Part 26

He took a room in Demminer Street with a grocer named Kahle. The room was immediately over the shop. The big sign saying “Eggs, Butter, Cheese” almost covered the low window; consequently there was little light in that hole. In addition the flooring and the walls were so thin that one could hear the ringing of the shop bell, the talk of the customers, and all other sounds. There he lay again and smoked cigarettes and thought of that man.

That man and he--there was no place in the world for them both. That was the upshot of his reflections.

Kahle demanded his rent money in advance. Niels Heinrich said that that demand offended his honour; he always paid on the last of the month. Kahle answered that that might be so, but that it was his custom to get rent in advance. Kahle’s wife--lean as a nail and with tall hair-dressing--screamed and became vulgar at once. Niels Heinrich contented himself with a few dry insults and promised to pay on the third.

He tried to work in a factory. But hammer and drill seemed to offer a conscious resistance to him; the wheels and flying belts seemed to whirl through his body, and the regular working-hours to smother him. After the noon-rest it was found that one of the machines was out of order. A screw was loose, and only the vigilance of the machinist had prevented a disaster. He declared to both the foreman and the engineer that the trouble was due to the deliberate act of a rogue; but investigation proved fruitless.

He had been ruined, so far as work was concerned, Niels Heinrich said to himself; and since he needed money he went to the widow. She said that all her available money consisted of sixteen marks. She offered him six. It wasn’t enough. “Boy, you look a sight!” she cried, frightened. He told her roughly not to put on airs, and added that she certainly couldn’t expect him to be satisfied with a few dirty pennies. She whined and explained that business was wretchedly slack; it hardly paid to tell people’s fortunes any more. She seemed to have nothing but ill-luck and to have lost her skill. Niels Heinrich answered darkly that he’d go to the colonies; he’d sail next week, and then she’d be rid of him. The widow was moved, and produced three small gold coins.

One he gave to Kahle.

Then he went to Griebenow’s gin shop, next to a dancing hall, finally to a notorious dive in a cellar.

He was a changed man--everybody said that, and he stared at them in an evil way. Nothing had any savour to him. Everything was disjointed; the world seemed to be coming apart. His fingers itched to jerk the lamps from their hooks. If he saw two people whispering together, it made him feel like raving; he wanted to pick up a chair, and bring it crashing down on their skulls. A woman made advances to him; he caught her so roughly by the neck that she screamed with terror. Her sweetheart called him to account, and drew his knife; the eyes of both blazed with hatred. The keeper of the dive, and several others in whose interest it was to have the peace kept, effected a partial reconciliation. The fellow’s mien was still menacing, but Niels Heinrich laughed his goat-like laugh. What could that fellow do to him? What could any of them do to him? Swine! All men, all--swine! What did they matter?

But there were four little words that he couldn’t get away from. “I shall expect you.” And these words sounded into the jabbering and slavering of the curs about him. “I shall expect you.” And how that man had stood up in front of him! Niels Heinrich drew in his lips with his teeth; and his own flesh disgusted him.

“‘I shall expect you.’ All right, old boy! You can go on expecting till you’re blue in the face.

“‘I shall expect you.’ Aw, can’t a man get no rest? Keep still or I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.

“‘I shall expect you.’ Yes, and you’ll meet me some day--in hell.

“‘I shall expect you.’”

New witnesses had appeared. In both Wisbyer and Stolpische Streets there were people who had last seen Ruth Hofmann in the company of a girl and of a huge butcher’s dog. All suspicious houses in Prenzlauer Alley had been searched. There were dives in plenty, but the place called “Adele’s Rest” attracted particular attention. In it was found a dog like the one described--a masterless dog, to be sure. Some said the dog had belonged to a Negro who worked in a circus; others that it had come from the stock-yards.

In the cellar traces of the murder were discovered. A worm-eaten board found behind a partition was black with blood. When the deed was done it must have rested on two wooden frames that still remained in the cellar. When the masterless dog was taken into the cellar, he howled. Between fifteen and twenty persons, including the innkeeper, the barmaid, frequenters of the inn, and dwellers in the house, were subjected to rigorous cross-questioning. Among the latter Molly Gutkind appeared highly suspicious by reason of her confused answers and perturbed demeanour. She was arrested and held as a witness.

Niels Heinrich had been to see her the night before. His private inquiries had confirmed the rumours that had previously come to him. It was undoubtedly she who had given refuge to the unknown boy. He determined to put on the thumbscrews. He was an expert at that.

His general impression was that she could hardly become a source of direct danger to him, but that she had gained a general notion of what must have happened. And when he recalled what Wahnschaffe had told him concerning Ruth’s brother, the connection was quite clear. If only he could have laid his hands on the boy, he would have seen to it that the latter didn’t wag his damned tongue for a while at least. It was the rottenest luck that took just him to the Little Maggot’s house. Now he’d have to make the wench harmless some way. Although he couldn’t extract three coherent words from her, and though she trembled like a straw beneath his gaze, yet she betrayed the knowledge she had gained from the boy’s delirious talk and had completed from what had transpired later. She wept copiously and confessed that she hadn’t left the house since then in her terror of meeting any one. Niels Heinrich told her icily that if she had any interest in her own life and didn’t want to ruin the boy into the bargain, she’d better not behave as much like a fool and an idiot as she had toward him. He knew a certain person who, if he got wind of her chatter, would wring her neck in five minutes. She’d better take the train and fade away quickly. Where was her home--in Pasewalk or Itzehoe? And if she didn’t fade away in double-quick time, he’d help her along! At that she sobbed and said she couldn’t go home. Her father had threatened to kill her; her mother had cursed her for the disgrace she had brought on them. He said if he came back to-morrow and still found her here, she’d have to dance to a less agreeable tune.

Next day she was arrested. On the day following Niels Heinrich was told that the Little Maggot, unwatched by her fellow-prisoners, had hanged herself by night on the window-bars of her cell.

He gave an appreciative nod.

But security in this one direction meant little to him. The net was being drawn tighter. There was whispering everywhere. Furtive glances followed him. Often he swung around wildly as though he would grasp some pursuer. Money was harder and harder to get. All that Karen had left brought him scarcely fifty talers. And everything that had once given him pleasure now filled him with loathing. It wasn’t an evil conscience; that conception was wholly unknown to him. It was contempt of life. He could hardly force himself to get up in the morning. The day was like melting, rancid cheese. Now and then he thought of flight. He was clever enough; he could make a fool of spies and detectives without much exertion. He’d find a place where they wouldn’t follow; he had planned it all out: first he’d leave on foot, then take a train, next a ship--if necessary as a stowaway in the coal-bunkers. It had been done before and done successfully. But what was the use? First of all he’d have to clear things up between himself and--that man! First he’d have to find out what that man knew and make him eat humble-pie. He couldn’t have that danger at his back. The man expected him. Very well. He’d go.

Though this reasoning may but have disguised an impulse stronger than hatred and sinister curiosity, the impulse itself was of driving and compelling force. He set out on that errand several times. At first he would be calm and determined, but whenever he saw the street and the house he would turn back. His restlessness turned into choking rage, until at last the suspense became insufferable. It was Friday; he delayed one more day. On Saturday he delayed until evening; then he went. He wandered about the house for a little, loitered in the doorway and in the yard. Then he saw a light in Christian’s room and entered.

XVI

Letitia with the countess and her whole train moved into a magnificently furnished apartment on Prince Bismarck Street near the Reichstag. Crammon took rooms in the Hotel de Rome. He didn’t like the modern Berlin hotels, with their deceptive veneer of luxury. He didn’t, indeed, like the city, and his stay in it gave him a daily sense of discomfort. Even when he strolled Unter den Linden or in the Tiergarten he was an image of joylessness. The collar of his fur-coat was turned up, and of his face nothing was visible but his morose eyes and his small but rather ignobly shaped nose.

The solitary walks increased his hypochondria more and more.

“Child, you are ruining me,” he said to Letitia one Sunday morning, as she outlined to him her programme for the week’s diversions.

She looked at him in astonishment. “But auntie gets twenty thousand a year from the head of the house of Brainitz,” she cried. “You’ve heard her say so herself.”

“I’ve heard,” Crammon replied. “But I’ve seen nothing. Money is something that one has to see in order to have faith in it.”

“Oh, what a prosaic person you are!” Letitia said. “Do you think auntie is lying?”

“Not exactly. But her personal relations to arithmetic may be called rather idealistic. From her point of view a cipher more or less matters no more than a pea more or less in a bag of peas. But a cipher is something gigantic, my dear, something demonic. It is the great belly of the world; it is mightier than the brains of an Aristotle or the armies of an empire. Reverence it, I beseech you.”

“How wise you are, how wise,” Letitia said, sadly. “By the way,” she added in a livelier tone, “auntie is ill. She has heart trouble. The doctor saw her and wrote her a prescription; a new remedy that he’s going to try on her--a mixture of bromine and calcium.”

“Why precisely bromine and calcium?” Crammon asked irritably.

“Oh, well, bromine is calming and calcium is stimulating,” Letitia chattered, quite at random, hesitated, stopped, and broke into her charming laughter. Crammon, like a school-teacher, tried for a while to preserve his dignity, but finally joined in her laughter. He threw himself into a deep armchair, drew up a little table on which was a bowl of fruit and little golden knives, and began to peel an apple. Letitia, sitting opposite him with a closed book in her hand, watched him with delicate and cunning attention. His graceful gestures pleased her. The contrast he afforded between plumpness and grace of movement always delighted her.

“I am told that you’re flirting with Count Egon Rochlitz,” Crammon said, while he ate his apple with massive zest. “I should like to sound a warning. The man is a notorious and indiscriminate Don Juan; all he requires is hips and a bosom. Furthermore, he is up to the eyes in debt; the only hope of his creditors is that he makes a rich marriage. Finally, he is a widower and the father of three small girls. Now you are informed.”

“It’s awfully nice and kind of you to tell me,” Letitia replied. “But if I like the man, why should your moral scruples keep me from continuing to like him? Nearly all men chase after women; all men have debts; very few have three little daughters, and I think that’s charming. He is clever, cultivated, and distinguished, and has the nicest voice. A man who has an agreeable voice can’t be quite bad. But I’m not proposing to marry him. Surely you’re not such a bad, stubborn old stepfather that you think I mean to marry every man who ... who, well, who has an agreeable voice? Or are you afraid, you wicked miser, that I’ll try to extract a dowry from you? I’m sure that’s the cause of your very bad humour. Come, Bernard, confess! Isn’t it so?”

Smiling she stood in front of him with a jesting motion of command. She touched his forehead with the index-finger of one hand; the other she raised half threateningly, half solemnly.

Crammon said: “Child, you are once more omitting the respect due me. Consider my whitening locks, my years and experience. Be humble and learn of me, and don’t mock at your venerable progenitor. My humour? Well, it isn’t the best in the world, I admit. Ah, it was better once. You seem not to know that somewhere in this city, far beyond our haunts, in its slums and morasses, there lives one who was dear to me above all men--Christian Wahnschaffe. You too, in some hoary antiquity, threw out your line after him. Do you remember? Ah, how long ago that is! That would have been a catch. And I, ass that I was, opposed that charming, little intrigue. Perhaps everything might have turned out differently. But complaint is futile. Everything is over between us. There is no path for me to where he is; and yet my soul is driven and goaded toward him, and while I sit here in decent comfort, I feel as though I were committing a scoundrelly action.”

Letitia had opened her eyes very wide while he spoke. It was the first time since the days at Wahnschaffe Castle that any one had spoken to her of Christian. His image arose, and she felt within her breast the faint beating of the wings of dread. There was a sweetness in that feeling and a poignancy.... One had to be as capable of forgetting as she was, in order to be able to recapture for a moment, in the deep chiming of a memoried hour, the keen emotion of a long ago.

She questioned him. At first he answered reluctantly, sentence by sentence; then, urged on by her impatience, his narrative flowed on. The utter astonishment of Letitia flattered him; he painted his picture in violent colours. Her delicate face mirrored the fleeting emotions of her soul. In her responsive imagination and vibrant heart everything assumed concreteness and immediate vividness. She needed no interpretations; they were all within her. She gazed into that unknown darkness full of presage and full of understanding. In truth, it all seemed familiar to her, familiar like a poem, as though she had lived with Christian all that time, and she knew more than Crammon could tell her, infinitely more, for she grasped the whole, its idea and form, its fatefulness and pain. She glowed and cried: “I must go to him.” But picturing that meeting, she grew frightened, and imagined a rapt look she would use, and Crammon’s lack of intensity annoyed her, and his whine of complaint seemed senseless to her.

“I always felt,” she said, with gleaming eyes, “that there was a hidden power in him. Whenever I had wicked little thoughts and he looked at me, I grew ashamed. He could read thoughts even then, but he did not know it.”

“I have heard you say cleverer things than you are doing now,” Crammon said, mockingly. But her enthusiasm moved him, and there welled up in him a jealousy of all the men who stretched out their hands after her.

“I shall go to him,” she said, smiling, “and ease my heart in his presence.”

“You were wiser in those days when you played at ball in that beautiful room while the lightning flashed,” Crammon murmured, lost in memories. “Has madness overtaken you, little girl, that you would act the part of a Magdalene?”

“I’d like, just once, to live for a month in utter loneliness,” Letitia said, yearningly.

“And then?”

“Then perhaps I should understand the world. Ah, everything is so mysterious and so sad.”

“Youth! Youth! Thy words are fume and folly!” Crammon sighed, and reached for a second apple.

At this point the dressmaker arrived with a new evening gown for Letitia. She withdrew to her room, and after a little while she reappeared, excited by her frock, and demanding that Crammon admire her, since she felt worthy of admiration. Yet a patina of melancholy shimmered on her, and even while she imagined the admiring looks that would soon be fixed on her--for Crammon’s did not suffice her--she dreamed with a sense of luxury of renunciation and of turning from the world.

And while she went to her aunt to collect the tribute of that lady’s noisier admiration, she still dreamed of renunciation and of turning from the world.

A bunch of roses was brought her. But even while she gave herself up to their beauty and fragrance with a characteristic completeness, she grew pale and thought of Christian’s hard and sombre life; and she determined to go to him. Only that night there was a ball at the house of Prince Radziwill.

There she met Wolfgang Wahnschaffe, but avoided him with an instinctive timidity. She was a great success. Her nature and fate had reached a peak of life and exercised an assured magic from which, in innocent cunning, she wrung all possible advantages.

On the way home in the motor she asked Crammon: “Tell me, Bernard, doesn’t Judith live in Berlin too? Do you ever hear from her? Is she happy with her actor? Why don’t we call on her?”

“No one will prevent you from calling on her,” answered Crammon. The snow was falling thickly. “She lives in Matthäikirch Street. I cannot tell you whether she is happy; it doesn’t interest me. One would have a lot to do if one insisted on finding out whether the women who drag our friends to the nuptial couch discover the game to have been worth the candle or not. One thing is certain--Lorm is no longer what he was, the incomparable and unique. I once called him the last prince in a world doomed to hopeless vulgarization. That is all over. He is going downhill, and therefore I avoid him. There is nothing sadder on earth than a man who deteriorates and an artist who loses himself. And it is the woman’s fault. Ah, yes, you may laugh--it is her fault.”

“How cruel you are, and how malevolent,” said Letitia, and sleepily leaned her cheek against his shoulder.

She determined to visit Judith. It seemed to her like a preparation for that other and more difficult visit, which she might thus delay for a little while, and to which her courage was not yet equal. It lured her when she thought of it as an adventure; but a voice within her told her that she must not let it be one.

XVII

Every time Christian saw Johanna Schöntag she seemed more emaciated and more worn. Beneath his observant glance she smiled, and that glance was meant to deceive him. She thought herself well hidden under her wit and her little harlequin-like grimaces.

She usually appeared toward evening to sit with Michael for an hour or two. She felt it to be her duty. She pretended to be utterly frivolous; yet when she had assumed a task she was pedantically faithful in its execution. On the day when she observed that the boy’s improvement had reached a point which made her service unnecessary, so vivid a look betokening her sense of futility stole into her face that Michael gazed at her and conceived a definite idea of her character. Checked though it still was by his old terror of human beings, gratitude for her sacrifices shone in his eyes. She began to employ his thoughts; her ways were so alien and yet so familiar. He could not rise to the point of frank communication, but when she rose to go he begged her to stay a little longer. Then the habitual silence fell between them, and Johanna, not really reading, let her tormented eyes glide over the page of some French or English novel that she had brought with her. But this time he put a question to her, and after a while another, and then another; and thus arose conversations in which they sought and explored each other. Johanna was by turns superior or mocking or motherly or elusive. She had weapons and veils in plenty. What he said was didactic or shy, or sudden and heated. Her sayings were often double-edged, and confused him; then she would laugh her sharp laughter, and he would be disillusioned and hurt.

He asked her to tell him whence she came, who she was, what she was doing, and she told him of her girlhood and her parents’ house. To him who was familiar with poverty alone it sounded like a fairy-tale. He said: “You are beautiful,” and she really seemed so to him, and his naïve homage made her blush and gave her a little inner courage. But her hands, he added, were not the hands of a rich girl. She seemed surprised, and answered with an expression of self-hatred that her hands, like a cripple’s hump or the devil’s splay foot, were the symbol of what she really was.

Michael shook his head; but he now understood her poor, chilled soul with its infinite yearning and its infinite disappointment. When he asked her what was her aim in life and what her occupation, she looked at him with disturbed surprise. What aim or occupation was there for a creature like herself? On another occasion, driven by the desire for self-torment, she revealed to him the complete emptiness of her life. It was a bad joke that fate was playing on her, a medicine one had to swallow in order to be healed; and healing was where life is not.

She chatted in this strain, but told him not to be bitter. It wasn’t worth while; the world was too trivial, grey, and wretched. “If only there weren’t so many people in it,” she sighed, and wrinkled her forehead in her comic way. Yet she was ashamed before the lad too, and became conscious of the fact that her words were blasphemous. Her feeling was a torment to herself, and she did not perceive that it communicated warmth to another. Timidly she tried to measure the young lad’s power of comprehension by his terrible experience, of which she knew no details, or by the sombre earnestness of his mind that made him seem maturer than his years. And she sank even lower in her own esteem when she saw him thoughtful and moved.

But precisely the secret wound of her weakness, which she revealed to him, and the lacerating conflict which she carried on with herself--these brought an awakening to him and stirred his will to life. He said: “You should have known Ruth.” A strange shadow and yet a living contradiction of Ruth came to him from Johanna. He said again and again: “You should have known Ruth.” To her question why, he had no answer but a sudden radiance in his glance in which Ruth seemed hitherto but to have slumbered. But now her image was a flame of fire that guided him.

Johanna said to Christian: “I don’t believe your protégé needs me any longer. You certainly don’t. So I’m superfluous, and had better get out of the way.”

“I want very much to talk to you,” said Christian. “I have wanted to beg you for long to talk to me. Will you come at the same hour to-morrow, or shall I come to you? I shall be glad to do whatever you like.”

She grew pale, and said she would come.

XVIII