most agile among them, a popular soubrette, climbed on the grand piano, and, accompanied by the grey-haired musician, sang the latest hit of the music halls.

The young men joined in the chorus.

Crammon applauded with just two fingers. “There is a sting in my soul,” he whispered into the din. He got up and left the room.

In the corridor the head-waiter Ferdinand was leaning alone and somewhat wearily against the frame of a mirror. A tender intimacy of two decades bound Crammon to this man, who had never in his life been indiscreet, in spite of the innumerable secrets he had overheard.

“Bad times, Ferdinand,” Crammon said. “The world is going to the deuce.”

“One must take things as they are, Herr von Crammon,” that dignified individual consoled him, and handed him the bill.

Crammon sighed. He gave directions that if his guests inquired after him, they were to be told that he was indisposed and had gone home.

“There is a sting in my soul,” he said, when he found himself on the street. He determined to travel again.

He yearned for his friend. It seemed to him that he had had no friend but that one who had cast him off.

He yearned for Ariel. It seemed to him that he had possessed no woman, because she had not yielded to him who was his very conception of genius and beauty.

At the door of his house stood Miss Aglaia. She had heard him coming and had hastened to meet him. It frightened Crammon, for the hour was late.

“There is a lady in the drawing-room,” Miss Aglaia whispered. “She arrived at eight, and has been waiting since then. She besought us so movingly to let her stay that we had not the heart to refuse. She is a distinguished lady, and she has a dear face----”

“Did she tell you her name?” Crammon asked, and the thunder-clouds gathered on his brow.

“No, not exactly----”

“People who enter my dwelling are required to give their names,” Crammon roared. “Is this a railway station or a public shelter? Go in and ask her who she is. I shall wait here.”

In a few minutes Miss Aglaia returned and said in a compassionate tone: “She’s fallen asleep in an armchair. But you can take a peep at her. I’ve left the door ajar.”

On tip-toes Crammon passed through the hall, and peered into the well-lit drawing-room. He recognized the sleeper at once. It was Elise von Einsiedel. She slept with her head leaned back and inclining a little to one side. Her face was pale, with blue circles under her eyes, and her left arm hung down limply.

Crammon stood there in his hat and overcoat, and gazed at her with sombre eyes. “Unhappy child!” he murmured.

He closed the door with all possible precaution. Then he drew Miss Aglaia toward the door and said: “The presence of a strange lady makes it unseemly, of course, for me to pass the night here. I shall find a bed elsewhere. I hope you appreciate my attitude.”

Miss Aglaia was speechless over such purity and sternness. Crammon continued: “As early as possible in the morning, pack my bags and bring them to meet me in time to catch the express to Ostende. And let Constantine come with you, so that I may say good-bye to her as well. Let the strange lady stay here as long as she desires. Entertain her courteously and fulfil all her wishes. She has a sorrow, and deserves kindness. If she asks after me, tell her that urgent affairs require my presence elsewhere.”

He went out. Sadly, and quite astonished, Miss Aglaia looked after him. “Good-night, Aglaia,” he called out once more. Then the door closed behind him.

XXII

During the last days of April Christian received a telegram from Eva Sorel. The message read: “From the third to the twentieth of May, Eva Sorel will be at the Hotel Adlon, Berlin, and feels quite sure that Christian Wahnschaffe will meet her there.”

Christian read the message over and over. In his inner and in his outer life all circumstances pointed to an approaching crisis. He knew that this summons would be decisive in its influence upon his fate. Its exact character and the extent of its power he could not predict.

For weeks there had been a restlessness in him that robbed him of sleep during many long hours of the night. On certain days he had called for his motor in order to drive to some near-by city. When the car had covered half the distance, he ordered his chauffeur to turn back.

He had gone to Waldleiningen, and had patted his horses and played with his dogs. But he had suddenly felt like a schoolboy who lies and plays truant, and his pleasure in the animals had gone. At parting he had put his arms about his favourite dog, a magnificent Great Dane, and as he looked into the animal’s eyes it had seemed to Christian, still in his character of a truant, that he wanted to say: “I must first go and pass my examination.” And the dog seemed to answer: “I understand that. You must go.”

Also the slender horse of Denis Lay had said, with a turn of its excessively graceful neck: “I understand that. You must go.”

It was settled that the horse was to run in the races at Baden-Baden, and the Irish jockey was full of confidence. But on the day of his departure Christian was told that the animal had sickened again. He thought: “I have loved it too insistently. Now it wants the caressing hand, and is lonely without it.”

With the coming of spring guests from the cities had appeared almost daily at Christian’s Rest. But he had rarely received any one. A single guest he could not bear at all. If there were two they could address each other and make his silence easier.

One day came Conrad von Westernach and Count Prosper Madruzzi, bringing messages from Crammon. They were on their way to Holland. Christian asked them to dine with him, but he was very laconic. Conrad von Westernach remarked later, in his forthright fashion, to Madruzzi: “That fellow has a damned queer smile. You never know whether he’s a born fool or whether he’s laughing at you.”

“It’s true,” the count agreed; “you never know where you are with him.”

XXIII

Christian had given his valet orders to prepare for his journey. Then he had gone to the green-houses to interview the gardeners. In the meantime twilight had set in. It had rained all day, and the trees were still dripping. But now the fresh greenery gleamed against the afterglow, and the windows of the beautiful house were dipped in gold.

“Herr Voss is in the library,” an old footman announced.

Christian had begged Amadeus Voss to use the library quite freely, whether he himself was at home or not. The servants had been instructed. Voss had offered to catalogue the library, but as yet he had made no beginning. He merely passed from book to book, and if one interested him he read it and forgot the passage of time.

The afterglow fell into the library too. Voss had taken fifty or sixty volumes from the shelves, and he was now arranging them in stacks on a large oak table.

“Why do you do that, Amadeus?” Christian asked carelessly.

“If you give me your permission, I’d like to burn these,” Amadeus Voss answered.

Christian was surprised. “Why?” he asked.

“Because I lust after an _auto-da-fé_. It is worthless and corrupt stuff, the product of idle and slothful minds. Don’t you scent the poison of it in the atmosphere?”

“No, I scent nothing,” said Christian, more absent-mindedly than ever. “But burn them if it amuses you,” he answered.

Amadeus had been in the library since three o’clock that afternoon, and he had had a remarkable experience there. In looking about among the shelves he had come upon a bundle of letters. By some accident it had probably fallen behind the books and been lost sight of. He had read a few lines of the topmost letter, and from the first words there breathed upon him the glow of an impassioned soul. Then he had yielded to the temptation of untying the package. He had taken the letters into a corner, and read them swiftly and with fevered eyes.

A few bore dates. The whole series had been written about two years before. They were signed merely by the initial F. But in every word, in every image, in every turn of speech there was such a fullness of love and devotion and adoration and self-abnegation, and so wild and at the same time so spiritual a stream of tenderness and pain, of happiness and yearning, that Amadeus Voss seemed to glide from a world of shadows and appearances into a far more real one. Yet in that, too, all was but feigned and represented to lure and madden him.

And F.--this unknown, eloquent, radiant, profoundly moved and nameless woman--where was she now? What had she done with her love? Pressed flowers lay between certain pages. Was the hand that plucked them withered as they? And what had he done with her love, he whom she had wooed so humbly and who was so riotous a spendthrift of great gifts? He had been only twenty. He had probably taken as a pastime all that was the fate of this full heart, and had used it and trampled it in a consciousness of wealth that neither counts nor reckons.

Deeper and deeper, as he read, a spear penetrated into the breast of Amadeus. The Telchines gained power over him. He turned pale and crimson. His fingers trembled, and his mouth shrivelled in dryness, and his head seemed to be full of needles. Had Christian entered then, he would have flung himself upon him in foaming hatred, to throttle or to stab him. Here was the unattainable, the eternally closed door. And a demon had hurled him down before it.

He sat long in dull brooding. Then he looked about furtively, and dropped the letters into his pocket. And then there arose in him the desire to destroy, to annihilate something. He chose books as sacrifices, and awaited Christian’s coming with repressed excitement.

“It’s practically all contemporary trash,” he said drily, and pointed to the books. “Stories like tangled thread, utterly confused, without beginning or end. If you’ve read one page, you know a thousand. There are descriptions of manners with a delight in what is common and mean. The emotions riot like weeds, and the style is so noisy that you lose all perception. Love, love, love! That’s one theme. And the other is wretchedness! There are histories and memoirs, too. Sheer gossip! The poems are empty rhymings by people with inflated egos. There’s popular philosophy--self-righteous twaddle. A sincere parson’s talk were more palatable. What is it for? Reading is a good thing, if a real spirit absorbs me, and I forget and lose myself in it. But the unspiritual has neither honesty nor imagination; he is a thief and a swindler.”

“Burn it, burn it!” Christian repeated, and sat down at the other side of the room.

Amadeus went to the marble fire-place, which was so large that a man could easily have lain down in it, and opened the gates of brass. Then he carried the books there--one pile after another, and heaped them on the flat stones. When he had thrown them all in, he set fire to the pages of one book, and lowered his head and watched the flames spread.

“You know that I am going to leave Christian’s Rest,” Christian said, turning to him. It had grown quite dark now.

Voss nodded.

“I don’t know for how long,” Christian continued. “It may be very long before I return.”

Amadeus Voss said nothing.

“What are you going to do, Amadeus?” Christian asked him.

Voss shrugged his shoulders. Involuntarily he pressed his hand against the inner pocket in which lay the letters of the unknown woman.

“It is dark and oppressive in the forester’s house,” said Christian. “Won’t you come and live here? I’ll give the necessary orders at once.”

“Don’t make me a beggar with your alms, Christian Wahnschaffe,” Voss answered. “If you were to give me the house, with all its forests and gardens, you would but rob me, and leave me poorer by so much.”

“I don’t understand that,” said Christian.

Voss walked up and down. The carpet muffled his sturdy tread.

“You are far too passionate, Amadeus,” Christian said.

Amadeus stopped in front of a lectern that had been placed in a niche. Upon it lay the great Bible that Christian had bought. It was open. The flames of the burning books flared so brightly that he could read the words. For a space he read in silence. Then he took the book, and going nearer to the fire, sat down opposite Christian, and read aloud:

“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.”

At the word, God, the almost unemphatic voice sounded like a bell.