Part 20

“Who really is Eva Sorel?” he asked, with a bitter rancour. “Where does she come from? To whom does she belong? What are we doing here with her? Tell me something about her. Enlighten me.” He threw himself into a chair, and stared at Christian.

When Christian, unprepared for this tempest of questions, made no answer, he went on: “You’ve put me into a new skin, but the old Adam writhes in it still. Is this a masquerade? If so, tell me at least what the masks represent. I seem to be disguised too, but badly. I expect you to improve my disguise.”

“You aren’t disguised any worse than the others,” Christian said, with a soothing smile.

Voss rested his head on his two hands. “So she’s a dancer, a dancer,” he murmured thoughtfully. “To my way of feeling there has always been something lewd about that word and what it means. How can it help arousing images that bring the blush to one’s cheek?” Suddenly he looked up, and asked with a piercing glance: “Is she your mistress?”

The blood left Christian’s face. “I think I understand what disturbs you so,” he said. “But now that you’ve gone with me, you must bear with me. I don’t know how long we shall stay with this crowd, and I can’t myself tell exactly why we are here. But you must not ask me about Eva Sorel. We must not discuss her either for praise or blame.”

Voss was silenced.

XIII

Christian, Amadeus, Bradshaw, Tavera, and Wiguniewski went by motor. Eva used the train.

But this way of travelling agreed with her as ill as any other. All night she lay sleepless in her crumpled silks, her head buried among pillows. Susan crouched by her, giving her perfume or a book or a glass of cold lemonade. There was a prickling in her limbs that would not let her rest, a weight on her bosom, an alternation of thought and fancy, of willing and the weariness of willing in her mind. The hum of the wheels on the rails cut into her nerves; the sable landscape, as it glided by, irritated her like a delusion that forever changed and melted. Malignity seemed to lurk in the fields; treacherous forests seemed to block the way; she saw haunted houses and terror-stricken men.

“What a torturer time is!” she whispered. “Oh, that it stood before me, and I could have it whipped.”

Susan bent nearer, and gazed at her attentively.

Suddenly she whispered tenderly: “What do you expect of him? What is the purpose of this new game? He’s the most banal of them all. I never heard him make a polished or a witty remark. Does he realize what you are? Not in his wildest dreams. His head is empty. Your art means about as much to him as the acrobatics of a circus dancer to some dreary shop-keeper. Nations are at your feet, and he grants you a supercilious smile. You have given the world a new kind of delight, and this German know-it-all is untouched and unchanged by it.”

Eva said: “If the North Sea is too sinister, we must seek a coast in the South.”

Susan grew excited: “One would like to yell into his ears: ‘Get on your knees! Pray!’ But he wouldn’t be shaken any more than the pillar of Vendôme. Is he ever shaken by anything? I described to him how we were adored in Russia, the ecstasy, the festivities, the outbursts of enthusiasm. He acted as if he were hearing a moderately interesting bit of daily news. I told him about the Grand Duke. No, don’t frown. I had to, or I would have choked. I described that chained barbarian, that iron soul dissolved! It’s certainly uncommon; it would make any heart beat faster. I tried to make him visualize the situation: fifty millions of trembling slaves and all, through his power, at your bidding. No poet could have been more impressive than I was. If you had heard me trying to penetrate his mind, you would have been astonished at my talent for sewing golden threads on sack cloth. It was all in vain. His breath came as regularly as the ticking of a clock. Once or twice he seemed to be startled. But it was due to a breeze or a mosquito.”

“I wonder whether the gowns from Paris have arrived at Heyst,” Eva said. The long oval of her face seemed to grow a trifle longer; her lips curled a little, and her teeth showed like pallid, freshly peeled almonds.

“Why did you refuse yourself to him?” Susan went on. “What we possess is part of our past, but a joy put off is a burden. Men are to be the rungs of your ladder--no more. Let them give you magical nights, but send them packing when the cock crows. How has he deserved a higher office? You’ve yielded to a whim, and made a grinning idol of him. Why did you summon him? I’m afraid you’re going to commit a folly.”

Eva did not answer. The tip of her tongue appeared between her lips, and she closed her eyes cunningly. Susan thought she understood those gestures, and said: “It’s true, he has the marvellous diamond for which you cried. But you have but to command, and they’ll trim your very shoes with such baubles.”

“When did you ever see me cry for a diamond?” Eva, asked indifferently. She raised herself up, and in her transparent, wavering, blossomy wrappings seemed like a spirit emerging from the dimness. “When did you ever see me cry for a diamond?” she asked again, and touched Susan’s shoulder.

“You told me so yourself.”

“Have you no better proof?” Eva laughed, and her laughter was her most sensuous form of expression, as her smile was her most spiritual.

Susan folded her hands and said resignedly: “Volvedme del otro lado, que de esto ya estoy tostado!” It is a Spanish ejaculation, and means: Lay me on the other side, for I have been toasted enough on this.

XIV

The house that Eva had taken was not very far from the beach. It was an old manor, which William of Orange had built, and which had belonged to the late Duchess of Leuchtenberg until a few years ago.

The rooms, built of mighty blocks of stone, soothed Eva. By day and night she heard the long-drawn thunder of the waves. Whenever she picked up a book, she dropped it again soon and listened.

She walked through those rooms, full of ancient furniture and dark portraits, glad to possess herself, and to await without torment him who came to her. She greeted him with half-closed eyes, and with the smile of one who has yielded herself wholly.

Susan practised on a piano with muted strings. When she had finished her task, she slunk away and remained hidden.

Christian and Amadeus Voss had taken lodgings in a neighbouring villa--Voss on the ground floor, Christian above. Since Christian neither asked questions nor detained him, Voss went out in the morning and returned in the evening or even late at night. He did not say where he had been, or what he had seen or experienced.

At breakfast on the third morning, he said to Christian: “It’s a thankless task to unchain a fellow like me. I breathe a different breath and sleep a different sleep. Somewhere my soul is ranging about, and I’m chasing it. I’ve got to catch it first, before I know how things are with me.”

Christian did not look up. “We’re invited to dine with Eva Sorel to-night,” he said.

Voss bowed ironically. “That invitation looks damnably like charity,” he said harshly. “I feel the resistance of those people to me, and their strangeness, in my very bones. What a superfluous comedy! What shall I do there? Nearly all of them talk French. I’m a provincial, a villager, and ridiculous. And that’s worse than being a murderer or thief. I may make up my mind to commit arson or murder, so as not to be ridiculous any more.” He opened his mouth as though to laugh, but uttered no sound.

“I’m surprised, Amadeus, that your thoughts always cling to that one point,” Christian said. “Do you really believe it to be of such decisive importance? No one cares whether you’re poor or rich. Since you appear in my company, no one questions your equality, or would be so vulgar as to question it. The feelings that you express originate in yourself, and you seem to take a kind of perverse joy in them. You like to torment yourself, and then revenge yourself on others. I hope you won’t take my frankness amiss.”

Amadeus Voss grinned. “Sometimes, Christian Wahnschaffe, I’d like to pat your head, as though I were your teacher, and say: You did that very well. Yes, it was wonderfully well done. And yet your little arrow went astray. To hit me, you must take better aim. It is true that the morbidness is deep in my soul, far too deep to be eradicated by a few inexpensive aphorisms. When this Russian prince or this Spanish legate shake hands with me, I feel as though I had forged cheques and would be discovered in a minute. When this lady passes by me, with her indescribable fragrance and the rustling of her garments, I grow dizzy, as though I dangled high over an abyss, and my whole soul writhes in its own humiliation and slavishness. It writhes and writhes, and I can’t help it. I was born that way. This is not my world, and cannot become mine. The under dogs must bleed to death, for the upper dogs consider that the order of the world. I belong to that lower kind. My place is with those who have the odour of decayed flesh, whom all avoid, who go about with an eternally festering wound. The law of my being ranges me with them. I have no power to change that, nor has any pleasant agreement. This is not my world, Wahnschaffe; and if you don’t want me to lose my reason and do some mischief, you had better take me out of it so soon as possible, or else send me away.”

Christian passed the tips of his fingers over his forehead. “Have patience, Amadeus. I believe it is not my world any longer. Give me but a little more time in which to straighten out my own thoughts.”

Voss’s eyes clung to Christian’s hands and lips. The words had been quietly, almost coolly uttered, yet there was a deep conflict in them and an expression that had power over Voss. “I cannot imagine a man leaving this woman, if once he has her favour,” he said, with a hovering malice on his lips, “unless she withdraws her favour.”

Christian could not restrain a gesture of aversion. “We’ll meet to-night then,” he said, and arose.

An hour later Amadeus Voss saw him and Eva on the beach. He was coming down the dunes, and saw them on the flat sands by the foam of the waves. He stopped, shaded his eyes with his hands, and gazed out over the ocean as though watching for a sail. The other two did not see him. They walked along in a rhythmic unity, as of bodies that have tested the harmony of their vibrations. After a while they, too, stopped and stood close together, and were defined like two dark, slender shafts against the iron grey of air and water.

Voss threw himself into the sparse, stiff grass, and buried his forehead in the moist sand. Thus he lay many hours.

Evening came. Its great event was to be the appearance of Eva with the diamond Ignifer in her hair. She wore it in an exquisitely wrought setting of platinum, and it shone above her head, radiant and solitary, like a ghostly flame.

She felt its presence in every throb of her heart. It was a part of her, at once her justification and her crown. It was no longer an adornment but a blazing and convincing symbol of herself.

For a while there was an almost awestruck silence. The lovely Beatrix Vanleer, a Belgian sculptress, cried out in her astonishment and admiration.

The smile of gentle intoxication faded from Eva’s face, and her eyes turned far in their sockets, and she saw Amadeus Voss, whose face was of a bluish pallor.

His mouth was half open like an imbecile’s, his head thrust brutally forward, his hanging arms twitched. He approached slowly, with eyes staring at the ineffable glow of the jewel. Those who stood on either side of him were frightened and made way. Eva turned her face aside, and stepped back two paces. Susan emerged beside her, and laid protective arms about her. At the same moment Christian went up to Voss, grasped his hand, and drew the quite obedient man aside.

Christian’s attitude and expression had something that calmed every one. As though nothing had happened, a vivid and twittering conversation arose.

Voss and Christian stood on the balcony of stone. Voss drank the salt sea air deep into his lungs. He asked hoarsely: “Was that Ignifer?”

Christian nodded. He listened to the sea. The waves thundered like falling fragments of rock.

“I have grasped the whole secret of your race,” Amadeus murmured, and the convulsion in his face melted under the influence of Christian’s presence. “I have understood both man and woman. In this diamond are frozen your tears and your shudderings, your voluptuousness and your darkness too. It is a bribe and an accursed delusion, a terrible fetish! How keenly aware am I now of your days and nights, Wahnschaffe, of all that is between you and her, since I have seen the gleam of this mineral which the Lord created out of the slime, even as He created me and you and her. That stone is without pain--earthly, and utterly without pain, burned pure and merciless. My God, my God, and think of me, of me!”

Christian did not understand this outburst, but it shook him to the soul. Its power swept aside the vexation which Voss’s shameless eloquence had aroused. He listened to the sea.

Voss pulled himself together. He went up to the balustrade, and said with unnatural self-control, “You counselled patience to-day. What was your purpose? It sounded as equivocal and as general as all you say to me. It is convenient to talk of patience. It is a luxury like any other luxury at your command, only less costly. There is no word, however, worthier of hatred or contempt. It is always false. Closely looked upon, it means cowardice and sloth. What have you in mind?”

Christian did not answer. Or, rather, he assumed having answered; and after a long while, and out of deep meditation, he asked: “Do you believe that it is of any use?”

“I don’t understand,” said Voss, and looked at him helplessly. “Use? To what end or how?”

Christian, however, did not enlighten him further.

Voss wanted to go home, but Christian begged him to stay, and so they went in and joined the others at dinner.

XV

When the dinner was over, the company returned to the drawing-room. The conversation began in French, but in deference to Mr. Bradshaw, who did not understand that language, changed to German.

The American directed the conversation toward the dying races of the New World, and the tragedy of their disappearance. Eva encouraged him, and he told of an experience he had had among the Navaho Indians.

The Navaho tribe had offered the longest resistance to Christianity and to its civilization. To subdue them the United States Government forbade the practice of the immemorial Yabe Chi dance, the most solemn ritual of their cult. The commissioner who was to convey this order, and on whose staff Mr. Bradshaw had been, yielded to the passionate entreaty of the tribal chief, and gave permission for a final celebration of the dance. At midnight, by the light of campfires and of pine torches, the brilliantly feathered and tattooed dancers and singers appeared. The singers sang songs which told of the fates of three heroes, who had been captured by a hostile tribe and freed by the god Ya. He taught them to ride the lightning; they fled into the cave of the Grizzly Bear, and thence into the realm of butterflies. The dances gave a plastic representation of these adventures. While the craggy mountains re-echoed the songs, and the contorted dances in the tawny glow rose to an ecstasy of despair, a terrific storm broke. Cascades of water poured from the sky and filled the dried river-beds with roaring torrents; the fires were extinguished; the medicine men prayed with uplifted arms; the dancers and singers, certain now that they had incurred the anger of their god, whose sacred ceremony they had consented to betray, hurled themselves in their wild pain into the turbulent waters, which carried their bodies far down into the plain.

When Mr. Bradshaw had ended, Eva said: “The gods are vengeful; even the gentlest will defend their seats.”

“That is a heathen view,” said Amadeus, in a sharp and challenging voice. “There are no gods. There are idols, to be sure, and these must be broken.” He looked defiantly about him, and added in a dragging tone: “For the Lord saith, no man can look upon me and live.”

Smiles met his outburst. Tavera had not understood, and turned to Wiguniewski, who whispered an explanation in French. Then the Spaniard smiled too, compassionately and maliciously.

Voss arose with a tormented look on his face. The merriment in those faces was like a bodily chastisement to him. From behind his glittering eye-glasses he directed a venomous glance toward Eva, and said in troubled tones: “In the same context of Scripture the Lord bids Israel hurl aside its adornments that He may see what He will do with them. The meaning is clear.”

“He cannot expiate the lust of the eye,” Christian thought, and avoided Eva’s glance.

Amadeus Voss left the company and the house. On the street he ran as though pursued, clasping his hands to his temples. He had pushed his derby hat far back. When he reached his room, he opened his box and drew out a package of letters. They were the stolen letters of the unknown woman F. He sat down by his lamp, and read with tense absorption and a burning forehead. It was not the first night that he had passed thus.

When Eva was alone with Christian, she asked: “Why did you bring that man with you?”

He laughed, and lifted her up in his arms, and carried her through many flights of rooms and out of light into darkness.

“The sea cries!” her lips said at his ear.

He prayed that all sounds might die out of the world except the thunder of the sea and that young voice at his ear. He prayed that those two might silence the disquiet that overcame him in her very embraces and made him, at the end of every ecstasy, yearn for its renewal.

That slender, passionate body throbbed toward him. Yet he heard the lamentation of an alien voice: What shall we do?

“Why did you bring this man?” Eva asked him far in the night, between sleep and sleep. “I cannot bear him. There is always sweat on his forehead. He comes from a sinister world.”

There was a bluish twilight in the room that came from the blue flame of a blue lamp, and a bluish darkness lay beyond the windows.

“Why don’t you answer me?” she urged, and raised herself, showing the pale face amid its wilderness of brown hair.

He had no answer for her. He feared the insufficiency of any explanation, as well as the replies that she would find.

“What is the meaning of it all? What ails you, dearest?” Eva drew him toward her, and clung to him, and kissed his eyes thirstily.

“I’ll ask him to avoid your presence,” said Christian. And suddenly he saw himself and Voss in the farm yard of Nettersheim, saw the kneeling men and maid servants, the old rusty lantern, the dead woman, and the carpenter who was measuring her for her coffin.

“Tell me what he means to you,” whispered Eva. “It seems to me suddenly as though you were gone. Where are you really? Tell me, dear friend.”

“You should have let me love you in those old days in Paris,” said Christian gently, and softly rested his cheek against her bosom, “in those days when Crammon and I came to you.”

“Speak, only speak,” Eva breathed, seeking to hide the fright in her heart.

Her eyes gleamed, and her skin was like luminous white satin. In the darkness her face had a spiritualized thinness; the restrained charm of her gestures mastered the hour, and her smile was deep and intricate of meaning, and everything about her was play and mirroring and raptness and unexpected magic. Christian looked upon her.

“Do you remember words that you once spoke to me?” he asked. “You said: ‘Love is an art like poetry or music, and he who does not understand that, finds no grace in love’s sight.’ Were not those your words?”

“Yes, they were. Speak to me, my darling!”

He held her in his arms, and the life of her body, its warmth, its blood that was conscious of him, and its vibration that was toward him, made speech a little easier. “You see,” he said thoughtfully, and caressed her hand, “I have only enjoyed women. Nothing more. I have been ignorant of that love which is an art. It was so easy. They adored me, and I took no pains. They put no hindrances on my path, and so my foot passed over them. Not one demanded a fulfilment of me. They were happy enough if I was but contented. But you, Eva, you’re not satisfied with me. You look at me searchingly and watch me; and your vigil continues even at those moments when one floats beyond thought and knowledge. And it is because you are not satisfied with me. Or is that an error, a deception?”

“It is so very late,” said Eva, and, leaning her head back upon the pillows, she closed her eyes. She listened to the perished echo of her own voice, and the oppression of her heart almost robbed her of breath.

XVI

It was in another night. They had been jesting and telling each other amusing stories, and at last they had grown weary.

Suddenly in the darkness outside of the window Christian had a vision of his father and of the dog Freia; and his father had the tread of a lonely man. Never had Christian seen loneliness so visibly embodied. The dog was his only companion. He had sought for another friend, but there had been none to go with him.

“How is that possible?” Christian thought.

His senses were lost in a strange drowsiness, even while he held Eva’s beautiful body, which was as smooth and cool as ivory. And in this drowsiness visions emerged of his brother, his sister, his mother, and about each of them was that great loneliness and desolation.

“How is that possible?” Christian thought. “Their lives are thronged with people.”

But he answered himself, and said: “Is not your own life likewise thronged with people to suffocation, and do you not also feel that same loneliness and desolateness?”

Now a dark object seemed to descend upon him. It was a coat--a wet, dripping coat. And at the same moment some one called out to him: “Arise, Christian, arise!” But he could not arise, for those ivory arms held him fast.

Suddenly he became aware of Letitia. She uttered but one word: “Why?” It seemed to him, while he slept, if indeed he slept, that he should have chosen Letitia, who lived but for her dreams, her yearnings and imaginings, and who had been sacrificed with her dreams to the vulgar world of reality. It seemed to him as though Letitia, pointing to Eva, were saying: “What do you seek of her? She knows nothing of you, but weaves at the web of her own life. She is ambitious, and can give you no help in your suffering; and it is only to forget and deaden the pain of your soul that you are wasting yourself upon her.”

Christian was astonished to find Letitia so wise. He was almost inclined to smile at her wisdom. But he knew now clearly that he was suffering. It was a suffering of an unfathomable nature, which grew from hour to hour and from day to day, like the spreading of a gangrened wound.

His head rested on the shoulder of his beloved; her little breasts rose from the violet shadows and had trembling contours. He felt her beauty with every nerve, and her strangeness and exquisite lightness. He felt that he loved her with all his thoughts and with every fibre of his flesh, and that, despite it all, he could find no help in her.

And again a voice cried: “Arise, Christian, arise!” But he could not arise. For he loved this woman, and feared life without her.

The dawn was breaking when Eva turned her face to him again: “Where are you?” she asked. “What are you gazing at?”

He answered: “I am with you.”

“To the last stirrings of your thought?”

“I don’t know. Who knows the last recesses of his mind?”

“I want you wholly. With every breath. And something of you escapes.”

“And you,” Christian asked evasively, “are you utterly with me?”