Part 29

“A clear road,” was the answer, “the immediate setting aside of his troublesome rights and claims as the firstborn. The shame and disgrace that he spreads pass all belief.”

He explained that certain individuals, including physicians, were willing to serve as witnesses and to co-operate. Yet actual internment was an extreme measure. If it should fail or the parental consent to carry it out should be unobtainable, there was another plan which was being prepared with equal care. The ground would be dug away from under his feet; he must be brought to leave the city and, preferably, the country. It was possible to have Christian boycotted at the university, though he rarely appeared there now. Another promising plan was to prejudice against him the people of the quarter where he lived; a beginning in that direction had already been made. But there wasn’t much time; the evil was infectious, and the shameful rumours grew more troublesome daily. It would not do to wait until the murder case with its fatal publicity came to trial; he must be made to disappear before that. There would be good prospects in Judith going to him in a friendly way and persuading him with sisterly kindness to disappear and not compel his relatives to use the force which the law would readily place in their hands. If Judith failed and he refused, everything must be done to send their father on the same errand. He had written to his father; if no decisive measures were taken within a week, he would telegraph. Furthermore, friends had gone to the Privy Councillor to plead for swift action.

There Wolfgang sat, pale with rage, balked in his mean worldliness.

“So far as Judith is concerned, she’s unapproachable in the matter,” Lorm said coldly. “I’ll speak to her once more, but I fear it will be useless. I myself would consider it desirable for her to go to Christian, though my reasons are not yours; but Judith cannot be persuaded. The fate of others, even of her own brother, are mere phantoms to her. A year ago she was still capable of refusing passionately any participation in such a plan; to-day she has probably simply forgotten Christian. She plays and dreams her life away. I am sorry that I do not know Christian myself. But people have come to seek me out for so many years that I have lost the impulse and ability to go to them. I must resign myself to that, though it is an evil, no doubt.”

Wolfgang was surprised at these words and grew quite icy. He asked Lorm whether Judith would receive him, Wolfgang, pleasantly. Lorm thought that she would. Therewith the interview came to an end. They shook hands with conventional indifference.

Lorm did not dare tell Judith of his meeting with Wolfgang. He was afraid of her questions, of her feeling his sympathy with Christian, of clouding the puppet-show of her life. Yet she was gradually draining all the light out of his own existence. Her niggardliness in the household became so extreme that the servants complained of hunger. The baker and the butcher could obtain settlement of their bills only when they threatened to bring suit. Judith intercepted the dunning letters they addressed to Lorm. She sorted the mail every morning. He knew it; one of the maids, whom she had discharged after an ugly quarrel, had flung the information at him. He did not reproach Judith. She began to cut down the expenses for his personal needs too, and he had to eke out his diet in restaurants and wine-rooms. But the sums that she wasted for frocks, coats, hats, and antiquities increased to the point of madness. She bought old cases and chests which she promptly sent to the attic; Chinese vases, Renaissance embroideries, ivory boxes, cut-glass goblets, candelabra of chased metal work. Her purchases were without discrimination, and served only the whim of the moment. The things stood or lay about as in a shop; they served neither use nor adornment. Now and then she had a generous impulse, and presented some object to one of the women who flattered her and whose society had therefore become indispensable to her. Afterwards she would regret her generosity, and abuse its recipient as though a trick had been played on her. In spite of the great number of things about her, she would observe the absence or displacement of any object at once, accuse every one who had entered the room of theft, and know no rest until the lost thing had been found. In her dressing-room there hung dozens of garments and hats and shawls that had never touched her body except when she had tried them on on the day of their purchase. It satisfied her to possess them. They might go out of fashion or be full of moths; to possess them was enough.

Lorm knew this, but he bore her no resentment. He made no objection; he let her do as she desired. He did not or would not see the obvious consequences of his boundless acquiescence--her degeneration and degradation and heartlessness. She was to him still the woman who had sacrificed everything in order to enter his lonely and joyless life. He had condemned his achingly modest soul to permanent gratitude, and had no conviction of any right of protest. He who had thrust so many from him, and had been cold toward so many, and had contemned so much genuine and active love, whose gentlest gesture had not only commanded but entranced thousands of watchers and listeners, this same man endured humiliation and neglect as though to expiate his sins, and was silent and steadfast in undeviating fidelity.

During this period his colleagues in the theatre trembled at his outbursts of irritability; even Emanuel Herbst’s philosophical calm had little power over him. He went to fill engagements in Breslau, Leipzig, and Stuttgart. He impressed people more profoundly than any actor had done for decades. One felt in him the turning-point of an epoch and the ultimate perfect moment of an artist. The public, wrought upon by his spirit to the height of rare perceptions, had a presentiment of the finality of his appearances, and was shaken in the passion of its applause as by the tragic, scarlet glow of a sunset that betokens doom.

He returned home, and took to his bed. After a thorough examination his physician’s face grew serious. He demanded a trained nurse. Judith was at a concert; the housekeeper promised to report to her mistress. When Judith returned, she sat down at his bedside. She was astonished and pouted a little, and talked to Lorm as though he were a parrot who refuses to chatter his accustomed words. It was the housekeeper who received the trained nurse.

“Well, Puggie dear,” Judith said next morning, “aren’t you well yet? Shall I have them cook you a little soup? I suppose the Suabians gave you too many goodies?”

“Puggie” smiled, reached for his wife’s hand, and kissed it.

Judith withdrew her hand in terror. “Oh, you wicked boy,” she cried, “you mustn’t do that! Do you want to infect your sweetheart? Think of it! Puggie mustn’t do that till we know what ails him and that it isn’t dangerous. Understand that?”

Letitia had announced her visit for that afternoon. She came, accompanied by Crammon. Judith’s cordial reception was largely the result of consuming curiosity. The two women, who had not seen each other since their girlhood, regarded each other. Where have you been stranded? And you? Thus their eyes asked, while their lips flowed with flattery. Crammon seemed to curdle of his own sourness.

Fifteen minutes later the maid appeared and announced that Count Rochlitz’s chauffeur was at the door. The count was waiting in the car. “Ask him to come up,” Letitia commanded. “You don’t mind, do you?” She turned to Judith. “An old friend of mine.”

The count obeyed and came up. He was charming and told racing anecdotes.

At the end of another fifteen minutes came the Countess Brainitz with Ottomar and Reinhold. It had been agreed that they were to call for Letitia. They all filled Judith’s drawing-room, and there was a hubbub of talk.

Crammon said to Ottomar, whom his condescension at times permitted to learn his opinions and feelings: “Once when I was in Tunis I was awakened by violent voices in the morning. I thought the native population had risen in revolt and rushed from my bed. But there were only two elderly, dark-brown ladies carrying on a friendly conversation under my window. It is characteristic of women to produce a maximum of din with a minimum of motive. They are constantly saving the Capitol. I am inclined to believe that the Romans, a nation of braggarts and sabre-rattlers, infused a rather ungallant implication into the pleasant fable of the geese. Usually their judgment of female nature was blithely sophomoric. As proof I adduce the story of Tarquin and Lucretia. Monstrous nonsense, penny-dreadful stuff! In my parental house we had a calendar on which the story was related in verse and bodied forth in pictures. This cataract of chastity gave me an utterly perverse notion of certain fundamental facts of human nature. It took years to penetrate the character of the deception.”

Ottomar said: “I grant you what you say of all women except of Letitia. Observe how she moves, how she carries her head. She is an exquisite exception. Her presence makes every occasion festive; she is the symbol of lovely moments. She will never age, and all her actions are actions in a dream. They have no consequences, they have no objective reality, and she expects them to have neither.”

“Very deep and very finely observed,” said Crammon, with a sigh. “But heaven guard you from trying to establish a practical household with such a fairy creature.”

“One shouldn’t, one mustn’t,” the young man replied, with conviction.

Crammon arose, and went over to Judith. “Isn’t Edgar at home, Frau Lorm?” he asked. “Can one get to him? We have not seen each other for long.”

“Edgar is ill,” Judith answered, with a frown, as though she had reason to feel affronted by the fact.

A silence fell on the room. All felt a sense of discomfort. And Crammon saw, as in a new and sudden vision, Judith’s projecting cheek-bones, her skin injured by cosmetics, her morbidly compressed mouth with its lines of bitterness, her fluttering glance, and her restless hands. There was something of decay in her and about her, something that came of over-intensity and the fever of gambling, of a slackening and rotting of tissues. Her cheerfulness arose from rancour, her vivacity was that of a marionette with creaking joints.

Letitia had forgotten to mention Christian. Not until they reached the street did she recall the purpose of her visit. She reproached Crammon for not having reminded her. “It doesn’t matter,” Crammon said. “I’m going back to-morrow and you can come with me. I want to see Lorm. I have a presentiment of evil; misfortune is brewing.”

“O Bernard,” Letitia said, plaintively, “you croak enough to make the sun lose its brightness and roses their fragrance.”

“No. Only I happen to know that a change is coming over the face of the earth; and you poor, lost souls do not see it,” answered Crammon, with forefinger admonishingly raised.

And he departed and went to Borchardt, where he intended to dine exquisitely. Each time he dined there, he called it the murderer’s last meal.

XXVI

When Michael left the church at Johanna’s side he felt profoundly stirred by the experience of the past hour.

They rode as far as Schönhauser Avenue, and from there on they went on foot. The flurries of snow and the drifts on the ground made walking doubly difficult for the limping boy.

During their long ride he had been silent, although his face showed the pathetic eagerness of his thoughts and feelings. He had but recently learned to express himself; formerly he had had to choke everything down. And since he had learned to speak out he seized every opportunity. His words were fresh, and his gestures expressive and extreme. His tone belied his youth. With shrill accents he deadened attacks of timidity. Afraid of not being taken as seriously as seemed to befit him and his confusions and insights and experiences, he would often defend daring assertions stubbornly, while his own conviction of their truth was already wavering. On the way out he had repeatedly begun to talk of Christian. His soul was filled by Christian. His worship, half timid, half full of wild enthusiasm, expressed itself in various ways. His mind had lacked an ideal and the spiritual centres and intoxications of youth; now he gave himself up to these the more gladly. Yet, in conformity to his brooding nature, he tricked out Christian’s simpleness in various mysteries and problems, and on this point Johanna could not set him right. She evaded his remarks. The boy seemed to her too impetuous, too absolute, too eager. He affronted the modesty of her feelings; he was too fond of rending veils. Yet he fascinated her, and kept her in a state of restlessness and gentle pain; and she needed both. She could fancy that she was protecting him, and through this duty she was better protected against herself.

He said it hadn’t been the music that had overwhelmed him. Music of that kind was an expression through difficult forms, and one should not, it seemed to him, let pleasure in the sounds deceive one in regard to one’s ignorance. One must know and learn.

“What was it then? What did impress you?” Johanna asked. But her question showed only a superficial curiosity. The way and the day had wearied her beyond the desire of speech.

“It was the church,” said Michael. “It was the song in praise of Christ. It was the devout multitude.” He stopped, and his head fell. In his childhood and until quite recently, he told her in his hoarse and slightly broken boyish voice, he had not been able to think of Jesus Christ without hatred. A religiously brought up Jewish child out in the country, who had suffered the jeers and abuse of Gentiles, felt that hatred in his very bones. To such a child Christ was the enemy who had deserted and traduced his people, the renegade and source of all that people’s suffering. “I remember how I used to slink past all churches,” Michael said; “I remember with what fear and rage. Ruth never felt so. Ruth had no sense for the reality of bitter things; to her everything was sweet and clear. She left the vulgar far below her. It ate into me, and I had no one to talk to.”

But one evening, a few days before her disappearance, Ruth without his asking her and without any preliminary speech, but simply as though she wanted to get closer to him and release him from his oppressed state, had read him a passage from the Gospel of the Christians. It was the passage in which the risen Lord asks Peter: “Lovest than me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He said unto him, Feed my lambs. He saith to him again the second time, Simon, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep. He saith unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? Peter was grieved that he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.” And later on he said: “Follow me.”

He told how he had torn the book from his sister’s hand and had turned its pages and had not desired to be led astray by it. But one sentence had held his attention, and he had dwelt upon it. It was this: “And he needed not to have knowledge of a man, for he knew what was in man.” At that the hatred of Christ had vanished from his soul. Yet he had not been able to believe in him or to turn to him. He didn’t mean in the way of piety and prayer; he meant the idea which gave men assurance and help to their minds. He had grasped that to-day, during the soaring song, and as he watched the thousand eyes that seemed first extinguished and then lit by a solemn flame. “Lovest thou me, Simon?” He had grasped that utterly, and also the saying: “Follow me.” And his consciousness of being a Jew and having been cast out had been transformed from pain and shame into wealth and pride through the assurance of a certain service and a peculiar power. “It was wonderful, wonderful,” he assured her. “I don’t quite understand it yet. I am like a lamp that has been lit.”

Johanna was frightened at the outburst of a passion so strange and incomprehensible to her.

“Feed my sheep,” Michael almost sang the words out into the snow. “Feed my sheep.”

“It is an awakening,” Johanna thought, with faint horror and envy. “He has been awakened.”

The boy’s impassioned attachment to Christian became ever clearer to her. When they waited at the locked door in Stolpische Street and Christian came out with Niels Heinrich and passed the two without noticing them, without glance or greeting, and went off with that shaking, shuffling, distorted creature, Michael limped behind him for a few paces, stared into the dark yard filled with the whirl of snow, and then returned to Johanna and said beseechingly: “He mustn’t go with that man. Do run after him and call him back. He mustn’t, for God’s sake, go with him.”

Johanna, although she was herself perturbed, soothed the overwrought boy. She remained for half an hour, forced herself to a natural cheerfulness, chatted pleasantly as she made tea and laid the cloth for a cold supper. Then she went home. At eight o’clock the next morning Michael rang the bell at her dwelling. She had scarcely finished dressing. She met him in the hall. He was pale, sleepless, struggling for words. “Wahnschaffe hasn’t come home yet,” he murmured. “What shall we do?”

Fighting down her first consternation, Johanna smiled. She took Michael’s hand and said: “Don’t be afraid. Nothing will happen to him.”

“Are you so sure of that?”

“Quite sure!”

“Why are you?”

“I don’t know. But it would never occur to me to be afraid for him. That would be a sheer waste of emotional energy.”

Her calm and assurance impressed Michael; yet he asked her to come with him and stay with him if she could. After a moment’s reflection she consented. On the way back they entered a bookshop and bought the volumes that Lamprecht had suggested. Christian had given Michael money for the purchase. He wanted to begin his studies alone and at once, but he could not collect his thoughts. He sat at the table, turned the leaves of books, arranged paper, lifted his head and listened, pressed his hands together or jumped up and walked to and fro in the room, looked out into the yard, gazed searchingly at Johanna, who was working at a piece of embroidery and sat shivering and worn in a corner of the sofa, gnawing at her lip with her small white teeth.

Thus that day passed and another night, and yet Christian did not return. The impatience and anxiety of the boy became unrestrainable. “We must bestir ourselves,” he said. “It is stupid to sit here and wait.” Johanna, who was also beginning to grow anxious, prepared to go either to Botho von Thüngen or to Dr. Voltolini. While she was putting on her hat Lamprecht came in. When he had been told of the situation he said: “You’re doing Wahnschaffe no favour by raising an alarm. If he doesn’t come, it is for reasons of his own. Your fear is childish and unworthy of him. We’d better start at something useful, my boy.”

His firmer intellect shared in an even higher degree Johanna’s instinctive assurance. Michael submitted once more, and for two hours he was an obedient pupil. Toward noon, when Johanna and Lamprecht had left, a teamster presented himself with an unpaid bill. He said he hadn’t received payment yet for the horses furnished for the funeral of the late Fräulein Engelschall. Michael assured the man that he would receive his money on the morrow, since Wahnschaffe had of course merely forgotten the matter. The man grumbled and went out; but in the yard he was joined by several other people, and Michael heard the sound of hostile talk and of Christian’s name. He went into the hall and to the outer door. The venomous words and references in the vilest jargon drove the blood into his cheeks. He felt at once that the feeling against Christian had been deliberately instigated by some one. A red-haired fellow, a painter who lived on the fourth floor, was especially scurrilous. He called the attention of the others to Michael; a coarse remark was made; the crowd roared. When the courage of his indignation drove Michael out into the yard, he was met by menacing glances.

“What have you to say against Wahnschaffe?” he asked in a loud voice, yet with an instinctive shrinking of his body.

Again they roared. Laughing, the red-haired fellow turned up his sleeves. A woman at a window above reached into the room and poured a pailful of dirty water into the yard. The water spattered Michael, and there was thunderous laughter. The teamster Scholz put his hands to his hips, and discoursed of idlers who set fleas into the ears of the working-people with dam’ fool talk and hypocrisy. And suddenly other words hissed into Michael’s face: “Get out o’ here, Jew!” He became pale, and touched the wall behind him with his hands.

At that moment Botho von Thüngen and Johanna came in through the doorway. They stopped and silently regarded the group of people in the snow and also Michael. They understood. Johanna drew Michael into the house. He gave a breathless report; he was so ardent, so nobly indignant, that his features took on a kind of beauty.

After a while someone knocked at the door, and Amadeus Voss entered. His courtesy was exaggerated, but he seemed in no wise astonished to find Johanna here, nor did it seem to annoy him. He said he wanted to talk to Christian Wahnschaffe. Thüngen replied that no one knew when Christian would return or whether he would return on that day at all.

Voss said drily that he had time and could wait.

Johanna felt paralysed. She could not will to go away. All she wanted to avoid was any demonstration, any scene. Like an animal that slinks to a hiding-place, she cowered in the corner of the sofa, and gnawed her lip with her little teeth.

Suddenly the thought flashed into her mind--“death, death, that’s the only thing.”

XXVII

The festivities were over; the guests had departed; Eva and Susan remained alone in the castle.

The fullness of spring had come thus early to that southern coast. The festivals had been festivals of spring amid a tropical wealth of flowers and in that heroic landscape. The flight from the winter of the North had been so swift that no dignity could withstand its effects. It had intoxicated every soul. They had given themselves up to the mere delight of breathing, to the astonishment of the senses. Some had felt like carousers and gluttons merely, others like liberated prisoners, and all had been conscious of the brevity of their respite; and this consciousness breathed a breath of melancholy over all delight.

The atmosphere still echoed the thrill of impassioned words and the tread and laughter of women; the sounds had not yet quite died away, and in the night the darkness of the silent park still yearned for the glow of lights which the stars above could not cause it to forget.

But they were all gone.

The Grand Duke had accepted the invitation of an Austrian Archduke to shoot on his estates. In April Eva was to meet him in Vienna and accompany him to Florence. She had asked none of her friends to stay longer, no woman, no artist, and no paladin. It had become a very hunger of her soul to be alone once more. She had not been alone for four years.