Part 21

She answered passionately, and with an imperious smile, as she drew closer to him: “You are more mine than I am yours.”

“Why?”

“Does it frighten you? Are you miserly in your love? Yes, you are more mine. I have broken the spell that held you and melted your soul of stone.”

“Melted my soul...?” Christian asked in amazement.

“I have, my darling. Don’t you know that I’m a sorceress? I have power over the fish in the sea, the horse on the sod, the vulture in the air, and the invisible deities that are spoken of in the books of the Persians. I can make of you what I would, and you must yield.”

“That is true,” Christian admitted.

“But your soul does not look at me,” Eva cried, and flung her arms about him, “it is an alien soul, dark, hostile, unknown.”

“Perhaps you’re misusing the power you have over me, and my soul resists.”

“It is to obey--that is all.”

“Perhaps it is not wholly sure of you.”

“I can give your soul only the assurance of the hour that is.”

“What are you planning?”

“Don’t ask me! Hold me fast with your thoughts. Don’t let me go for a moment, or we are lost to each other. Cling to me with all your might.”

Christian answered: “It seems to me as though I ought to know what you mean. But I don’t want to know it. Because you see, you ... I ... all this ... it’s too insignificant.” He shook his head in a troubled way. “Too insignificant.”

“What, what do you mean by that?” Eva cried in fright, and clung to his right hand with both hers. Tensely she looked into his face.

“Too insignificant,” Christian repeated stubbornly, as though he could find no other words.

Then he reflected on all he had said and heard with his accustomed scepticism and toughmindedness, and arose and bade his friend good-night.

XVII

Edgar Lorm was playing in Karlsruhe. On a certain evening he had increased the tempo of his playing, and given vent to his disgust with his rôle, the piece, his colleagues, and his audience so obviously that there had been hissing after the last act.

“I’m a poor imbecile,” he said to his colleagues at their supper in a restaurant. “Every play actor is a poor imbecile.” He looked at them all contemptuously, and smacked his lips.

“We must have had more inner harmony in the days when we were suspected of stealing shirts from the housewife’s line and children were frightened at our name. Don’t you think so? Or maybe you’re quite comfortable in your stables.”

His companions observed a respectful silence. Wasn’t he the famous man who filled the houses, and whom both managers and critics flattered?

Dust was whirling in the streets, the dust of summer, as he returned to his hotel. How desolate I feel, he thought, and shook himself. Yet his step was free and firm as a young huntsman’s.

When he had received his key and turned toward the lift, Judith Imhof suddenly stood before him. He started, and then drew back.

“I am ready to be poor,” she said, almost without moving her lips.

“Are you here on business, dear lady?” Lorm asked in a clear, cold voice. “Undoubtedly you are expecting your husband----?”

“I am expecting no one but you, and I am alone,” answered Judith, and her eyes blazed.

He considered the situation with a wrinkled face that made him look old and homely. Then with a gesture he invited her to follow him, and they entered the empty reading room. A single electric lamp burned above the table covered with newspapers. They sat down in two leather armchairs. Judith toyed nervously with her gold mesh-bag. She wore a travelling frock, and her face was tired.

Lorm began the conversation. “First of all: Is there any folly in your mind that can still be prevented?”

“None,” Judith answered in a frosty tone. “If the condition you made was only a trick to scare me off, and you are cowardly enough to repudiate it at the moment of its fulfilment, then, of course, I have been self-deceived, and my business here is at an end. Don’t soothe me with well-meant speeches. The matter was too serious to me for that.”

“That is sharply and bitterly said, Judith, but terribly impetuous,” Lorm said, with quiet irony. “I’m an old hand at living, and far from young, and a good bit too experienced to fly into the passion of a Romeo at even the most precious offers and surprises of a woman. Suppose we discuss what you’ve done like two friends, and you postpone for a bit any final judgment of my behaviour.”

Judith told him that she had written her father, and requested him to make some other disposition of the annual income which he had settled on her at the time of her marriage, since she had determined to get a divorce from Felix Imhof, and to marry a man who had made this step a definite condition of their union. At the same time she had made a legal declaration of her renunciation before a notary, which she had brought to show Lorm, and intended thereupon to send on to her father. All this she told him very calmly. Felix had known nothing of her intentions at the time of her departure. She had left a note for him in the care of his valet. “Explanations are vain under such circumstances,” she said. “To tell a man whom one is leaving why one is leaving him is as foolish as turning back the hands of the clock in the hope of really bringing back hours that are dead. He knows where I am and what I want. That’s enough. Anyhow, it’s not the sort of thing he comprehends, and there are so many affairs in his busy life that one more or less will make little difference.”

Lorm sat quietly, his head bent forward, his chin resting on the mother-of-pearl handle of his stick. His carefully combed hair, which was brown and still rather thick, gleamed in the light. His brows were knit. In the lines about his nose, and his wearied actor’s mouth, there was a deep joylessness.

A waiter appeared at the door and vanished again.

“You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for, Judith,” Lorm said, and tapped the floor lightly with his feet.

“Then tell me about it, so that I can adjust myself.”

“I’m an actor,” he said almost threateningly.

“I know it.”

He laid his stick on the table, and folded his hands. “I’m an actor,” he repeated, and his face assumed the appearance of a mask. “My profession involves my representing human nature at its moments of extreme expressiveness. The fascination of the process consists in the artificial concentration of passion, its immediate projection, and the assigning to it of consequences that reality rarely or never affords. And so it naturally happens--and this deception is the fatal law of the actor’s life--that my person, this Edgar Lorm who faces you here, is surrounded by a frame that suits him about as well as a Gothic cathedral window would suit a miniature. A further consequence is that I lack all power of adjustment to any ordered social life, and all my attempts to bring myself in harmony with such a life have been pitiable failures. I struggle and dance in a social vacuum. My art is beaten foam.

“I’ve been told of people who have a divided personality. Well, mine is doubled, quadrupled. The real me is extinct. I detest the whole business; I practise my profession because I haven’t any other. I’d like to be a librarian in the service of a king or a rich man who didn’t bother me, or own a farm in some Swiss valley. I’m not talking about the accidental miseries of the theatre, disgusting and repulsive as they are--the masquerading, the lies and vanities. And I don’t want you to believe either that I’m uttering the average lament of the spoiled mime, which is made up of inordinate self-esteem and of coquettish fishing for flattering contradiction.

“My suffering lies a little deeper. Its cause is, if you will try to understand me, the spoken word. It has caused a process within me that has poisoned my being and destroyed my soul. What word, you may ask? The words that pass between man and man, husband and wife, friend and friend, myself and others. Language, which you utter quite naturally, has in my case passed through all the gamuts of expression and all the temperatures of the mind. You use it as a peasant uses his scythe, the tailor his needle, the soldier his weapon. To me it is a property and a ghost, a mollusk and an echo, a thing of a thousand transformations, but lacking outline and kernel. I cry out words, whisper them, stammer them, moan, flute, distend them, and fill the meaningless with meaning, and am depressed to the earth by the sublime. And I’ve been doing that for five and twenty years. It has worn me thin; it has split my gums and hollowed out my chest.

“Hence all words, sincere as they may be on others’ lips, are untrue on mine, untrue to me. They tyrannise over me and torment me, flicker through the walls, recall to me my powerlessness and unrewarded sacrifices, and change me into a helpless puppet. Can I ever, without being ashamed to the very marrow, say: I love? How many meanings have not those words! How many have I been forced to give them! If I utter them I practise merely the old trick of my trade, and make the pasteboard device upon my head look like a golden crown. Consider me closely and you will see the meaning of literal despair. Words have been my undoing. It sounds queer, I know; but it is true. It may be that the actor is the absolute example of hopeless despair.”

Judith looked at him rather emptily. “I don’t suppose that we’ll torture each other much with words,” she said, merely to say something.

But Edgar Lorm gave to this saying a subtle interpretation, and nodded gratefully. “What an infinitely desirable condition that would be,” he answered, in his stateliest manner; “because, you see, words and emotions are like brothers and sisters. The thing that I detest saying is mouldy and flat to me in the realm of feeling too. One should be silent as fate. It may be that I am spoiled for any real experience--drained dry. I have damned little confidence in myself, and nothing but pity for any hand stretched out to save me. However that may be,” he ended, and arose with elastic swiftness, “I am willing to try.”

He held out his hand as to a comrade. Charmed by the vividness and knightly grace of his gesture, Judith took his hand and smiled.

“Where are you stopping?” he asked.

“In this hotel.”

Chatting quite naturally he accompanied her to the door of her room.

XVIII

On the next afternoon Felix Imhof suddenly appeared at the hotel. He sent up his card to Judith, and waited in the hall. He walked up and down, swinging his little cane, carelessly whistling through his thick lips, his brain burdened with affairs, speculations, stock quotations, a hundred obligations and appointments. But whenever he passed the tall windows, he threw a curious and merry glance out into the street, where two boys were having a fight.

But now and then his face grew dark, and a quiver passed over it.

The page returned, and bade him come up.

Judith was surprised to see him. He began to talk eagerly at once. “I have business in Liverpool, and wanted to see you once more before leaving. A crowd of people came, who all had some business with you. Invitations came for you, and telephone calls; your dressmaker turned up, and letters, and I was, of course, quite helpless. I can’t very well receive people with the agreeable information that my wife has just taken French leave of me. There are a thousand things; you have to disentangle them, or the confusion will be endless.”

They talked for a while of the indifferent things which, according to him, had brought him here. Then he added: “I had an audience with the Prince Regent this forenoon. He bestowed a knighthood on me yesterday.”

Judith’s face flushed, and she had the expression of one who, in a state of hypnosis, recalls his waking consciousness.

Felix tapped against his faultlessly creased trousers with his stick. “I beg your pardon for venturing any criticism,” he said, “but I can’t help observing that the whole matter might have been better managed. To run off with that degree of suddenness--well, it wasn’t quite the proper thing, a little beneath us, not quite fair.”

Judith shrugged her shoulders. “Things that are inevitable might as well be done quickly. And I don’t see that your equanimity is at all impaired.”

“Equanimity! Nonsense! Doesn’t enter the question.” He stood, as was his habit, with legs stretched far apart, rocking to and fro a little, and regarding his gleaming boots. “What has equanimity to do with it? We’re cultivated people. I’m neither a tiger nor a Philistine. Nihil humanum a me alienum, et cetera. You simply don’t know me. And it doesn’t astonish me, for what chance have we ever had to cultivate each other’s acquaintance? Marriage gave us no opportunity. We should retrieve our lost occasions. It is this wish that I should like to take with me into my renewed bachelorhood. You must promise not to avoid me as rigorously in the future as you did during the eight months of our married life.”

“If it will give you any pleasure, I promise gladly,” Judith answered good-humouredly.

With that they parted.

An hour later Felix Imhof sat in the train. With protruding eyes he stared at the passing landscape until darkness fell. He desired conversation, argument, the relief of some projection of his inner self. With wrinkled brow he watched the strangers about him who knew nothing of him or his inner wealth, of his great, rolling ideas, or his far-reaching plans.

At Düsseldorf he left the train. He had made up his mind to do so at the last possible moment. He checked his luggage, and huddled in his coat, walked, a tall, lean figure, through the midnight of the dark and ancient streets.

He stopped in front of one of the oldest houses. In this house he had passed his youth. All the windows were dark. “Hello, boy!” he shouted toward the window behind which he had once slept. The walls echoed his voice. “O nameless boy,” he said, “where do you come from?” He was accustomed to say of himself often: “I am of obscure origin like Caspar Hauser.”

But no secret weighed upon him, not even that of his own unknown descent. He was a man of his decade--stripped of mystery, open to all the winds.

He entered a house, which he remembered from his student days. In a large room, lined with greasy mirrors, there were fifteen or twenty half-dressed girls. In his hat and coat he sat down at the piano and played with the false energy of the dilettante.

“Girls,” he said, “I’ve got a mad rage in me!” The girls played tricks on him as he sat there. They hung a crimson shawl over his shoulders and danced.

“I’m in a rage, girls,” he repeated. “It’s got to be drowned out.” He ordered champagne by the pailful.

The doors were locked. The girls screeched with delight.

“Do something to relieve my misery, girls,” he commanded, bade half a dozen stand in a row and open their mouths. Then he rolled up hundred mark notes like cigarettes, and stuck them between the girls’ teeth. They almost smothered him with their caresses.

And he drank and drank until he lost consciousness.

XIX

Christian could not be without Eva. If he left her for the shortest period, the world about him grew dark.

Yet all their relations had the pathos of farewells. If he walked beside her, it seemed to be for the last time. Every touch of their hands, every meeting of their eyes had the dark glow and pain of the irrevocable.

His love for her was in harmony with this condition. It was clinging, giving, patient, at times even obedient.

It showed its nature in the way he held her cloak for her, gave her a glass that her lips were to touch, supported her when she was weary, waited for her if she was later than he at some appointed spot.

She felt that often and questioned him; but he had no answer. He might have conveyed his sensation of an eternal farewell, but he could not have told her what was to follow it. And it became very clear to him, that not a farewell from her alone was involved, but a farewell from everything in the world that had hitherto been clear and pleasant and indispensable to him. Beyond that fact he understood nothing; he had no plans and did not make any.

He was so void of any desire or demand that Eva yielded recklessly to a hundred wishes, and was angry when none remained unfulfilled. She wanted to see the real ocean. He rented a yacht, and they cruised on the Atlantic for two weeks. She had a longing for Paris, and he took her there in his car. They had dinner at Foyot in the Rue de Tournon, where they had invited friends--writers, painters, musicians. On the following day they returned. They heard of a castle in Normandy which was said to be like a dream of the early Middle Age. She desired to see it by moonlight; so they set out while the moon was full and cloudless nights were expected. Then the cathedral at Rouen lured her; next the famous roses of a certain Baron Zerkaulen near Ghent; then an excursion into the forest of Ardennes, or a sunset over the Zuyder Zee, or a ride in the park at Richmond, or a Rembrandt at The Hague, or a festive procession in Antwerp.

“Do you never get tired?” Christian asked one day, with that unquiet smile of his that seemed a trifle insincere.

Eva answered: “The world is big and youth is brief. Beauty yearns toward me, exists for me, and droops when I am gone. Since Ignifer is mine, my hunger seems insatiable. It is radiant over my earth, and makes all my paths easy. You see, dear, what you have done.”

“Beware of Ignifer,” said Christian, with that same, apparently secretive smile.

Eva’s lids drooped heavily. “Fyodor Szilaghin has arrived,” she said.

“There are so many,” Christian answered, “I can’t possibly know them all.”

“You see none, but they all see you,” said Eva. “They all wonder at you and ask: Who is that slender, distinguished man with very white teeth and blue eyes? Do you not hear their whispering? They make me vain of you.”

“What do they know of me? Let them be.”

“Women grow pale when you approach. Yesterday on the promenade there was a flower-seller, a Flemish girl. She looked after you, and then she began to sing. Did you not hear?”

“No. What was the song she sang?”

Eva covered her eyes with her hands, and sang softly and with an expression on her lips that was half pain and half archness:

“‘Où sont nos amoureuses? Elles sont au tombeau, Dans un séjour plus beau Elles sont heureuses. Elles sont près des anges Au fond du ciel bleu, Où elles chantent les louanges De la Mère de Dieu.’

“It touched my very soul, and for a minute I hated you. Ah, how much beauty of feeling streams from human hearts, and finds no vessel to receive it!”

Suddenly she arose, and said with a burning glance: “Fyodor Szilaghin is here.”

Christian went to the window. “It is raining,” he said.

Thereupon Eva left the room, singing with a sob in her throat:

“Où sont nos amoureuses? Elles sont au tombeau.”

That evening they were walking down the beach. “I met Mlle. Gamaleja,” Eva told him. “Fyodor Szilaghin introduced her to me. She is a Tartar and his mistress. Her beauty is like that of a venomous serpent, and as strange as the landscape of a wild dream. There was a silent challenge in her attitude to me, and a silent combat arose between us. We talked about the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff. She said that such creatures should be strangled at birth. But I see from your expression, dear man, that you have never heard of Marie Bashkirtseff. Well, she was one of those women who are born a century before their time and wither away like flowers in February.”

Christian did not answer. He could not help thinking of the faces of the dead fishermen which he had seen the night before.

“Mlle. Gamaleja was in London recently and brought me a message from the Grand Duke,” Eva continued; “he’ll be here in another week.”

Christian was still silent. Twelve women and nineteen children had stood about the dead men. They had all been scantily clad and absorbed in their icy grief.

They walked up the beach and moved farther away from the tumult of the waves. Eva said: “Why don’t you laugh? Have you forgotten how?” The question was like a cry.

Christian said nothing. “To-morrow,” she remarked swiftly, and caught her veil which was fluttering in the breeze, “to-morrow there’s a village fair at Dudzeele. Come with me to Dudzeele. Pulcinello will be there. We will laugh, Christian, laugh!”

“Last night there was a storm here,” Christian began at last. “You know that, for we were long among the dunes up there. Toward morning I walked toward the beach again, because I couldn’t sleep. Just as I arrived they were carrying away the bloated corpses of the fishermen. Three boats went to pieces during the night; it was quite near Molo, but there was no chance for help. They carried seven men away to the morgue. Some people, all humble folk, went along, and so did I. There in that death chamber a single lantern was burning, and when they put down the drenched bodies, puddles gathered on the floor. Coats had been spread over the faces of the dead men; and of the women I saw but a single one shed tears. She was as ugly as a rotten tree-trunk; but when she wept all her ugliness was gone. Why should I laugh, Eva? Why should I laugh? I must think of the fishermen who earn their bread day after day out on the sea. Why should I laugh? And why to-day?”

With both hands Eva pressed her veil against her cheeks.

In that tone of his, which was never rudely emphatic, Christian continued: “Yesterday at the bar Wiguniewski and Botho Thüngen showed me a man of about fifty, a former star at the opera, who had been famous and made money in his day. The day before he had broken down on the street--from starvation. But in his pocket, they found twenty francs. When he was asked why, having the money, he had not satisfied his hunger, he answered that the money was an advance given him toward travelling expenses. He had been engaged to sing at a cabaret in Havre. It had taken him months to find this employment. But the fare to Havre is thirty-five francs, and for six days he had made frantic efforts to scrape together the additional fifteen francs. He had resisted every temptation to touch the twenty francs, for he knew that if he took but a single centime his life would be finally wrecked. But on this day the date of the beginning of his engagement had lapsed, and he returned the twenty francs to the agent. They pointed this man out to me. Leaning on his arms, he sat before an empty cup. I meant to sit down by him, but he went away. Why should I laugh, Eva, when there are such things to think about? Don’t ask me to-day of all days that I should laugh.”

Eva said nothing. But when they were at home, she flung herself in his arms, as though beside herself, and said: “I must kiss you.”

And she kissed him and bit his lip so hard that drops of blood appeared.

“Go now,” she said with a commanding gesture, “go! But don’t forget that to-morrow we shall visit the fair at Dudzeele.”

XX

They drove to the fair and made their way through the crowds to the little puppet-show. The benches were filled with children; the grown people stood in a semi-circle. From the harbour floated the odours of machine oil, leather, and salt herring; in the air resounded the discords of all kinds of music and of the criers’ voices.

Christian made a path for Eva; half-surprised and half-morosely the people yielded. Eva followed the play with cheerful intensity. She had loved such scenes from childhood, and now they brought back to her with a poignant and melancholy glow the years of her obscure wanderings.

The Pulcinello, who played the rôle of an outwitted cheat, was forced to confess that no cunning could withstand the magic of the good fairies. His simplicity was too obvious, and his downfall too well deserved to awaken compassion. The rain of blows which were his final portion constituted a satisfying victory of good morals.