Part 17

Letitia laughed. She regarded him with a mixture of irony and shyness. But as she stood before him in her frock of soft, pale yellow silk, her neck and bosom radiating an ivory shimmer, Crammon found it difficult to sustain his self-pity. Letitia approached him, and said archly yet with feeling: “So you are my papa. Who would have thought it? It must have been quite unpleasant for you to have an old, forgotten sin suddenly transformed into a great girl.”

Crammon chuckled, although a shadow still lay on his face. He took her hand into both of his and pressed it warmly. “I see that we understand each other,” he said, “and that consoles me. What I feared was an outburst and tears and the emotional display that is considered fitting. It is so nice of you to be sensible. But let us sacrifice something to the ceremonial tradition of the emotions. I shall imprint a paternal kiss upon your brow.”

Letitia inclined her head, and he kissed her. She said: “We share a delightful secret now. How shall I call you in company--Uncle, or Uncle Crammon, or Uncle Bernard, or simply Bernard?”

“Simply Bernard, I’m sure,” Crammon replied. “I need not remind you, of course, that you are legally the daughter of the late Herr von Febronius and of his late wife. Our situation demands of us both the most delicate tactfulness.”

“Certainly,” Letitia agreed, and sat down. “But just fancy the dangers that lurk in this world. Suppose I hadn’t known anything and had fallen in love with you. How horrible! And I must tell you at once that I don’t seem to revere you a bit. My feeling is rather sisterly, and I’m sure that I like you very, very much. Will you be satisfied with that, or is it terribly unfilial?”

“It quite suffices,” said Crammon. “I can’t indeed impress on you too strongly the wisdom of emotional frugality. Most people carry their feelings about the way the Ashanti women do their glass beads. They rattle them in public, and never realize what very ordinary stuff they are. But that is by the way. For our relations we must have a very special programme. This is important in order to ward off the intrusion of outsiders. I am--it goes without saying--at your service at any time and in any way. You may rely wholly upon my friendship, upon my ... let us use the odious word--paternal friendship.”

Letitia was immensely amused at his grave and anxious zeal to gain what easements the situation permitted. She was quite worthy of him in the capacity for a certain hypocrisy. Beneath her charming expression and her innocent appearance of pliability, she hid a good deal of mockery and not a little self-will. She answered: “There’s no reason why we should limit each other’s freedom. We shall not stand in each other’s way, nor become unduly indebted to each other. Each has the right to assume the other’s confidence, and thus to preserve his freedom of action. I hope that that suits you.”

“You are a very determined little person, and I took you to be foolishly enthusiastic and fanciful. Did the cattle drivers in the land of fire sharpen your wits? Yes, it suits me; it suits me admirably.”

“There is so much ahead of me,” Letitia continued, and her eyes glowed with desires and dreams, “I hardly know how I shall get through it all--people, countries, cities, works of art. I’ve lost so much time and I’m nearly twenty-one. Auntie wants me to stay with her, but that’s impossible. I’m expected in Munich on the first of December and in Meran on the tenth. In Paris it was divine. The people were perfectly charming to me. Every one wanted me at once.”

“I quite believe it, quite,” said Crammon, and rubbed his chin. “But tell me, how did that adventure with the vicomte end that the countess told me about?”

“Oh, did she tell you about it?” Letitia blushed. “That wasn’t very discreet.” For a moment her face showed an expression of sorrow and of embarrassment. But unhappy experiences, even when they made their way into her consciousness, could not really darken it. In a moment her eyes were again full of laughter. All dark memories had fled. “Take me on a motor drive to-morrow, won’t you, Bernard,” she urged him, and stretched out her hands impulsively. “And you must invite the little Baron Rehmer who lives in the Grand Hotel. He’s Stanislaus Rehmer, the Polish sculptor. He’s going to model me and teach me Polish. He’s a charming person.”

Crammon interrupted her: “Explain one thing to me! Tell me what is happening in the Argentine. Hasn’t that blue-skinned bandit in whom you once saw the essence of all manly virtues taken any steps against you? You don’t imagine, do you, that he will simply stand by while you take French leave with his double offspring? As for me, I wouldn’t have shared the same board with him, far less the same bed. But that was not your opinion, and the law doesn’t consider fluctuations of taste.”

“He’s brought a suit for divorce against me, and I’ve entered a countersuit,” Letitia said. “I’ve seen mountains of documents. The children are mine, since he forced me to flight by his extreme cruelty. I’m not worried about it a bit.”

“Does he pay you an income?”

“Not a penny so far.”

“Then how do you live? You’re obviously not retrenching. Where does the money come from? Who pays for all these luxuries? Or is it all a sham with a background of debts?”

Letitia shrugged her shoulders. “I hardly know,” she answered, with some embarrassment. “Sometimes I have money and sometimes I haven’t any. Poor auntie sold a few old Dutch pictures that she had. One can’t spend one’s life reckoning like a shopkeeper. Why do you talk of such horrid things?” There was such sincere pain and reproachfulness in her voice that Crammon felt like a sinner. He looked aside. Held by her charm, he lost the courage to burden her farther with coarse realities. And now, too, the countess appeared in the room. She had put on gloves of gleaming white, and her face glowed like freshly scrubbed porcelain. In her arms she carried Puck, the little Pekingese, who had grown old and slept much.

“My dears, supper is served,” she cried, with the slightly stagy cheeriness of her youth.

XVIII

Karen believed that, in his own mind, Christian expected her to pay some attention to her child. She had secretly written to her mother, but no answer had come.

Christian had never mentioned the child. He did not expect to find any softening in Karen. Her behaviour gave no sign of any.

But brooding in her bed she wondered both what Christian expected of her and what had become of her child. Occasionally a glassy clinking could be heard. It came from the pearls. She would reach for them to assure herself of their presence. When she felt them, a smile of mysterious well-being appeared on her face.

For three days Christian had not been out of his clothes. He fell asleep in a corner of the sofa. Since morning a formless disquietude had possessed him.

Isolde Schirmacher, noisily bringing in Karen’s soup, wakened him. He put the chairs in their places, cleared the table of his books, put the checked cover on it, and opened the window. “It’s Sunday,” he said.

“I don’t want soup,” Karen grumbled.

“And I went and made it for you extry,” Isolde whined, “and a pork fricassee and all. You never want nothing.”

“Eat the stuff yourself,” Karen said spitefully.

Isolde carried the soup out again.

“Can’t you close the window?” Karen whined. “Why do you always have to open it? A person can freeze to death.”

Christian closed the window.

“I’d like to know why she carried the soup out again,” Karen said after a while. “That’d suit her, to gorge herself on what’s meant for me. I’m hungry.”

Christian went to the kitchen and brought in the soup. He sat down beside her bed, and held the plate in both hands while she laboriously ate the soup. “It’s hot,” she moaned, and pressed her head against the pillows. “Open the window so’s I can get a bit of air.”

He opened the window. Karen looked at him with a dull wonder in her eyes. His patience was unfathomable to her. She wanted to get him to the point of scolding and showing her her place.

During the night she would make twenty demands and then reverse them with embittered impatience. His kindliness remained uniform. It enraged her; she wanted to scream. She cried out to him: “What kind of a man are you, for God’s sake?” She shook her fists.

Christian did not know what to answer.

At two o’clock Dr. Voltolini arrived. The clinical assistant who had examined Karen at Ruth’s request had no time to make regular visits, so Ruth had suggested that Voltolini, whom she knew, be permitted to continue the treatment.

Karen refused to answer nearly all his questions. Her hatred of physicians dated from her experiences on the streets.

“I hardly know what attitude to take,” Dr. Voltolini said to Christian, who accompanied him to the stairs. “There’s an incomprehensible stubbornness in her. If I didn’t want to accommodate you, I would have given up the case long ago.” He had been deeply charmed by Christian, and often observed him tensely. Christian did not notice this.

He reproached Karen for her behaviour.

“Never mind,” she said curtly. “These doctors are swindlers and thieves. They speculate on people’s foolishness. I don’t want him to lay his hand on me. I don’t want him to listen to my heart so I can smell his bald head, or tap me all over and look like an executioner. I don’t need him if I’m going to live, and less if I’ve got to die.”

Christian did not answer.

Karen crouched in her bed. She suffered from pain to-day. A saw seemed to be drawn up and down between her ribs. She went on: “I’d like to know why you bother to study medicine. Tell me that. I’ve never asked you anything, but I’d like to know. What attracts you about being a saw-bones? What good will you get out of it?”

Christian was surprised at her insistent tone and at the glitter in her eyes. He tried to tell her, arguing clumsily. He talked to her as to an equal, with respect and courtesy. She did not wholly understand the sense of his words, but she thrust her head far forward, and listened breathlessly.

Christian said that it was not the study itself that had attracted him, but the constant contact with human beings into which it brought you. Then, too, there was the natural temptation to choose a study the length of which could be shortened by bits of knowledge that he already had. When he first determined to take it up, he had also thought of its practical usefulness to him. That thought he had now abandoned. He had believed that he might earn his livelihood by practising medicine; but he had been forced to the conclusion that he was morally incapable of earning money by any means. He had reached this conclusion not long since. He had gone to visit the student Jacoby and found him out. Just then a child of the landlady had fallen from a ladder and become unconscious. He had carried the child into the room, rubbed it with alcohol, listened to its heart, and stayed with it a while. When the child had quite recovered and he himself had been ready to go, the mother had pressed a two-mark piece into his hand. He had had the impulse to laugh into the woman’s face. He hadn’t been able to realize the cause of his shame, but the sense of it had been so strong as to make him dizzy. And that incident had taught him the impossibility of his taking money for services.

Even while he was speaking, it came to him that this was the first time he had ever talked to Karen about himself. It seemed quite easy to do so, because of the solemn attention with which she listened and which changed her whole expression. It seemed to rejuvenate him. A sense of well-being surged through him, a peculiar joy that seemed to affect his very skin. He had never known a joy like that. It was a new feeling.

And so he continued more freely--quite frankly and without reserve. Science, he told her, was rather indifferent to him in itself. He valued it as a means to an end. He didn’t know whither it would lead him. The future had grown less rather than more clear to him recently. At first, as he had told her, he thought that he might enter a profession and practise it like most young men. In that hope he had been disappointed. Nevertheless he knew that he was fundamentally on the right track. It was a time of preparation for him, and every day was enriching him. He got a great deal closer to people now, and saw them without pretence and falseness. In a hospital dormitory, in the waiting-room of a clinic, in the operating room, in the presence of hundreds of sufferers--in such scenes all hypocrisy died; there truth gripped one, and one understood what one had never understood before, and one could read the open book of life. Tubercular children, scrofulous children, large-eyed children beholding death--whoever had not seen that had not yet truly lived. And he knew whence they came and whither they went and what they said to one another, these fathers and mothers and strange crowds, and how each human creature was supremely interesting and important to itself. No horror frightened him any more, no wound, no terrible operative incision; he could see such things quite coldly now; he had even thought of volunteering for service in the lepers’ colony in East Prussia. But his urge was toward deeper and ever deeper abysses of life. He was never satisfied. He wanted to steep himself in humanity. There were always new horrors behind the old, other torment beyond any he had seen; and unless he could absorb all that into himself, he had no peace. Later he hoped to find still other ways. He was only practising upon sick bodies; later he would sink himself into sick souls. But it was only when he had unveiled something secret and hidden that his heart felt free and light.

Resting her arms on the edge of the bed and bending over far, Karen watched him with avid wonder. She understood and yet did not understand. At times she caught the drift, at times the sense of the words themselves. She nodded and brooded, contorted her mouth and laughed silently and a little wildly; she held her breath, and had a dim vision of him at last, of this noble and strange and beautiful being who had been utterly mysterious to her to this very hour. She saw him as he was, and it seemed to her as though she were in the midst of a flaming fire. It made her desperate that she had to be so silent, that she was so like stone within, that she had no words at her command, not one, that she could not even say: “Come to me, brother.” For he was of flesh like her own; and that made her feel alive. She felt gratitude as she had before felt despair and weariness, disgrace and hatred. Her gratitude was like a flame cleansing her wilderness, and it was also a great urge and a woeful joy, and at last again despair. For she felt that she was dumb.

Christian left in strange haste. Karen called in Isolde Schirmacher, and told the girl she was free for the evening. She got up and dressed slowly and painfully. She could hardly stand, and the room whirled around with her. The table seemed to cling to the ceiling and the oven to be upside down. But at each step she trod more firmly. She hid the pearls in her bosom. She faltered down the stairs, and strange colours flickered before her eyes. But she wanted to do something for him. That thought drove her onward. She wanted to drag herself to a cab and drive to her mother and ask: “Where is the child? Where did you take it?” And if the old woman was impudent, she meant to clutch her and strangle her till she told the truth.

To do something for him! To prove to him that there was a Karen whom he did not know.

She crept along the walls of the houses.

Christian was just coming back when a policeman and a working man, followed by an idle crowd, half led, half carried her home. He was confounded. She was white as chalk. They laid her on the bed. Since Isolde was not there, Christian knocked at the door of the Hofmann flat to ask Ruth to help him with Karen. But he caught sight of the little slate, and read the message that Ruth had left for her brother.

The chaotic unrest that he had felt all day rose more powerfully within his soul.

XIX

And now things had gone so far with Johanna that she had given herself to him whom she despised. At last she had the valid proof of her own feebleness of soul. She needed no longer to fear an inner voice that would defend her, nor any hope that might counsel her to guard herself. It was superfluous now to spare her body, and no longer necessary to keep up the little self-deceptions that bolstered up her brittle pride. She was unmasked in her own eyes, and, in a sense so different from the ordinary moral one, dishonoured ... dishonoured for all time and all eternity ... branded.... She had become what she had always suspected herself capable of becoming. Things were settled.

From the moment that he had waited for her in the street that day, Amadeus Voss had not left her side. From time to time he had repeated with mad monotony: “I love you, Johanna.” She had made no reply. With compressed lips and lowered eyes she had walked on and on, for more than an hour. The fear of human glances and human presences had kept her from fleeing by tram. Furthermore it was he who chose their path by a silent command. At last he had stopped in front of a little coffee-house. He neither asked her nor invited her in. He took it for granted that she would follow, and she did.

In a dim corner they sat facing each other. He took out a pencil and drew mystic symbols on the marble top of the table. This oppressive state of silence had lasted nearly half an hour. At last he had spoken: “To utter the word ‘love’ is to become guilty of an enormous triviality. It has been flattened out and savours of cheap fiction. Speak it and you become secondhand. The feeling is unique, incomparable, strange, and wondrous--an unheard-of adventure, a dream of dreams. The word is a base sound taken from a tattered reader. But how shall one communicate with another when the feeling strangles and shakes you, and your days are the days of a madman? I came to the age of twenty-six without knowing this magic and this wonder. No hand was stretched out toward me, no eye sought me out, and so I looked with hatred upon all who were in the grip of what seemed to be a blasphemous passion. Among the playmates of my childhood little erotic friendships were common. Every boy had his little sweetheart with whom he flirted instinctively and yet innocently. I excluded myself from all that and hated. On Sunday afternoon they would stroll out beyond the village. I would follow some couple, and if the boy and girl sat down somewhere to chat, I would observe them from some ambush with rage and bitterness. You have a keen enough insight to realize how I felt then and later and until this very day. Longing--yes, well, that’s another of those pale, drained concepts. Occasionally I stretched out my hand in my confusion and my cowardly desire, and trembled when a woman’s sleeve brushed mine. I became the fool of one who sought to trap me, and I let the accursed dancer poison my blood. Sometimes I flung myself into the gutter, and became defiled merely to silence the pitiless voice of nature, which is a heritage of the Evil One and the work of Satan.”

She had not raised her eyes from the table, and the hieroglyphs covered half of its top. “I won’t make any promises in the name of my so-called love,” he continued, and his bowed face became a mask of pain. “I don’t know whither it will lead either me or her who elects to be mine. To be mine--that has a sound of horror, hasn’t it? All I can say is that that woman will contribute to my salvation and redeem me from torment. You may reply: ‘What have I to do with your salvation or with the torments of a lost soul?’ Very well. Let us not bring that in. But consider whether in all the world there is another man whom you can win wholly, utterly, body and soul? Every step and every breath of yours is infinitely precious to me; there is an equal life and loveliness to me in the lashes of your eyes and the hem of your garment. I am within your very body, and throb in the pulsing of your heart. There is a fear that one feels of one’s own heart-beats; and there is one that is felt of another’s. Shall I use more words? These are enough. All words are unholy, and creep on the fringe of experience.”

The woman in Johanna had succumbed. A terrible curiosity had enslaved her. Because all that she was and did seemed unnatural and distorted to her, and because she was weary and sore, she let herself glide into those desperately outstretched arms.

She seemed to fall into a depth where heat and glow corroded what they touched. Shattering ecstasy and crushing weariness alternated. Scenes pallid and terrible flitted by as on the screen of a cinematograph, and the hours raced to their hideous death.

She wrote to her sister in Bucharest: “You’re so very near the Orient, and I’ve always been told that it is full of mighty wizards. Couldn’t you, please, use your well-tried charms to get the better of one of them, and steal from him some magic formula by virtue of which one can lose the consciousness of one’s self? Mine, you see, is quite ragged and tattered. And if I could exchange it for a nice, new, fashionable one, I’d be helped so much! I could marry a nice Jewish manufacturer and have babies and eat chocolates and flirt with the _jeunesse dorée_ and realize similar ideals. I beseech you, Clarisse, find me a wizard--young or old, it doesn’t matter. But I must have a wizard to be saved.”

XX

At eight o’clock in the evening Christian knocked at Ruth’s door again. No one answered. He was surprised.

He knew that the key was put under the door-mat when no one was at home. He raised the mat and saw the key. Then he went back to Karen’s rooms.

She seemed to be sleeping. Her face was like a piece of chalk. Her strawy hair, like a flaming helmet, contrasted in ghastly fashion with that pallor. After she had lain rigid for a while, she had undressed herself and crept back into bed.

Christian listened at the wall again and again, trying to catch some voice, some sign of life from the Hofmann flat. Silence. When two hours had passed, he took a lighted candle and stepped out into the hall. The key was still under the mat.

He thought he heard a sound of lamentation in the air. He did not think he had the right to unlock the door and enter the flat. And yet, after he had stood there for some time in indecision, he slipped the key into the keyhole and opened the door.

A breath of melancholy came from the empty room. He put the candle on the table and caught sight of Hofmann’s letter of farewell. He hesitated to read it. He thought he heard steps and stopped to listen. The feeling that the letter would explain Ruth’s absence finally decided him to read it.

The letter seemed to him to remove all doubt. She had probably thought her father still in the city, and set out to find him and dissuade him from his plan. The acquaintance with whom she had hoped to find him probably lived in Prenzlauer Alley, and Michael, when he had read her message, had probably hurried on to the same place.

Although this reasoning seemed plausible enough, his imagination was unsatisfied. He looked questioningly at the furniture and the walls, and touched with tenderness the books on the table that Ruth had so recently had in her hands. He left the room, locked the door, hid the key under the mat, and returned to Karen’s rooms.

He blew out the light and lay down on the sofa. These nights of brief and light slumber were exhausting him. His cheeks were thin, his profile peaked, his lids inflamed, and his brain morbidly tense.