Part 3

“No peace is left in me. From an invisible wound in the world’s body the blood keeps flowing. I cry out for a vessel to receive it, but no one brings me such a vessel. Or are the sickness and the wound within myself? Is there such a thing as the yearning of the shadow for its body? Is it conceivable that the unimaginable has come to pass, and yet that he who yearned and sobbed and struggled and prayed for it to come to pass cannot recognize it now? There is some strange fatality in it all. I have learned now to tell fruit from rottenness, the bitter from the sweet, the fragrant from the stinking, the hurtful from the harmless. And I have also learned how limbs swing from their sockets, how vertebra joins vertebra, how muscle is intertwined with muscle, how ligament grows on ligament, how the veins pulse and how the brain is stratified. I can open the magic clockwork and put my hand into the mechanism that is forever rigid. There are compensations; but always at the sombre gates of existence must I pay my entrance fee to brighter regions. The other day I had a vision: You stood with me beside the corpse of a young person, and asked me to cut out the heart which had survived by a little the death of its body and twitched under my knife.

“That one more thing I wanted to tell you. With it I close.”

Johanna sat over that letter all night until morning. A storm of March swept about the house. Her virginal room, with its hangings of white silk and the white enamelled furniture, seemed already bare and rifled to her. For on the morrow she was to leave it forever.

VII

Dead and wounded men lay on the red velvet sofas of the restaurant. They had been carried here hurriedly, and people were trying to help the living. Through the open doors there blew in an icy blast mixed with snow. Random shots were still fired in the streets, soldiers galloped up and down, an infantry squad appeared and disappeared. Guests hovered at the windows. A German waiter said: “They have mounted cannons on the Neva.” A gentleman in a fur-coat entered hastily and said: “Kronstadt is in flames.”

In one of the halls which were used for exclusive banquets, there was a brilliant company invited by Count Tutchkoff, one of the friends of the Grand Duke Cyril. There were Lord and Lady Elmster, the Earl of Somerset, Count and Countess Finkenrode, gentlemen belonging to the German and Austrian embassies, the Marquis du Caille, and the Princes Tolstoi, Trubetzkoi, Szilaghin, and their ladies.

The Grand Duke and Eva Sorel had come late. The dinner was over, and the general conversation had ceased. The couples whispered. The Duke, sitting between Lady Elmster and the Princess Trubetzkoi, had fallen asleep. However animated the company, this would happen from time to time; every one knew it, and had become accustomed to it.

Though he slept, his pose remained erect and careful. From time to time his lids twitched; the furrow on his forehead deepened so that it seemed black; his colourless beard was like a fern on the bark of a tree. One might have suspected that he feigned sleep in order to listen; but there was a slackness in his features that showed the uncontrolled muscles of sleep, and lent his face the appearance of a lemur. On his excessively long, lean hand, which rested on the cloth, and, like his lids, twitched at times, gleamed a solitaire diamond, the size of a hazelnut.

A restlessness had stolen over the company. When the rifles outside began to rattle again, the young Countess Finkenrode arose and turned frightened glances toward the door. Szilaghin approached her, and calmed her with a smile. An officer of the guards entered, and whispered a report to Tutchkoff.

Eva and Wiguniewski sat a little aside, in front of a tall mirror that reflected a pallid image of them and of a part of the room.

Wiguniewski said to her: “Unhappily the report is vouched for. No one thought of such a thing.”

“I was told he was in Petrograd,” Eva answered. “In a German newspaper, moreover, I read a report that he was arrested in Moscow. And where are your proofs? To condemn Ivan Becker on hearsay is almost as terrible as the crime of which he is accused.”

Wiguniewski took a letter from his pocket, looked about him carefully, unfolded it, and said: “From Nice he wrote this to a friend of his who is also my friend. I am afraid it puts an end to all doubt.” Painfully, and with many hesitations, he translated the Russian words into French. “I am no longer what I was. Your suppositions are not groundless, and the rumours have not lied. Announce and confirm it to all who have set their hopes on me and given me their trust on definite conditions. A terrible time lies behind me. I could not go farther on my old and chosen path. You have been deceived in me, even as a phantom has misled me. In a case like mine it requires greater courage and strength to confess sincerely, and to wound those who had put their faith and trust in me, than to mount the scaffold and give up one’s life. Gladly would I have suffered death for the ideas to which all my thoughts and feelings have been devoted hitherto. All of you know that. For I had already sacrificed to them my possessions, my peace, my youth, my liberty. But now when I have come to recognize these ideas as destructive errors, I must not serve them for another hour. I fear neither your accusations nor your contempt. I follow my inner light and the God that is within. There are three truths that have guided me in that searching of my soul which led to my conversion: It is a sin to resist; it is a sin to persuade others to resistance; it is a sin to shed the blood of man. I know all that threatens me; I know the isolation that will be mine. I am prepared for all persecutions. Do what you must, even as I do what I must.”

After a long silence Eva said: “That is he. That is his voice; that is the bell whose chime none can resist. I believe him and I believe in him.” She threw a sombre glance at the face of that sleeper beside the radiant board.

Wiguniewski crushed the letter, and thrust forward his chin with a bitter gesture. “His three truths,” he replied, “will be as effective against our cause as three army divisions of Cossacks. They will suffice to fill the dungeons on both sides of the Urals, to unman our youth, to bury our hopes. Each one is a whip that will smite unto the earth an hundred thousand awakened spirits. Crime? It is worse; it is the tragedy of all this land. Three truths!” He laughed through his compressed teeth. “Three truths, and a blood-bath I will begin that will make those of Bethlehem and St. Bartholomew seem jests. You may look at me. I do not weep; I laugh. Why should I weep? I shall go home, summon the popes, and give them this rag; and let them made amulets of it to distribute among those who wait for salvation. Perhaps that will suffice them.”

Eva’s face grew hard. An evil fascination still drew her eyes toward that sleeper’s face. Upon the edges of her lips hovered a morbid smile; the skin of her cheek glimmered like an opal. “Why should he not follow the command of his soul?” she asked, and for a moment turned her diademed brow toward the prince. “Is it not better that a man should express and embody himself completely than that many hundreds of thousands be helped in the dreary mediocrity of their rigid lives? He has said it in his own beautiful way: ‘I follow the inner light and the God that is within.’ How many can do that? How many dare? And now I understand something he once said”--more penetratingly she looked into that sleeper’s face--“‘one must bow down before that!’ So that was in his mind. Strange ploughs are passing over this earth of yours, prince. In its lacerated body there streams a darkness into which one would like to plunge in order to be born again. A primitive breath is there, and chaos; there the elements thunder and the most terrible dream becomes reality, an epic reality of immemorial ages. Of such life I once had no perception, except in some great marble in which a nameless woe had become rigid and eternal. I feel as though I were looking back on this scene from the height of centuries to come or from a star, and as though everything were vision.” All this she said in a trembling voice and with an impassioned melancholy.

Wiguniewski, who had been a constant witness of her inner transformations for months past, was not surprised at her speech. His eyes, too, sought the sleeper’s face. With a deep breath he said, “Yesterday a student of nineteen, Semyon Markovitch, heard of Ivan Becker’s recanting and shot himself in his room. I went there and saw the body. If you had seen that dead boy, Eva, you would speak differently. A little differently, at all events. Did you ever see a lad lie in his coffin with a little black wound in his temple? He was charming and innocent as a girl, and yet he could experience this unspeakable woe and entertain this determined despair at a loss beyond measure.”

A shiver passed over Eva’s shoulders, and she smiled with a glittering feverishness that made her seem strangely possessed and heartless. The Prince continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “No doubt there’s a good deal that is alluring about this letter. Why shouldn’t a man like Ivan Becker render his breach of faith less repulsive by some plausible psychological excuses? I am ready to grant you that he acted neither in conscious hypocrisy nor from any self-seeking motive. But he wouldn’t be the genuine Russian that he is--emotional, turbid, fanatical, self-tormenting--if his transformation were not to entail all the fatal consequences of a systematic and deliberate treachery. He thinks that what he calls his awakening will serve mankind. In the meantime, out of blindness and weakness, confusion and mistaken moral fervour, he rushes into the claws of the beast that waits mercilessly in every corner and nook of Europe seeking to destroy and annihilate. And what I am doing now is passing a most charitable judgment. We happen to know that he has opened negotiations with the Holy Synod and is corresponding eagerly with the secret cabinet. Here in Moscow, as well as in Kiev and Odessa, arrests have been made in rapid succession which must be attributed to him. As things are, he alone could have furnished the information without which the authorities would not have ventured on these steps. These are facts that speak for themselves.”

Eva pressed her right hand against her bosom, and stared, as though fascinated, into the air where she saw a vision that caused her to feel a rapidly alternating horror and ecstasy. Her lips moved as though to put a question, but she restrained herself.

With large and earnest eyes she looked at Wiguniewski, and, whispered: “I suddenly have a longing that burns my heart, but I do not know after what. I should like to climb a mountain far beyond the snowline; or fare on a ship out into uncharted seas; or fly above the earth in an aeroplane. No, it is none of these things. I should like to go into a forest, to a lonely chapel, and cast myself down and pray. Will you go on such a pilgrimage with me? To some far monastery in the steppes?”

Wiguniewski was puzzled. Passion and sadness were in her words, but also a challenge that wounded him. Before he could formulate an answer, the Marquis du Caille and Prince Szilaghin approached them.

The sleeper opened his eyes and showed their slothful stare.

VIII

The costumer and the wig-maker had arrived in Edgar Lorm’s study. He was going to try on his costume for the rôle of Petrucchio. “The Taming of the Shrew” was soon to be given with new scenery and a new cast, and he looked forward to playing the impetuous and serene tamer.

Judith, sitting on a low stool in her over-dainty sitting-room, her arms folded on her knees, heard his resonant voice, although three closed doors separated them. He was quarrelling; tradesmen and assistants always enraged him. He was difficult to satisfy, for what he demanded of himself he also required of others--the tensest exertion and the most conscientious toil.

Judith was bored. She opened a drawer filled with ribands, turned over the contents, tried the effect of different ribands in her hair, and looked at herself in the glass with a frown. That occupation tired her too. She left the drawer open and the many-coloured silks scattered about.

She went through the rooms, knocked at Lorm’s door and entered. She was surprised at his appearance. In the lace-trimmed, velvet doublet, the pied hose, the broad-brimmed hat with its adventurous feather, the brown locks of the wig that fell to his shoulders, he looked a victor, handsome, bold, fascinating. And his very way of standing there was art and interpretation; the whole world was his stage.

Like soldiers at attention, the costumer and wig-maker stood before him and smiled admiringly.

Judith smiled too. She had not expected to find him in a new transformation, and she was grateful for the experience. She came to him, and touched his cheeks with her fingers. His eyes, still lit by the ardour of the poet’s creation, asked after her desire. He was accustomed to have her express some wish whenever she condescended to a caress. With her arm she drew his head down a little and whispered: “I want you to make me a present, Edgar.”

He laughed, embarrassed and amused. The good-natured observation of the two strangers was painful to him. He drew her arm through his and led her to the library. “What shall I give you, child?” The bold fervour of Petrucchio which, with the donning of the costume, had passed into him, faded from his face.

“Anything you please,” Judith answered, “but something remarkable that will delight me and something that you are fond of.”

He smacked his lips, looked merry and yielding, glanced about him, took up one object after another, pushed his chin forward and reflected, mimicked a whole scale of emotions from puzzled helplessness to anxious serviceableness, and finally struck his forehead with a roguish and graceful gesture. “I have it,” he cried. He opened a little cabinet, and with a bow gave Judith a watch of very old Nürnberger make. Its case was of exquisite old gold filigree work.

“How charming,” said Judith, and balanced the watch on the palm of her hand.

Lorm said: “Now amuse yourself admiring it. I must go and send those fellows away.” With a swift, resilient tread he left the room.

Judith sat down at the great oak table, looked at the engraved ornamentation on the watch, pressed a little spring, and, when the oval sides of the case flew open, gazed into the ancient, lifeless works. “I shall take it all apart,” she determined. “But not now; to-night. I want to see what’s inside.” And she looked forward with a glow to the evening hour when she would take the watch apart.

But the present, charming as it was, did not suffice her. When Lorm returned in modern dress, a clean-shaven gentleman and husband, she held out the watch-case from which she had slipped the works, and begged or rather commanded him, who was now the man of common clay: “Fill it with gold pieces, Edgar. That’s what I want.”

She was all voracity, avidity, desire.

Lorm lowered his head in vicarious shame. In a drawer of his desk he had a little roll of gold-pieces. He filled the watch-case and gave it to her. Then he said, “While you were out driving to-day, your brother Wolfgang called. He stayed about an hour. He seems to have a rather sterile nature. It amused me--the difficulty he had in placing me in some social category whose ways he understood. He’s a born bureaucrat.”

“What did he want?” Judith asked.

“He wanted to consult you about Christian. He’s coming again to do so.”

Judith arose. Her face was pale and her eyes glittered. Her knowledge of Christian’s changed way of life was derived from a talk she had had with Crammon during his visit to Berlin, from the letters of a former friend, and from messages that had come to her directly from her parents. The first news had awakened a rage in her that gnawed at her soul. Sometimes when she was alone and thought of it she gritted her teeth and stamped her feet. Further details she heard made the very thought of him fill her to the brim with bitterness. If she had not possessed the gift of forcing herself to forgetfulness, of commanding it so successfully as to annihilate the things she desired not to be, her inner conflicts over this matter would have made her ill and morose. Every enforced recollection awakened that rage in her, and recoiled against him who caused it.

Lorm knew and feared this fact. His instinct told him, moreover, that what Judith feared in Christian’s actions was an evil caricature of her own fate; for she did not conceal the fact from him that she considered herself as one who had voluntarily fallen from her original station. But he thought too modestly of himself to resent this attitude of hers. To tremble at the opinions of people had become a part of her innermost nature. Although she was no longer upheld by the elements that had once nourished her aristocratic consciousness, her being was still rooted in them, and she felt herself degraded in her new life.

But even this could not explain the wild fury to which she yielded at any mention of Christian’s name.

Her attitude was that of a cat at bay. “I don’t want him to come back,” she hissed. “I don’t want to hear anything about that man. I’ve told you that a hundred times. But you’re always so flabby, and go in for everything. Couldn’t you have told him that I won’t listen? Get a car and drive to him at once. Forbid him absolutely to enter my house or to write me. But no! You’re such a coward. I’ll write to him myself. I’ll tell him that his visits will always be a pleasure to me, although his sudden fondness is queer enough, but that I will not, under any circumstances, listen to a word about that man.”

Lorm did not dare to contradict her. With gentle superiority he said: “I don’t understand your extreme bitterness. No one considers your brother Christian to have done anything criminal. He is very eccentric, at the worst. He harms no one. What injury has he done you? Weren’t you and he very fond of each other? You used always to speak of him with an affectionate and proud emphasis. I don’t understand.”

She became livid and drunk with rage. “Of course,” she jeered, “you! Does anything touch you? Have you any sense left for anything but grease-paint and old rags? Have you any conception of what those words stood for--Christian Wahnschaffe? What they meant? You in your world of lies and hollowness--what should you understand?”

Lorm came a step nearer to her. He looked at her compassionately. She drew back with a gesture of aversion.

She was beating, beating the fish.

IX

Karen Engelschall said: “You don’t have to worry; there’s no chance of his getting back before night. If he does, I’ll tell him you’re an acquaintance of mine.”

She gave Girke a slow and watchful look. She sat by the window, resting her body with the broad satisfaction of those women of the people to whom sitting still is an achievement and a luxury. She was sewing a baby’s shift.

“Anyhow we don’t have much to talk about,” she continued with a malicious enjoyment. “You’ve said your say. They offer me sixty thousand if I go and disappear. That’s all right enough. But if I wait they’ll go a good bit higher. I’m somebody now. I’ll think it over; you can come back next week.”

“You should think very seriously,” Girke replied in his official manner. “Think of your future. This may be the highest offer. Six months ago you didn’t dream of such a thing. It’s very pleasant to live on one’s own income; it’s every one’s ideal. It is very foolish of you to lose such an opportunity.”

With her malicious smile she bent lower over her work. An undefined well-being made her press her knees together and close her eyes. Then she looked up, swept her tousled, yellow hair from her forehead, and said: “I’d have to be a bigger fool than I am to be taken in. D’you think I don’t know how rich he is? If he wanted to buy me off he’d make your offer look like dirt. Why shouldn’t I make a good bargain? No, I’m no fool. This here, as you say, is my great chance, but not the way you think. I’m going to wait and see. If I’m wrong, well, I done it to myself.”

Girke shifted his position uncomfortably. He looked at his watch, and then with his prying eyes regarded the room with its common wall-paper, furniture, and carpet.

“I can tell you one thing that’ll please you, and I don’t mind because it don’t change nothing,” Karen Engelschall said. “His people are all wrong if they think it’s on my account that he’s acting the way he does, and that he’d have stayed with them except for me. ’Course, I could make fools of you all and pretend he’d changed his life on my account. What good would that do? A new-born child could see that there’s something queer and crazy about it. So why should I go and play-act in front of you, when I myself just sit here and wonder and wonder!”

“That’s very true,” said Girke, amazed at her frankness. “I understand, and what you say interests me immensely. I have always said that we could count on the most valuable assistance from you. Now you would do me a very real service if you would answer a few questions. I should not, of course, forget your assistance but show my appreciation very practically.”

Karen giggled quietly. “I believe you,” she answered. “You’d like to spy around a bit and then go and report. No, I’m not fond of that sort o’ thing. There’re other places where you can hear a lot. There’re people what can tell you all you want to know. There’s that friend of his, that Voss: Go to him!” The name brought rage to her eyes. “He acts as if there wasn’t nothing he didn’t know in the world, and treats a person so mean and low that you’d like to punch his dirty nose for him. Ask him who gets the money. I don’t, but Voss ought to be able to tell you.”

“I’m afraid you overestimate that,” said Girke, with his most expert air. “There is no doubt that the man in question is at the bottom of all the trouble. But things being as they are, even ten times the amount that satisfies his greed would be inconsiderable. I can give you that very definite assurance. There must be other and quite unaccounted drains on his purse.”

“I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying there,” Karen answered, and showed her small, yellow, evil teeth. “Maybe you’d like to search my wardrobe or my mattress here, eh? Maybe you think this place is too fine or that I got expensive clothes and jewels? And did you ever see that hole over at Gisevius’s where the elegant gentleman himself sleeps? We’re living in luxury, we are! Why, the very mice starve here. I found one dead in a corner over there the other day. Most people hate mice, but they don’t bother him. And it’s pitiful for a man that’s lived like he has. According to what people say, he must have been just like the emperor. He had castles and game-preserves and motor cars and the handsomest women, and they just threw themselves at his head. And never no trouble and no worry, more of everything than he could use, and money and clothes and eating and drinking and friends and servants and everything. And now he’s at Gisevius’s, where the mice die of hunger.”

Her burning eyes were fixed on Girke, but in reality she saw him no longer. She was no longer speaking to this unknown man, whose professional curiosity left her quite unmoved. She was relieving herself by breaking the convulsive silence of her lonely days. Her hands lay on her lap like empty shells, and the child’s garment had slipped to the floor. Her tongue was unleashed. The words poured forth--words born of her brooding, words familiar to her through many days and nights of strangeness and amazement. In her voice there was something metallic, and in her face the slack muscles grew taut.