Part 24

“I shall tell you that,” said Christian, with an expression that had grown more meditative from minute to minute. “A human being like this Joachim Heinzen was not capable of killing Ruth. Think what it means to kill a human being. And when that human being is Ruth! Oh, no, it’s quite out of the question. The poor fellow is actually weak-minded. Many believe him guilty for that very reason; but no weak-minded man could have killed Ruth. Even if we suppose that he obeyed his animal instincts utterly, and that in his bestial rage he lost all self-control and all human semblance, yet he could never have gone to the ultimate length, to murder. Not this lad; it is out of the question. I have looked at his hands--at his hands and at his eyes. It is out of the question.”

He paused. Niels Heinrich leaned against the oven, holding his hands carefully between his back and the tiles.

Christian continued, in a voice that was gentle and yet extraordinarily clear and penetrating: “It is out of the question, because he does not possess the necessary qualifications for the deed. I have tried to sink myself as profoundly as possible into his psychical life. I have succeeded in excluding from my consciousness all other thoughts and images, in order to arrive at a vision of his character as well as of the rôle which he played in connection with the crime. And when I have imagined him in his most bestial unrestraint, in all the rage of his lechery, I am still convinced that at the last moment he would have succumbed to Ruth. If Ruth had looked at him as he raised his arm, being what he is and as I know him, he would have weakened. He would have fallen whimpering on his knees, and rather killed himself than done her any hurt. And if she had inspired him with but one spark of thought or feeling, she would have won him over entirely. You may reply that these are mere hypotheses and suppositions; but that is not the case when one considers what Ruth was. Did you know her? Had you ever met her?”

This innocent and harmless question brought a ghastly pallor into the face of Niels Heinrich. He murmured something, and shrugged his shoulders.

“You may also make this objection: the same pressure which drove him to his confession may also have driven him to the deed itself. What will not a human being do in the darkness of mania, especially one so degraded and brutal and spiritually infirm. I consider his confessions quite valueless; it is clear that he has been influenced and commanded to make them. He contradicts himself constantly, and denies to-day what he affirmed yesterday. He sticks only to the one point of his guilt. But in this stubborn self-accusation there is more than mere persistence; there is despair and utter horror. And these are not manifested as they would be by a guilty soul in the torments of conscience, but as they would be manifested by a child who has spent a long night in a dark room, where monstrous and ghastly horrors shook the very foundations of its soul. His conscience should have been eased by confession, but the contrary is true. How is that to be explained?

“Furthermore, he is supposed to have lured Ruth to a hidden place. Certainly it must have been obscure and hidden, for the deed was not done in woods or lonely fields. But in spite of the most rigid search, no such spot has been discovered, and at no hearing has it been possible to persuade Heinzen to point it out. He is being questioned on this point continually, but he is resolutely silent or answers nonsense. Two explanations have been proposed. One is that he desires to save an accomplice who might be tracked from the scene of the crime. The other is that he suffers from one of those disturbances or even complete interruptions of the memory, such as are familiar to psychiatrists in their study of abnormal types. I accept neither the one explanation nor the other. It is my opinion that he doesn’t know the place. He was not perhaps even present when the murder was committed. It is possible that he was drugged or drunk, and awakened from his stupor only to see the body. And it is possible that the sight of the body produced in him a fearful self-deception, or that he was tricked and driven into believing himself the murderer....”

Niels Heinrich advanced a single step. His jaw shook. He felt as though a rain of burning stones were falling on him. A dark astonishment and horror were revealed in his face. He wanted to be silent, to jeer, to go; he wanted to seem cold and unconscious of any knowledge or understanding. For danger was upon him, the ultimate danger of vengeance, of the sword, the rope, the axe. He saw them all. Yet he was not capable of self-control; something within was stronger than he. “Man alive....” The words came clucking from his throat on fire. “Man alive....” Then came a wild terror of increasing the danger by his behaviour. He couldn’t stand that; it was too much for his nerves. What had that man to do with it? And again he fell silent before Christian’s slightly blinking glance, and became tense with staring and waiting. He’d have to watch this man now; the business was getting bad; it was necessary now to guard his life. God, what wouldn’t that accursed mouth utter?

Christian walked to the window and returned. He walked around the table and returned. He had become aware of the stirring in Niels Heinrich; and he had the impression of having witnessed the bursting of some taut vessel and felt the flick of flying slime. But this impression was not tangible at once. Only he had the curious feeling of having received a confirmation of thoughts and visions of which he was himself still faintly doubtful; and these he wanted to develop and fortify. He said: “To lure Ruth to the spot where she was killed needed a certain cunning. Careful preparations were necessary, and guarded plans; and these were skilfully made, as their success illustrates. But all witnesses who know Heinzen agree that he is incapable of such activities. He is described as so stupid that he cannot remember names or numbers; and then it is assumed that he could have committed the murder with the brutal, merciless violence of a degraded debauchee. The experts in criminology assert that precisely this mixture of the cunning and the brutal is characteristic of such types and such crimes. That may be true; but it proves nothing in this case, which was not so simple. Ruth went another path from that to Joachim Heinzen.”

“Another, eh? What one, eh? Well, well,” Niels Heinrich croaked. “Ain’t it enough to give you a belly-ache? Ain’t it enough to----” He took his hat, which he had hung up at the beginning of the conversation, put it on at a dashing angle, and prepared to go. But Christian knew that Niels Heinrich would not go, and followed him with a passionately inquiring glance. He was terribly moved.

Niels Heinrich got as far as the door. There he turned around, and with a peering, repressed look drew from his pocket, with apparent indifference, a little revolver. He held it in one hand. With the other hand he played, still indifferently and as though to amuse himself, with the trigger and the barrel.

Christian paid no attention to this perfidious gesture. He scarcely saw it. He stood in the middle of the room, and, in the irresistible excitement which had mastered him, pressed his right hand over his eyes. He said: “Perhaps I only dreamed that she determined of her own free will to die. Oh, it was murder, none the less. But she consented to it. And those last hours of hers! They must have been unheard of--verging on the ultimate which no feeling can reach. Step by step! And then at last she begged for the end. Perhaps I have only dreamed it, but it seems to me as though I had seen....”

He stopped, for a sharp, whip-like report resounded. A shot had been fired. One of the chairs beside the table trembled; the bullet was buried in its leg. But it had also grazed the back of Niels Heinrich’s hand, and from the wound, which was like a cut, the blood trickled. He cursed and shook himself.

“You’ve hurt yourself,” Christian said, sympathetically, and went up to him. Yet both were listening--like accomplices. The entrance of another seemed equally undesirable to both. Although the detonation had been moderate, it had been heard in the adjoining flats. One heard doors opening and questioning, scolding, frightened voices. After a few minutes the silence fell again. The people in the house were used to sudden alarms, and quickly quieted down.

Niels Heinrich wrapped his rather soiled handkerchief about his wounded hand. But Christian hurried into the next room, and returned with a jug of water and a clean cloth. He washed the wound and bandaged it expertly. He did so with a tenderness and care that made Niels Heinrich regard him with tensely wrinkled forehead and sombre shyness. He had never seen any one, no man at least, act thus. He was passive. He was contemptuous, yet could not hold his contempt. He could not but let Christian finish.

“It might have had dangerous consequences,” Christian murmured.

Niels Heinrich did not answer, and so there ensued a long and rather strange silence.

Niels Heinrich became aware of the terrible meaning of this silence, and words came from him raspingly: “Well, what’s wanted?”

Christian leaned with both hands upon the back of the chair, and looked at Niels Heinrich. He was pale, and struggled for expression. “It would be important to determine where Michael was hidden in the time during which he was gone,” he began. He spoke differently now--more gropingly and searchingly, quiveringly and uncertainly, as though, during his very speaking, he were constantly addressing questions to himself. “It would be extremely important. Michael is Ruth’s brother. Perhaps you have heard that for six days he could not be found anywhere. Whenever the commissary of police or the investigating judge try to question him, he has an attack of hysterics. So they have determined to let him be for a while, merely keeping a strict watch over him; but he will not move from the room, and utters no sound. The medical experts shake their heads and are at a loss. And everything depends on his being persuaded to speak at last. Surely it would throw some light on the mystery. But much would be gained if only we discovered where he was hidden.”

Niels Heinrich stared in dark consternation. This man grew more and more terrible. The thought of flight quivered in his eyes. “How d’you expect me to know?” he grunted. “What the bloody hell do I care? How should I know? I told you before--what the----” He lapsed back into his Berlinese jargon, as though it were a refuge.

“I merely thought that rumours might have come your way, that perhaps people who live near the Heinzens noticed or heard something. Do you recall any such thing?”

The question was so earnest, so full of monition and almost of beseeching, that Niels Heinrich, instead of yielding to an impulse of anger, listened, listened to that voice, and had the appearance of one who was bound in fetters. And gradually he really recalled a rumour of that kind which had come to him. There was among his acquaintances a woman of the streets called Molly Gutkind. On account of her plump body and white skin she was known as the Little Maggot. She was quite young, barely seventeen. A few days ago he had been told that the Little Maggot had given shelter to a boy for quite a while, that she had carefully hidden him from everyone, and that, since then, a complete change had come over her. Before that, she had been cheerful and careless; now she was melancholy, and haunted the streets no more.

He had been told this as he was told all the news of the lower world, but he had paid no attention to the anecdote, and it had slipped from his memory. Now it emerged in his mind and fitted the case in question. An instinct told him that it fitted; but that very perception increased his feeling of defencelessness before this man who seemed now to be gazing into him and tearing from him things silent and hidden and even forgotten. He must follow up the rumour, and very secretively get to the bottom of it and test it. In order to say something and tear himself away at last, he murmured that he’d see what could be done, but the gentleman mustn’t count on him, because spying was not his kind of business. He dragged himself shiftily to the door with a wavering, withered expression. He rubbed his moist fingers together and lit a cigarette, shivered in the coolness that met him from the outer hall, and turned up the collar of his yellow overcoat.

Christian courteously accompanied him to the door, and said softly: “I hope to see you soon. I shall expect you.”

On the landing of the second storey Niels Heinrich stopped and laughed his goat-like laugh senselessly into the void.

XIII

Prince Wiguniewski wrote to Cornelius Ermelang at Vaucluse in the South of France:

“In your Petrarchan solitude you seem to have lost all touch with the world, since you inquire so insistently after our diva. I thought you were still in Paris and that you had seen Eva Sorel. For she returned from there only a few weeks ago--returned like a general after a victorious campaign of three weeks, full of fame and booty. Didn’t you learn from the newspapers at least of the feverish enthusiasm which she has recently created in international society?

“In your inquiry there is an undertone of anxiety. I understand the reason for it, even though you are reserved on that point. Brief as your visit to her during your stay in Petrograd may have been, your eyes, which are so practised in reading the souls of men, must have perceived the change that has come over her. I hesitate to call that change one that should cause us anxiety, for doubtless it conforms somehow to the law of her being. Yet to behold it means pain to us who witnessed her beginnings and her rise--to those ten or twelve people in Europe, the fairest experience of whose youth was her sweetness and radiance and starry freedom from earth’s heaviness. She was timeless; she was at each moment that very moment’s gift. I need not describe to you what she was; you knew her. But is it for us to quarrel or mourn because a given development does not correspond to our expectations? However we may strive and cry, that which has become and now is unquestionably holds the wiser and the deeper sense of life. We always want too much, and so end by seeing and understanding too little. We need more humility.

“It is a fact that she employs and stirs public opinion in our country as scarcely any other human being does. Every one knows at all times who is in her favour and who has fallen from grace. The luxury that surrounds her generates the wildest fables, and does, indeed, surpass anything ever known. Her monthly income runs into the hundreds of thousands, and her fortune is estimated at between twenty and thirty millions of rubles. Twice a week she receives a carload of flowers from the Riviera, and twice from the Crimea.

“Concerning the castle which she is building at Yalta on the sea, details are told that remind one of the Arabian Nights. It is to be finished in a month, and magnificent festivities are planned for the house-warming. I am among the guests invited. Every one is talking about this castle. The park is said to cover an area of five square miles. Only by a most extravagant expenditure of money and labour could the whole thing have been completed within a year. I am told that the central building has a tower from which one has a magnificent view of the sea, and that this tower is a copy of the tower of the Signoria at Florence. A gilded spiral staircase with a balustrade of costly enamel leads upward within, and each window affords a carefully selected view of the southern landscape. To adorn the walls of one of her great rooms she desired the remaining paintings which the British had still left in El Hira, the celebrated ruin in the Arabian desert. To obtain them, extensive commercial and diplomatic negotiations were necessary. Further large sums were spent and difficulties surmounted to fit out an expedition which was in the desert for three months and has but just returned. Its task was as dangerous as it was romantic, and seven of its members lost their lives. When Eva was told of this, she seemed to be frightened and to regret the boldness of her desires. But then she saw the pictures, and was so entranced that her smile seemed almost to express a satisfaction at the sacrifices they had cost.

“There is no exaggeration in this account. Such is her nature now. Those inconceivably beautiful hands treat the world as though it were possessed by slaves and meant and destined for her alone. I myself beheld her one day crouching before the paintings of a strange, far age, and I was shaken by the expression with which she regarded the gestures of those archaic figures. It was an expression of estrangedness and cruelty.

“It is quite by chance that I drifted to the subject of the ancient paintings and how they were procured. But I see now that I could have chosen no shorter path to the kernel of what I should like to tell you. The events of the past few days actually start from that incident. Few men, of course, can raise the veil that hides these events to-day and will probably always hide them. Any one who has not, like myself, gained some insight through a series of lucky accidents, is simply groping in the dark. I must beg you, too, to observe the strictest secrecy. This letter, which is being sent with especial precautions and which a courier of the embassy is taking across the frontier, may serve as a document entrusted to your care. By its help a later age will be able to track the genesis of certain happenings to their most distant roots.

“Scarcely had the paintings of El Hira arrived, than reclamations on the ground of violated property rights were made by France. The arrangements with England were asserted to have omitted all consideration of the legal rights of a Parisian stock-company, and the French government overwhelmed our ministry with notes and protests. The leader of the expedition, a courageous and witty scholar named Andrei Gabrilovitch Yaminsky, was accused of open robbery. The whole matter was unpleasant and the consternation great, and the noise intimidated even the old foxes of diplomacy. They feared that they had committed a bad blunder, and thus promenaded into the trap set for them. Since this affair, amusingly enough, actually threatened to darken the political sky, the important thing, above all, was to keep it from the knowledge of the Grand Duke Cyril, who holds the threads of foreign affairs in his hands like a spider in the midst of its web, and who feels the gentlest vibration. All efforts were directed to this end. Terror of the Grand Duke’s rage created the most grotesque situations in the responsible ministerial offices.

“The minister in person went to Eva Sorel. She declared proudly that she would assume full responsibility and guard everyone concerned from unpleasant consequences. But there were grave doubts as to that. Similar cases were recalled, in which later on a malicious punishment had, after all, been the portion of the subordinates. So Eva was earnestly begged to give up the mural paintings. She resisted steadily, asserted her right to them, and grew defiant. When the officials were foolish enough to have Andrei Yaminsky, to whom she had taken a great liking, arrested, she threatened to inform the Grand Duke, who happened to be staying at Tsarskoye Selo. Thus terror rose to its utmost height. And now the original instigators of the whole intrigue held their fit time to have come. Suddenly there was calm and the storm had passed. But what had been the hidden and ultimate occasion of it all?

“The initiated whispered of an unholy bargain; but their knowledge, it seems to me, reaches no farther than mine. I sit near enough to the loom to see the shuttles flying to and fro. But I can assert that it is weaving an evil web. In what age have not the arts of a courtesan served to drag nations into slaughter? Perhaps you think the twentieth century too advanced for cabals in the style of Mazarin? I am not so sure of it. And perhaps you also think that the great catastrophes and revolutions use the wills and the actions of trivial mortals only in appearance, and that both accusation and guilt lose their validity when we become aware of the impersonal march of fate? But we do not grasp that march. We are human and we must judge, even as we must suffer, just because we must suffer.

“The unholy bargain involved in this instance concerns the building of fortresses on our Polish and Volhynian frontiers. For unknown reasons the Grand Duke opposed this plan until now. But during the past few days there has been talk of a new government loan. Well, there is one human being and only one capable of having inclined his rigid will toward this project. Why say more? One shudders at the thought of a connection between mural paintings five thousand years old and the springs of modern diplomatic trickery; between the bought complaisance of that incomparable body, that true adornment of the world, and the erection of fortress walls and casemates. The comedy rends one’s heart.

“But that is not all my story. Connected with these events is the death of Andrei Gabrilovitch Yaminsky. I have indicated the fact that Eva was markedly attracted toward him. The courage and energy he had shown in that expedition to the desert, his mind, and not least of all his physical advantages dazzled her. She distinguished him in every way. Since she admits the existence of no barriers and gives her impulses complete expression in action, she did not hesitate in this instance, and Yaminsky was granted a happiness of which he had not dared to dream, and which seems to have robbed him of all moral equilibrium. It filled him to overflowing; it crazed him. Among his friends one evening, over the wine, of course, he began to chatter and boasted of his conquest. He realized his frightful error too late. What would have been contemptible weakness in any instance was sheer crime here. Too late he besought his witnesses to forget his words, to be silent, to consider him a liar and a boaster. Nor did it help him to seek them out singly and persuade them to secrecy. The rumour was started. A discreet and suspected affair would not have caused more than silent or whispered curiosity. The thing openly acknowledged became a topic of general talk. Punishment did not delay long, and Fyodor Szilaghin was the executioner.

“It is not easy to define the rôle which Szilaghin plays in Eva’s present life. Now he seems to be her warder, now her seducer. No one knows whether he desires to please and win her, or whether he is but the servant and Argus of his sombre lord and friend. I believe that Eva herself is in the dark on this point. His enigmatic character, his masterly subtlety and impenetrable faithlessness seemed to me like the visible symbols of the darkening and disquietude of Eva’s soul. There is no doubt that he acted with her knowledge and consent when he undertook to punish Yaminsky. But I dare not decide whether they ever actually spoke of the matter, whether it was done at his or her demand, whether her disappointment made her yield to him or her anger made her revengeful for herself, whether he acted in defence of her honour or that of his master. At all events, the punishment was accomplished.