On the appointed hour of the appointed day Crammon arrived. He had prepared himself to stay and to be festive; but he was disappointed. Eva and her train were on the point of leaving. Maidanoff had proceeded to Paris, whither Eva was to follow him.

Crammon had been informed of this new friendship of his idol. All other news came to him too, and so he was aware that a quarrel had arisen between Christian and Eva. He was the more astonished to see Christian determined to follow Eva to Hamburg.

They had exchanged but a few words, when the transformation in Christian struck him. He laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder, and asked sympathetically: “Have you nothing to confide?”

He spent the evening with Wiguniewski. “It isn’t possible,” he said; “you’re mistaken. Or else the world is topsy-turvy and I can no longer tell a man from a woman.”

“I had no special liking for Wahnschaffe from the start,” Wiguniewski confessed. “He’s too impenetrable, mysterious, spoiled, cold, and, if you will, too German. Nevertheless I knew from the first that he was the very man for Eva Sorel. You couldn’t see the two together without a sense of delight—the sort of delight that a beautiful composition gives you, or anything that is spiritually fitting and harmonious.”

Crammon nodded. “He has a strange power over women,” he said. “I’ve just had another instance which is the more remarkable as it developed from a mere sight of his picture. At the Ashburnhams’ in Yorkshire, where I’ve been staying, I made the acquaintance of a Viennese girl, a banker’s daughter, rather ugly, to be frank, but with a peculiar little sting and charm and wit of her own. Not a bad figure, though rather—shall we say scanty? Yes. Her name is Johanna SchÖntag, though that matters little. I called her nothing but Rumpelstilzkin. That fitted her like a glove. God knows how she got there. Her sister, a russet-haired person who looks as though she’d jumped out of a Rubens, is married to an attachÉ of some minor legation, Roumanian or Bulgarian or something like that. The big capitalists fit their daughters into society that way. Well, anyhow, this Rumpelstilzkin and I agreed to amuse each other in the murky boredom of Lord and Lady Ashburnham’s house. So one day I showed the girl a miniature of Christian which Gaston Villiers painted for me in Paris. She looked at the picture and her merry face grew grave, absorbed, and she handed it back to me silently. A couple of days later she asked to see it again, and it had the same effect on her. She asked me about the man, and I, of course, became very eloquent, and happened to remark, too, that I expected to meet Christian here. She insisted at once that she must meet him, and that I must plan to have her do so. Remember she’s rather unapproachable as a rule, fastidious, turning up her nose—her worst feature by the way—at things that please most people. The request was unexpected and rather a nuisance. One mustn’t, as you know, bring the wrong people together and land one’s self in difficulties. So I said at once: ‘The Almighty forbid!’ I admonished her gently to change her mind, and painted the danger in its darkest hues. She laughed at me, and asked me whether I’d grown strait-laced; then she at once developed a most cunning plan. She had time enough. She wasn’t expected home till the first of November, which gave her seven weeks. So she would announce her intention of studying the Dutch galleries, the pursuit of culture being always respectable. She had a companion and chaperone, as it was, and her sister, who was broad-minded in such matters, could be taken into her confidence. Her energy and astuteness made me feel weak, and forced me into the conspiracy. Well, she arrived yesterday. She’s at the Hotel de la Plage, a little scared, like a bird that’s dropped out of its nest, a little dissatisfied with herself, vexed by little attacks of morality; and I, for my part, don’t know what to do with her. I bethought me too late that Christian isn’t to be caught by such tricks, and now I’ve got to make it clear to the girl. All this is by the way, prince—a sort of footnote to your discourse, which I did not intend to interrupt.”

Wiguniewski had listened with very slight sympathy. He began again: “These past months, as I’ve said, have given us all an unforgettable experience. We have seen two free personalities achieving a higher form of union than any of the legitimized ones. But suddenly this noble spectacle turns into a shabby farce; and it is his fault. For such a union has its organic and natural close. A man of subtle sensitiveness knows that, and adjusts himself accordingly. Instead of that, he actually lets it get to the point of painful scenes. He seeks meetings that humiliate him and make him absurd. When she is out he waits in her rooms for her return, and endures her passing him by with a careless nod. Once he sat waiting all night and stared into a book. He lets the Rappard woman treat him insolently, and doesn’t seem to mind that the fruits and flowers he sends daily are regularly refused. What is it? What does it mean?”

“It points to some sorrow, and assuredly to a great sorrow for me,” Crammon sighed. “It’s incomprehensible.”

“She entertained at dinner day before yesterday,” Wiguniewski continued. “As though to mock him he was placed at the lower end of the table. I didn’t even know the people who sat by him. It seems to arouse a strange cruelty in her that he doesn’t refuse to bear these humiliations; he, on the other hand, seems to find some inexplicable lure in his suffering. He sat down that evening in silence. Afterwards a curious thing happened. Groups had been formed after dinner. He stood a few feet from Eva and gazed at her steadily. His face had a brooding look as he observed her. She wore Ignifer, which is his gift, and looked like Diana with a burning star above her forehead.”

“That’s excellently well put, prince,” Crammon exclaimed.

“The conversation touched upon many subjects without getting too shallow. You know her admirable way of checking and disciplining talk. Finally there arose a discussion of Flemish literature, and some one spoke of Verhaeren. She quoted some verses of a poem of his called ‘Joy.’ The sense was somewhat as follows: My being is in everything that lives about me; meadows and roads and trees, springs and shadows, you become me, since I have felt you wholly. There was a murmur of appreciation. She went to a shelf and took down a volume of Verhaeren’s poems. She turned the pages, found the poem she sought, and suddenly turned to Wahnschaffe. She gave him the book with a gesture of command; he was to read the poem. He hesitated for a moment, then he obeyed. The effect of the reading was both absurd and painful. He read like a schoolboy, low, stammering, and as though the content were beyond his comprehension. He felt the absurdity and painfulness of the incident himself, for his colour changed as the ecstatic stanzas came from his lips like an indifferent paragraph in a newspaper; and when he had finished the reading, he laid the book aside, and left without a glance at any one. But Eva turned to us, and said as though nothing had happened: ‘The verses are wonderful, aren’t they?’ Yet her lips trembled with fury. But what was her purpose? Did she want to prove to us his inability to feel things that are beautiful and delicate? Did she want to put him to shame, to punish him and publicly expose the poverty of his nature? Or was it only an impatient whim, the annoyance at his dumb watchfulness and his searching glances? Mlle. Vanleer said later: ‘If he had read the verses like a divine poet, she would have forgiven him.’ ‘Forgiven him what?’ I asked. She smiled, and answered: ‘Her own faithlessness.’ There may be something in that. At all events, you should get him out of this situation, Herr von Crammon.”

“I shall do all in my power,” said Crammon, and the lines of care about his mouth grew deeper. He wiped his forehead. “Of course I don’t know how far my influence goes. It would be empty boastfulness to guarantee anything. I’ve been told too that he frequents all sorts of impossible dives with impossible people. I could weep when I think of it. He was the flower of modern manhood, the pride of my lengthening years, the salt of the earth! Unfortunately he had, even when I left him, certain attacks of mental confusion, but I put those down to the account of that suspicious fellow, Ivan Becker.”

“Don’t speak of him! Don’t speak of Becker!” Wiguniewski interrupted sharply. “Not at least in that manner, I must beg and insist.”

Crammon opened his eyes very wide, and the tip of his tongue became visible, like a red snail peering out of its shell. He choked down his discomfort and shrugged his shoulders.

Wiguniewski said: “At all events you’ve given me an indication. I never considered such a possibility. It throws a new light on many things. It’s true, by the way, that Wahnschaffe associates with questionable people. The queerest of them all is Amadeus Voss, a hypocrite and a gambler. One must not couple such persons with Ivan Becker. Becker may have set him upon a certain road. If we assume that, a number of incidents become clear. But anything really baneful comes from Voss. Save your friend from him!”

“I haven’t seen the fellow yet,” Crammon murmured. “What you tell me, Prince, doesn’t take me quite unawares. Nevertheless, I’m grateful. But let that scoundrel beware! May I never drink another drop of honest wine, if he escape me! Let me never again glance at a tempting bosom, if I don’t grind this infamous cur to pulp. So help me!”

Wiguniewski arose, and left Crammon to plan his revenge.

II

The morning sun of late September was gilding sea and land, when Crammon entered Christian’s room. Christian was sitting at his curved writing table. The bright blue tapestries on the walls gleamed; chairs and tables were covered by a hundred confused objects. Everything pointed to the occupant’s departure.

“Don’t let me disturb you, dear boy; I have time enough,” said Crammon. He swept some things from a chair, sat down, and lit his pipe.

But Christian put down his pen. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” he said angrily, without looking at Crammon, “I can’t get two coherent sentences down on paper. However carefully I think it out, by the time it’s written it sounds stiff and silly. Have you the same experience?”

Crammon answered: “There are those who have the trick. It takes, primarily, a certain impudence. You must never stop to ask: Is that correct? Is it true? Is it well-founded? Scribble ahead, that’s all. Be effective, no matter at what cost. The cleverest writers are often the most stupid fellows. But to whom are you writing? Is the haste so great? Letters can usually be put off.”

“Not this time. It is a question of haste,” Christian answered. “I have a letter from Stettner and I can’t make out his drift. He tells me that he’s quitting the service and leaving for America. Before he goes he wants to see me once more. He takes ship at Hamburg on October 15. Now it fortunately happens that I’ll be in Hamburg on that date, and I want to let him know.”

“I don’t see any difficulty there,” Crammon said seriously. “All you need say is: I’ll be at such a place on such a day, and expect or hope, et cetera. Yours faithfully or sincerely or cordially, et cetera. So he’s going to quit? Why? And run off to America? Something rotten in the state of Denmark?”

“He was challenged to a duel, it appears, and refused the challenge. That’s the only reason he gives. He adds that matters shaped themselves so that he is forced to seek a new life in the New World. It touches me closely; I was always fond of him. I must see him.”

“I’d be curious too to know what really happened,” said Crammon. “Stettner didn’t strike me as a chap who’d lightly run away and risk his honour. He was an exemplary officer. I’m afraid it’s a dreary business. But I observe that it gives you a pretext for going to Hamburg.”

Christian started. “Why a pretext?” He was a little embarrassed. “I need no pretext.”

Crammon bent his head far forward, and laid his chin on the ivory handle of his stick. His pipe remained artfully poised in one corner of his mouth, and did not move as he spoke. “You don’t mean to assert, my dearest boy, that your conscience doesn’t require some additional motive for the trip,” he began, like a father confessor who is about to use subtle arguments to force a confession from a stubborn malefactor, “and you’re not going to try to make a fool of an old boon-companion and brother of your soul. One owes something to a friend. You should not forget under whose auspices and promises you entered the great world, nor what securities he offered—securities of the heart and mind—who was the author and master of your radiant entry. Even Socrates, that rogue and revolutionary, recalled such obligations on his death bed. There was a story about a cock—some sort of a cock, I believe. Maybe the story doesn’t fit the case at all. No matter. I always thought the ancients rather odious. What does matter is that I don’t like your condition, and that others who love you don’t like it. It rends my very heart to see you pilloried, while people who can’t tell a stud-horse from a donkey shrug their shoulders at you. It’s not to be endured. I’d rather we’d quarrel and exchange shots at a distance of five paces. What has happened to you? What has come over you? Have you stopped gathering scalps to offer your own head? The hares and the hounds, I tell you, are diverse creatures. I understand all things human, but the divine order must be kept intact. It’s flying in the face of providence that you should stand at the gate like a beggar. You used to be the one who showed others the door; they whined and moaned after you—and that was proper. I had an uncle who was something of a philosopher, and he used to say: when a woman, a lawyer, and a stove are at their hottest—turn your back to them. I’ve always done that, and kept my peace of mind and my reputation. There are extenuating circumstances in your case, I admit. There is but one such woman in a century, and whoever possesses her may well lose his reason. But even that should not apply to you, Christian. Splendour is your natural portion: it is for you to grant favours; at your board the honey should be fresh each day. And now tell me what you intend to do.”

Christian had listened to this lengthy though wise and pregnant discourse with great patience. At times there was a glint of mockery or anger in his eyes. Then again he would lower them and seem embarrassed. Sometimes he grasped the sense of Crammon’s words, sometimes he thought of other things. It cost him an effort to recall clearly by what right this apparently complete stranger interfered in his life and sought to influence his decisions. And then again he felt within himself a certain tenderness for Crammon in the memory of common experiences and intimate talks; but all that seemed so far away and so estranged from the present.

He looked out of the window, from which the view was free to the horizon where sea and sky touched. Far in the distance a little white cloud floated like a white, round pillow. The same tenderness that he felt for Crammon, he now felt for that little cloud.

And as Crammon sat before him and waited for an answer, there suddenly came into his mind the story of the ring which Amadeus had told him. He began: “A young candidate for Holy Orders, who was tutor to the children of a banker, fell under the suspicion of having stolen a costly ring. He told me the story himself, and from his words I knew that the ring, when he saw it on the hand of his employer’s wife, aroused his desire. In addition he loved this woman, and would have been happy to have had something by which to remember her. But he was utterly innocent of the disappearance of the ring, and some time after he had left that house, his innocence received the most striking confirmation. For the lady sent him the ring as a gift. He was wretchedly poor, and the ring would have meant much to him; but he went and threw it into a well, a deep old-fashioned well. The costliest thing he had ever possessed in life, he threw without hesitation or reflection into a well—that’s what this man did.”

“Oh, well, very well. Although ... no, I don’t quite see your meaning,” said Crammon, discontentedly, and shifted his pipe from the right to the left corner of his mouth. “What good did the ring do the poor fool? How absurd to take something that reaches you in a manner so delicate and discreet, and throw it into a well? Would not a box have served, or a drawer? There at least it could have been found. It was a loutish trick.”

Crammon’s way of sitting there with his legs crossed, showing his grey silk socks, had something about it so secure and satiated, that it reminded one of an animal that basks in the sun and digests its food. Christian’s disgust at his words quieted, and was replaced by a gentle, almost compassionate tenderness. He said: “It is so hard to renounce. You can talk about it and imagine it; you can will it and even believe yourself capable of it. But when the moment of renunciation comes, it is hard, it is almost impossible to give up even the humblest of things.”

“Yes, but why do you want to renounce?” Crammon murmured in his vexation. “What do you mean exactly by renunciation? What is it to lead to?”

Christian said almost to himself: “I believe that one must cast one’s ring into a well.”

“If you mean by that that you intend to forget our wonderful Queen Mab, all I have to say is—the Lord help you in your purpose,” Crammon answered.

“One holds fast and clings because one fears the step into the unknown,” Christian said.

Crammon was silent for a few minutes and wrinkled his forehead. Then he cleared his throat and asked: “Did you ever hear about homoeopathy? I’ll explain to you what is meant by it. It means curing like with like. If for instance some food has disagreed with you violently, and I give you a drug that would, in a state of health, have sickened you even more violently than your food—that would be a homoeopathic treatment.”

“So you want to cure me?” Christian asked, and smiled. “From what and with what?”

Crammon moved his chair nearer to Christian’s, laid a hand on his knees, and whispered astutely: “I’ve got something for you, dear boy. I’ve made an exquisite find. There’s a woman in your horoscope, as the sooth-sayers put it. Some one is yearning for you, is immensely taken with you, and dying of impatience to know you. And it’s something quite different, a new type, something prickling and comical, indeterminate, sensitive, a little graceless and small and not beautiful, but enormously charming. She comes from the bourgeoisie at its most obese, but she struggles with both hands and feet against the fate of being a pearl in a trough. There’s your chance for employment, distraction, and refreshment. It won’t be a long affair,—an interlude of her holidays, but instructive, and, in the homoeopathic sense, sure to work a cure. For look you: Ariel, she is a miracle, a star, the food of the gods. You can’t live on such nourishment; you need bread. Descend, my son, from the high tower where you still grasp after the miraculum coeli that once flamed on your bosom. Put it out of your mind; descend, and be contented with mortality. To-night at seven in the dining-room of the Hotel de la Plage. Is it a bargain?”

Christian laughed, and got up. On the table stood a vase filled with white pinks. He took out one of the flowers, and fastened it into Crammon’s button-hole.

“Is it a bargain or not?” Crammon asked severely.

“No, dear friend, there’s nothing in that for me,” Christian answered, laughing more heartily. “Keep your find to yourself.”

The veins on Crammon’s forehead swelled. “But I’ve promised to bring you, and you mustn’t leave me in the lurch.” He was in a rage. “I don’t deserve such treatment, after all the slights which you have put on me for months. You give rights to an obscure vagabond that astonish the whole world, and you cast aside heartlessly an old and proved friend. That does hurt and embitter and enrage one. I’m through.”

“Calm yourself, Bernard,” said Christian, and stooped to pick up some blossoms that had fallen on the floor. And as he put back the flowers into the vase, there came to him the vision of Amadeus Voss’ white face, showing his bleeding soul and paralyzed by desire and renunciation, even as it was turned toward the fat, morose Walloon woman. “I don’t comprehend your stubbornness,” he continued. “Why won’t you let me be? Don’t you know that I bring misfortune to all who love me?”

Crammon was startled. Despite Christian’s equivocal smile, he felt a sudden twinge of superstitious fear. “Idiotic!” he growled. He arose and took his hat, and still tried to wring from Christian a promise for the evening. At that moment a knock sounded at the door, and Amadeus Voss entered.

“I beg your pardon,” he stammered, and looked shyly at Crammon, who had at once assumed an attitude of hostility. “I merely wanted to ask you, Christian, whether we are going to leave. Shall the packing be done? We must know what to do.”

Crammon was furious. “Fancy the scoundrel taking such a tone,” he thought. He could hardly force himself to assume the grimace of courtesy that became inevitable when Christian, quite hesitatingly, introduced them to each other.

Amadeus bowed like an applicant for some humble office. His eyes behind their lenses clung to Crammon, like the valves of an exhaust pump. He found Crammon repulsive at once; but he thought it advisable not only to hide this feeling but to play the part of obsequiousness. His hatred was so immediate and so violent, that he was afraid of showing it too soon, and stripping himself of some chance of translating it into action.

Crammon sought points of attack. He treated Voss with contempt, looked at him as though he were a wad of clothes against the wall, neither answered him nor listened to what he said, deliberately prolonged his stay, and paid no attention to Christian’s nervousness. Voss continued to play the part he had selected. He agreed and bowed, rubbed the toe of one of his boots against the sole of the other, picked up Crammon’s stick when the latter dropped it; but as he seemed determined not to be the first to yield, Crammon at last took pity on the silent wonder and torment in Christian’s face. He waved his well-gloved left hand and withdrew. He seemed to swell up in his rage like a frog. “Softly, Bernard,” he said to himself; “guard your dignity, and do not step into the ordure at your feet. Trust in the Lord who said: Vengeance is mine.” He met a little dog on his path, and administered a kick to it, so that the beast howled and scurried into an open cellar.

Across the table Christian and Voss faced each other in silence. Voss pulled a flower from the vase, and shredded its calyx with his thin fingers. “So that was Herr von Crammon,” he murmured. “I don’t know why I feel like laughing. But I can’t help it. I do.” And he giggled softly to himself.

“We leave to-morrow,” said Christian, held a handkerchief to his mouth, and breathed the delicate perfume that aroused in him so many tender and slowly fading images.

Voss took a blossom, tore it in two, gazed tensely at the parts, and said: “Fibre by fibre, cell by cell. I am done with this life of sloth and parasitism. I want to cut up the bodies of men and anatomize corpses. Perhaps one can get at the seat of weakness and vulgarity. One must seek life at its source and death at its root. The talent of an anatomist stirs within me. Once I wanted to be a great preacher like Savonarola; but it’s a reckless thing to try in these days. One had better stick to men’s bodies; their souls would bring one to despair.”

“I believe one must work,” Christian answered softly. “It does not matter at what. But one must work.” He turned toward the window. The round, white cloud had vanished; the silver sea had sucked it up.

“Have you come to that conclusion?” Voss jeered. “I’ve known it long. The way to hell is paved with work; and only hell can burn us clean. It is well that you have learned that much.”

III

Crammon and Johanna SchÖntag were sitting in a drawing-room of the hotel. They had had dinner together. Johanna’s companion, FrÄulein Grabmeier, had already retired.

“You must be patient, Rumpelstilzkin,” said Crammon. “I’m sorry to say that he hasn’t bitten yet. The bait is still in the water.”

“I’ll be patient, my lord,” said Johanna, in her slightly rough, boyish voice, and a gleam of merriment, in which charm and ugliness were strangely blended, passed over her face. “I don’t find it very hard either. Everything is sure to go wrong with me in the end. If ever unexpectedly a wish of mine is fulfilled, and something I looked forward to does happen, I’m as wretched as I can be, because it’s never as nice as I thought it would be. The best thing for me, therefore, is to be disappointed.”

“You’re a problematic soul,” said Crammon musingly.

Johanna gave a comical sigh. “I advise you, dear friend and protector, to get rid of me by return post.” She stretched her thin little neck with an intentionally bizarre movement. “I simply interfere with the traffic. I’m a personified evil omen. At my birth a lady by the name of Cassandra appeared, and I needn’t tell you the disagreeable things that have been said of her. You remember how when we were at target practice at Ashburnhill I hit the bull’s-eye. Everybody was amazed, yourself included; but I more so than any one, because it was pure, unadulterated chance. The rifle had actually gone off before I had taken aim. Fate gives me such small and worthless gifts, in order to seem friendly and lull me into security. But I’m not to be deceived. Ugh! A nun, a nun!” she interrupted herself. Her eyes became very large, as she looked into the garden where an Ursuline nun was passing by. Then she crossed her arms over her bosom, and counted with extraordinary readiness: “Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” Then she laughed, and showed two rows of marvellous teeth.

“Is it your custom to do that whenever a nun appears?” Crammon asked. His interest in superstitions was aroused.

“It’s the proper ritual to follow. But she was gone before I came to one, and that augurs no good. By the way, dear baron, your sporting terminology sounds suspicious. What does that mean: ‘he hasn’t bitten yet; the bait is still in the water’? I beg you to restrain yourself. I’m an unprotected girl, and wholly dependent on your delicate chivalry. If you shake my tottering self-confidence by any more reminiscences of the sporting world, I’ll have to telegraph for two berths on the Vienna train. For myself and FrÄulein Grabmeier, of course.”

She loved these daring little implications, from which she could withdraw quite naÏvely. Crammon burst into belated laughter, and that fact stirred her merriment too.

She was very watchful, and nothing escaped her attentive eyes. She took a burning interest in the characters and actions of people. She leaned toward Crammon and they whispered together, for he could tell a story about each form and face that emerged from the crowd. The chronicle of international biography and scandal of which he was master was inexhaustible. If ever his memory failed him, he invented or poetized a little. He had everything at his tongue’s end—disputes concerning inheritances, family quarrels, illegitimate descent, adulteries, relationships of all sorts. Johanna listened to him with a smile. She peered at all the tables and carefully observed every uncommon detail. She picked up and pinned down, as an entomologist does his beetles, any chance remark or roguish expression, any silliness or peculiarity of any of these unconscious actors of the great world or the half world.

Suddenly the pupils of her greyish blue eyes grew very large, and her lips curved in a bow of childlike delight. “Who is that?” she whispered, and thrust her chin out a little in the direction of a door at Crammon’s back. But she at once knew instinctively who it was. She would have known it without the general raising of heads and softening of voices, of which she became aware.

Crammon turned around and saw Eva amid a group of ladies and gentlemen. He arose, waited until Eva glanced in his direction, and then bowed very low. Eva drew back a little. She had not seen him since the days of Denis Lay. She thought a little, and nodded distantly. Then she recognized him, kicked back her train with an incomparable grace, and, speaking in every line before her lips moved, went up to him.

Johanna had arisen too. Eva remarked the little figure. She gave Crammon to understand that he had a duty toward his companion, and that she would not refuse an introduction to the unknown girl, on whose face enthusiasm and homage were so touchingly to be seen. Crammon introduced Johanna in his most ceremonious manner. Johanna grew pale and red and curtsied. She seemed to herself suddenly so negligible that she was overcome with shame. Then she tore off the three yellow roses at her corsage, and held them out to Eva with a sudden and yet timid gesture. Eva liked this impulse. She felt its uniqueness and veracity, and therefore knew its value.

IV

Christian and Amadeus wandered across the Quai Kokerill in Antwerp.

A great transatlantic liner lay, silent and empty, at the pier. The steerage passengers waited at its side for the hour of their admission. They were Polish peasants, Russian Jews, men and women, young ones and aged ones, children and sucklings. They crouched on the cold stones or on their dirty bundles. They were themselves dirty, neglected, weary, dully brooding—a melancholy and confused mass of rags and human bodies.

The mighty globe of the sun rolled blood-red and quivering over the waters.

Christian and Amadeus stopped. After a while they went on, but Christian desired to turn back, and they did so. At a crossing near the emigrants’ camp, a line of ten or twenty donkey-carts cut off the road. The carts looked liked bisected kegs on wheels, and were filled with smoked mackerels.

“Buy mackerels!” the cart-drivers cried. “Buy mackerels!” And they cracked their whips.

A few of the emigrants approached and stared hungrily; they consulted with others, who were already looking for coins in their pockets, until finally a few determined ones proceeded to make a purchase.

Then Christian said to Voss: “Let us buy the fish and distribute them. What do you think?”

Amadeus was ill pleased. He answered. “Do as you wish. Great lords must have their little pleasures.” He felt uncomfortable amid the gathering crowd.

Christian turned to one of the hucksters. It was difficult to make the man understand normal French, but gradually he succeeded. The huckster summoned the others, and there followed excited chatter and gesticulations. Various sums were named and considered and rejected. This process bored Christian; it threatened to be endless. He offered a sum that represented a considerable increase over the highest price named, and handed his wallet to Amadeus that the men might be paid. Then he said to the increasing throng of emigrants in German: “The fish are yours.”

A few understood his words, and conveyed their meaning to the others. Timidly they ventured forward. A woman, whose skin was yellow as a lemon from jaundice, was the first to touch a fish. Soon hundreds came. From all sides they brought baskets, pots, nets, sacks. A few old men kept the crowd in order. One of these, who wore a flowing white beard and a long Jewish coat, bowed down thrice before Christian. His forehead almost touched the earth.

A sudden impulse compelled Christian to see in person to the just distribution of the fish. He turned up his sleeves, and with his delicate hands threw the greasy, malodourous fish into the vessels held out for them. He laughed as he soiled his fingers. The hucksters and some idle onlookers laughed too. They thought him a crazy, young Englishman out for a lark. Suddenly his gorge rose at the odour of the fish, and even more at the odour of these people. He smelled their clothes and their breath, and gagged at the thought of their teeth and fingers, their hair and shoes. A morbid compulsion forced him to think of their naked bodies, and he shuddered at the idea of their flesh. So he stopped, and slipped away into the twilight.

His hands still reeked of the smoked fish. He walked through the streets that had had nothing to do with his adventure and the night seemed empty.

Amadeus Voss had escaped. He waited in front of the hotel. There the line of motor cars had gathered that was to accompany Eva on her journey to Germany. Among the travellers were Crammon and Johanna SchÖntag.

V

In October the weather turned hot on the Rio de la Plata. All day one had to stay in the house. If one opened a window, living fire seemed to stream in. Once Letitia fainted, when she wanted to air her stuffy room, and opened one of the wooden shutters.

The only spot that offered some shade and coolness toward evening was an avenue of palms beside the river. Sometimes, during the brief twilight, Letitia and her young sister-in-law Esmeralda would steal away to that place. Their road passed the ranchos, the wretched cave-like huts in which the native workmen lived.

Once Letitia saw the people of the ranchos merrily feasting and in their best garments. She asked for the reason, and was told that a child had died. “They always celebrate when some one dies,” Esmeralda told her. “How sad must their lives be to make them so in love with death.”

The avenue of palms was forbidden ground. When darkness came, the bushes rustled, and furtive men slipped back and forth. Not long before the mounted police had caught a sailor here who was wanted for a murder in Galveston. Somehow Letitia dreamed of him. She was sure he had killed his man through jealousy and bore the marks of a beautiful tragedy.

One evening she had met in this spot a young naval officer, who was a guest on a neighbouring estate. Letitia exchanged glances with him, and from that time on he sought some way of approaching her. But she was like a prisoner, or like a Turkish woman in a harem. So she determined to outwit her guards; she really fell in love with the young officer. Her imagination made an heroic figure of him, and she began to long for him.

The heat increased. Letitia could not sleep at night. The mosquitoes hummed sweetishly, and she cried like a little child. By day she locked herself in her room, stripped off her clothes, and lay down on the cold tiles.

Once she was lying thus with arms outstretched. “I’m like an enchanted princess,” she thought, “in an enchanted castle.”

Some one knocked at the door, and she heard Stephen’s voice calling her. Idly she raised her head, and from under her heavy lids gazed down at her naked body. “What a bore it is,” she thought, “what a terrible bore always to be with the same man. I want others too.” She did not answer, and let her head droop, and rubbed her glowing cheek against the warm skin of her upper arm. It pleased the master of the harem out there to beg for admission; but Letitia did not open the door.

After a while she heard a tumult in the yard—laughter, the cracking of whips, the report of rifles, and the cries of beasts in torment. She jumped up, slipped into a silk dressing gown, opened the window that gave on the verandah, and peered out.

Stephen had tied together the tails of two cats by means of a long fuse. Along the fuse were fastened explosive bits of firework. The hissing little rockets singed the cats’ fur, and the glowing cord burned into their flesh. The cats tumbled about in their agony and howled. Stephen goaded them and followed them. His brothers, bent over the balustrade, roared with delight. Two Indians, grave and silent, watched from the gate.

Stephen had, of course, counted on Letitia’s opening the door in her curiosity. A few great leaps, and he was beside her. Esmeralda, who was in the plot, had at once faced Letitia and prevented her from locking the door. White with rage, and with raised fist, he stormed across the threshold. She fell to her knees, and hid her face in her hands.

“Why do you beat me?” she moaned, in horror and surprise. But he did not touch her.

His teeth gnashed. “To teach you to obey.”

She sobbed. “Be careful! It’s not only me you’re hurting now!”

“Damnation, what are you saying?” He stared at her crouching figure.

“You’re hurting two now.” Letitia enjoyed fooling him. Her tears were now tears of pity for herself.

“Woman, is that true?” he asked. Letitia peered furtively between her fingers, and thought mockingly: “It’s like the last act of a cheap opera.” She nodded with a gesture of pain, and determined to deceive him with the naval officer.

Stephen gave a howl of triumph, danced about, threw himself down beside her, and kissed her arms, her shoulders, and her neck. At the windows and doors appeared DoÑa Barbara, Esmeralda, Stephen’s brothers, and the servants. He lifted Letitia on his strong shoulders, and carried her about on the verandah. He roared his orders: a feast was to be prepared, an ox slaughtered, champagne to be put on ice.

Letitia had no qualms of conscience. She was glad to have made a fool of him.

When old Gunderam learned the cause of the rejoicing in his house, he chuckled to himself. “Fooled all the same, my sly lawyer man. In spite of the written agreement, you won’t get the Escurial, not for a good while, even if she has a whole litter.” With an unappetizing, broken little comb he smoothed his iron grey beard, and poured eau de Cologne on his head, until his hair, which was still thick, dripped.

But, strangely enough, the lie that Letitia had told in her terror turned out to be the truth. In a few days she was sure. Secretly she was amazed. Every morning she stood before the mirror, and looked at herself with a strange respect and a subtle horror. But she was unchanged. Her mood became gently melancholy, and she threw a kiss to her image in the glass.

Since they were now afraid of crossing her wishes, she was permitted to attend a ball given by SeÑor and SeÑora KÜchelbÄcker, and it was there that she made the formal acquaintance of the naval lieutenant, Friedrich Pestel.

VI

Felix Imhof and the painter Weikhardt met at the exhibition of the “secessionists” in Munich. For a while they strolled through the rooms, and looked at the paintings; then they went out on the terrace, and sat down at a table that commanded a view of the park.

It was in the early afternoon, and the odours of oil and turpentine from within blended with the fragrance of the sun-warmed plants.

Imhof crossed his long legs, and yawned affectedly. “I’m going to leave this admirable home of art and letters for some months,” he declared. “I’m going to accompany the minister of colonial affairs to South West Africa. I’m anxious to see how things are going there. Those people need looking after. Then, too, it’s a new experience, and there will be hunting.”

Weikhardt was utterly self-absorbed. He was full of his own annoyances, his inner and outer conflicts, and therefore spoke only of himself. “I am to copy a cycle by Luini for the old Countess Matuschka,” he said. “She has several blank walls in her castle in Galicia, and she wants tapestries for them. But the old creature is close as the bark on the tree, and her bargaining is repulsive.”

Imhof also pursued his own thoughts. “I’ve read a lot about Stanhope recently,” he said. “A tremendous fellow, modern through and through, reporter and conquistador at the same time. The blacks called him the ‘cliff-breaker.’ It makes one’s mouth water. Simply tremendous!”

Weikhardt continued: “But I dare say I’ll have to accept the commission. I’ve come to the end of my tether. It’ll be good to see the old Italians again, too. In Milan there’s a Tintoretto that’s adorable. I’m on the track of a secret. I’m doing things that will count. The other day I finished a picture, a simple landscape, and took it to an acquaintance of mine. He has a rather exquisite room, and there we hung it. The walls had grey hangings, and the furnishings were in black and gold. He’s a rich man and wanted to buy the picture. But when I saw how much he liked it, and saw, too, the delicate, melancholy harmony of its colours with the tints of the room, I felt a sudden flash of encouragement. I couldn’t bear to talk money, and I simply gave him the thing. He accepted it quietly enough, but he continued saying: ‘How damned good it is!’”

“It’ll take my thoughts off myself, this little trip to the Southern Hemisphere,” said Imhof. “I’m not exactly favoured of fortune just now. To be frank—everything’s in the deuce of a mess. My best horse went to smash, my favourite dog died, my wife took French leave of me, and my friends avoid me—I don’t know why. My business is progressing backward, and all my speculations end in losses. But, after all, what does it matter? I say to myself: Never say die, old boy! Here’s the great, beautiful world, and all the splendour and variety of life. If you complain, you deserve no better. My sandwich has dropped into the mud. All right; I must get a fresh one. Whoever goes to war must expect wounds. The main thing is to stick to your flag. The main thing is faith—quite simple faith.”

It was still a question which of the two would first turn his attention from himself, and hear his companion’s voice. Weikhardt, whose eyes had grown sombre, spoke again: “O this dumb loneliness in a studio, with one’s hundred failures, and the ghosts of one’s thousand hours of despair! I have a chance to marry, and I’m going to take it, too. The girl has no money, to be sure, but she has a heart. She’s not afraid of my poverty, and comprehends the necessary quixotism of an artist’s life. She comes of a Protestant family of very liberal traditions, but two years ago she became a Catholic. When I first met her I was full of suspicion, and assumed all sorts of reasons for her step except the simple and human ones. It’s very difficult to see the simple and the human things, and still more difficult to do them. Gradually I understood what it means—to believe! and I understood what is to be reverenced in such faith. It is faith itself that is sacred, not that in which the faith is placed. It doesn’t matter what one has faith in—a book, a beast, a man, a star, a god. But it must be pure faith—immovable and unconquerable. Yes, I quite agree with you—we need simple faith.”

So they had found each other through a word. “When do I get my picture, your Descent from the Cross?” Imhof inquired.

Weikhardt did not answer the question. As he talked on, his smooth, handsome, boyish face assumed the aspect of a quarrelsome old man’s. Yet his voice remained gentle and slow, and his bearing phlegmatic. “Humanity to-day has lost its faith,” he continued. “Faith has leaked out like water from a cracked glass. Our age is tyrannised by machinery: it is a mob rule without parallel. Who will save us from machinery and from business? The golden calf has gone mad. The spirit of man kowtows to a warehouse. Our watchword is to be up and doing. We manufacture Christianity, a renaissance, culture, et cetera. If it’s not quite the real thing, yet it will serve. Everything tends toward the external—toward expression, line, arabesque, gesture, mask. Everything is stuck on a hoarding and lit by electric lamps. Everything is the very latest, until something still later begins to function. Thus the soul flees, goodness ceases, the form breaks, and reverence dies. Do you feel no horror at the generation that is growing up? The air is like that before the flood.”

“Create, O artist, and don’t philosophize,” Imhof said gently.

Weikhardt was shamed a little. “It’s true,” he said, “we have no means of knowing the goal of it all. But there are symptoms, typical cases that leave little room for hope. Did you hear the story of the suicide of the German-American Scharnitzer? He was pretty well known among artists. He used to go to the studios himself, and buy whatever took his fancy. He never bargained. Sometimes he would be accompanied by a daughter of eighteen, a girl of angelic beauty. Her name was Sybil, and he used to buy pictures for her. She was especially fond of still-life and flower pieces. The man had been in California and made millions in lumber. Then he returned to the fatherland to give the girl an atmosphere of calm and culture. Sybil was his one thought, his hope, his idol and his world. He had been married but a short time. His wife, it is said, ran away from him. All that a life of feverish activity had left him of deep feeling and of hope for the future was centred in this child. He saw in her one girl in a thousand, a little saint. And so indeed she seemed—extraordinarily dainty, proud and ethereal. One would not have dared to touch her with one’s finger. When the two were together, a delightful sense of harmony radiated from them. The father, especially, seemed happy. His voluntary death caused all the more consternation. No one suspected the motive; it was assumed that he had suffered a moment of madness. But he left behind him a letter to an American friend which explained everything. He had been indisposed one day, and had had to stay in bed. Sybil had invited several girl friends to tea, and the little company was in a room at the other end of their suite. But all the doors between were open, even the last was slightly ajar, so that the murmur of the girls’ voices came to him inarticulately. A sudden curiosity seized him to know what they were saying. He got up, slipped into a dressing gown, went softly through the intervening rooms, and listened at the door. The conversation was about the future of these girls—the possibilities of love, happiness, and marriage. Each gave her ideas. Finally it was Sybil’s turn to speak her thoughts. At first she refused; but they urged her again and again. She said she took no interest in emotions of any sort; she didn’t yearn for love; she wasn’t able to feel even gratitude to any one. What she expected of marriage was simply liberation from a galling yoke. She wanted a man who could give her all that life held—boundless luxury and high social position—and who, moreover, would be abjectly at her feet. That, she said, was her program, and she intended to carry it out too. The other girls fell silent. None answered. But that hour poisoned the father’s soul. This cynicism, uttered by the pure and spiritual voice of the child he adored and thought a miracle of depth and sweetness, the child on whom he had wasted all he was and had, plunged him into an incurable melancholy, and caused him finally to end his life.”

“My dear fellow,” cried Imhof, and waved his arm, “that man wasn’t a lumber merchant, he was a minor poet.”

“It’s possible that he was,” Weikhardt replied, and smiled; “quite possible. What does it alter? I admire a man who cannot survive the destruction of all his ideals. It’s better than to be a cliff-breaker, I assure you. Most people haven’t any ideals to be destroyed. They adapt themselves endlessly, and become vulgar and sterile.” Again his eyes grew sombre, and he added, half to himself: “Sometimes I dream of one who neither rises nor falls, of one who walks on earth whole and unchangeable, unswerving and unadaptable. Perfectly unadaptable. It is of such an one that I dream.”

Imhof jumped up, and smoothed his coat. “Talk, talk!” he rattled, in the disagreeable military tone that he assumed in his moments of pseudo-virility. “Talk won’t improve things.” He passed his arm through Weikhardt’s, and as they left the terrace, which had been gradually filling with other guests, he recited, boldly, unashamed, and in the same tone, the alcaic stanza of HÖlderlin:

On their first evening in Hamburg, Crammon rented a box in the playhouse, and invited Christian, Johanna SchÖntag, and Herr Livholm, one of the directors of the Lloyd, to be his guests. He had made the latter’s acquaintance in the hotel where he had gone to pay Eva a visit of welcome. He had liked the man, who cut a good figure, and so he had added him to the party in order, as he put it, to keep the atmosphere normal by the presence of an entirely neutral person.

“Social skill,” he was accustomed to say, “is not unlike skill in cookery and serving. Between two heavy, rich dishes there must be one like foam that stimulates the palate quite superficially. Otherwise the meal has no style.”

The play was a mediocre comedy, and Christian was frankly bored. Crammon thought it his duty to show a condescending and muffled amusement, and now and then he gave Christian a gentle poke, to persuade him also to show some appreciation of the performance. Johanna was the only one who was genuinely amused. The source of her amusement was an actor to whom a serious rÔle had been assigned, but who talked with such silly affectation and false importance that every time he appeared she had to hold her lacy handkerchief to her lips to smother her laughter.

Occasionally Christian gave the girl a far and estranged glance. She wasn’t either agreeable or the reverse; he did not know what to make of her. This feeling of his had not changed since he had first seen her during the journey in Eva’s company.

She felt the coldness of his glance. Her merriment did not vanish; but on the lower part of her face appeared a scarcely perceptible shadow of disappointment.

As though seeking for help, she turned to Christian. “The man is terribly funny, don’t you think so?” It was characteristic of her to end a question with a negative interrogation.

“He’s certainly worth seeing,” Christian agreed politely.

The door of the box opened, and Voss entered. He was faultlessly dressed for the occasion; but no one had expected or invited him. They looked at him in astonishment. He bowed calmly and without embarrassment, stood quite still, and gave his attention to the stage.

Crammon looked at Christian. The latter shrugged his shoulders. After a while Crammon arose, and with sarcastic courtesy pointed to his seat. Voss shook his head in friendly refusal, but immediately thereafter assumed once more his air of humility and abjectness. He stammered: “I was in the stalls and looked up. I thought there was no harm in paying a visit.” Suddenly Crammon went out, and was heard quarrelling with the usher. Johanna had become serious, and looked down at the audience. Christian, as though to ward off disagreeable things, ducked his shoulders a little. The people in the near-by seats became indignant at the noise Crammon was making. Herr Livholm felt that the proper atmosphere had hardly been preserved. Amadeus Voss alone showed himself insensitive to the situation.

He stood behind Johanna, and thought: “The hair of this woman has a fragrance that turns one dizzy.” At the end of the act he withdrew, and did not return.

Late at night, when he had him alone, Crammon vented his rage on Christian. “I’ll shoot him down like a mad dog, if he tries that sort of thing again! What does the fellow think? I’m not accustomed to such manners. Damned gallow’s bird—where’d he grow up? Oh, my prophetic soul! I always distrusted people with spectacles. Why don’t you tell him to go to hell? In the course of my sinful life, I’ve come in contact with all kinds of people; I know the best and I know the dregs; but this fellow is a new type. Quite new, by God! I’ll have to take a bromide, or I won’t be able to sleep.”

“I believe you are unjust, Bernard,” answered Christian, with lowered eyes. But his face was stern, reserved, and cold.

VIII

Amadeus Voss submitted the following plan to Christian: to go to Berlin, first as an unmatriculated student, and later to prepare himself for the state examination in medicine.

Christian nodded approvingly, and added that he intended to go to Berlin shortly too. Voss walked up and down in the room. Then he asked brusquely: “What am I to live on? Am I to address envelopes? Or apply for stipends? If you intend to withdraw your friendship and assistance, say so frankly. I’ve learned to wade through the mud. The new kind won’t offer more resistance than the old.”

Christian was thoroughly surprised. A week ago, in Holland, he had given Amadeus ten thousand francs. “How much will you need?” he asked.

“Board, lodging, clothes, books....” Voss went over the items, and his expression was that of one who formulates demands and uses the tone of request only as a matter of courtesy. “I’ll be frugal.”

“I shall order two thousand marks a month to be sent you,” Christian said, with an air of aversion. The impudent demand for money pained him. Possession weighed upon him like a mountain. He could not get his arms free nor lift his chest, and the weight grew heavier and heavier.

In a bowl of chrysolite on the table lay a scarf-pin with one large, black pearl. Voss, whose hands always groped for some occupation, had taken it up, and held it between his thumb and index finger against the light. “Do you want the pin?” Christian asked. “Take it,” he persuaded Amadeus, who was hesitating. “I really don’t care about it.”

Voss approached the mirror, and with a curious smile stuck the pin into his cravat.

When Christian was left alone, he stood for a while quite lost in thought. Then he sat down, and wrote to his manager at Christian’s Rest. He wrote in his lanky script and his no less awkward style. “My dear Herr Borkowski:—I have determined to sell Christian’s Rest, together with all furnishings and objects of art, as well as the park, woods, and farms. I herewith commission you to find a capable and honest real estate dealer, who might telegraph me any favourable offers. You know people of that sort, and need merely drive over to Frankfort. Have the kindness to settle the matter as quietly as possible. No advertisements are to appear in the press.”

Then he wrote a second letter to the manager of his racing stable at Waldleiningen. To write this he had to do more violence to his heart than the first had cost him, for he saw constantly fixed upon him the gentle or spirited eyes of the noble animals. He wrote: “My dear Herr Schaller:—I have determined to discontinue my racing stable. The horses are to be sold at auction or quietly to fanciers. I should prefer the latter method, and I suppose you share that feeling. Baron Deidinger of Deidingshausen was at one time much interested in Columbus and the mare Lovely. Inquire of him whether he wants them. Admirable and Bride o’ the Wind could be offered either to Prince Pless or Herr von Strathmann. Have my friend Denis Lay’s Excelsior sent to Baden-Baden, and boarded temporarily in the stables of Count Treuberg. I don’t wish him to remain at Waldleiningen alone.”

When he had sealed the letters, he sighed with relief. He rang, and gave the letters to his valet. The latter had turned to go, when Christian called him back. “I’m very sorry to have to give you notice, Wilhelm,” he said. “I’m going to attend to myself hereafter.”

The man could not trust his ears. He had been with Christian for three years, and was genuinely devoted to him.

“I’m sorry, but it’s necessary,” said Christian, looked past the man, and had almost the same strange smile with which he had watched Amadeus Voss at the mirror putting the black pearl pin into his cravat.

IX

Crammon asserted that Amadeus Voss was paying his attentions to Johanna SchÖntag. Johanna was annoyed, and tapped him with her long gloves. “I congratulate you on your conquest, Rumpelstilzkin,” Crammon teased her. “To have a monster like that in leash is no small achievement. I should advise muzzling the monster, however. What do you think, Christian, wouldn’t you advise a muzzle, too?”

“A muzzle?” answered Christian. “Yes, if it would keep people from talking. So many talk too much.”

Crammon bit his lips. The reproof struck him as harsh. Somewhere beneath the downs of life on which he lay and enjoyed himself, there was, evidently, a stone. The stone hurt. He sought for it, but the softness of the down calmed him again, and he forgot his pain.

“I was sitting in the breakfast room, and waiting for Madame Sorel,” Johanna began in a voice whose every shading and inflection sought to woo Christian’s ear, “when Herr Voss came in and marched straight up to me. ‘What does that bad man want of me?’ I asked myself. He asked me, as though we’d been bosom friends for years, whether I didn’t want to go with him to St. Paul’s to hear the famous itinerant preacher Jacobsen. I couldn’t help laughing, and he stalked away insulted. But this afternoon, as I was leaving the hotel, he seemed suddenly to spring from the earth, and invited me to a trip around the harbour. He had rented a motor launch, and was looking for a companion. He had the same gruff familiarity, and when he left he was quite as insulted as before. And you call that paying attentions? I felt much more as though he were going to drag me off and murder me. But perhaps that’s only his manner.” She laughed.

“You’re the only person, at all events, whom he distinguishes by observing at all,” Crammon said, with the same mockery.

“Or the only one whom he considers his equal,” Johanna said, with a childlike frown.

Christian was wondering: “Why does she laugh so often? Why are her hands so pudgy and so very pink?” Johanna felt his disapproval, and was as though paralysed. And yet Christian felt himself drawn toward her by some hidden power.

Why should he resist? Why be so ceremonious? Such was his thought, as Johanna arose, and he, with unobtrusive glances, observed her graceful form that still possessed the flexibility of immaturity. He saw the nape of her slender neck, in which were expressed both the weakness of her will and the fineness of her temper. He knew these signs; he had often been guided by them and used them.

Crammon, massive and magnificent in a great easy chair, spoke with some emphasis of Eva’s appearance on the morrow. The whole city was in a state of expectancy. But Christian and Johanna had suddenly become truly aware of one another.

“Are you coming along?” Christian turned carelessly, and with a sense of boredom, to Crammon.

“Yes, my boy, let us eat!” Crammon cried. He called Hamburg the Paradise of Saint Bernard, concerning whom, as his patron saint and namesake, he had instituted especial investigations, and who, according to him, had been a mighty trencherman during his lifetime at Tours.

A frightened, subtle, and very feminine smile hovered about Johanna’s lips. As she preceded the two men, the motions of her dainty body expressed a vague oppression of the spirit, and at the same time a humorous rebellion against her own unfreedom.

X

Amadeus Voss knew that he had no one’s sympathy, no one’s except Christian’s. And him he suspected, watching him, weighing and analysing his words and actions. In his terror of hypocrisy and treachery, he practised both himself. Nothing healed or convinced or reconciled him. Least of all did he pardon Christian the fact that the latter’s glance and presence had the effect of subduing him. His bitterness moaned from his very dreams.

He read in the Scriptures: “There was a certain house-holder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country: and when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen that they might receive the fruits of it. And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first, and they did unto them likewise. But last of all, he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him.”

Sometimes he would not leave Christian’s side for hours. He would study his gestures and the expressions of his countenance, and all these perceptions fed the corrosive fire in his brain. For this was the heir! Then he would flee and bruise and stamp upon his very soul, until his consciousness of guilt cast him down into the very dust. He would return, and his demeanour would be a silent confession: “I can thrive only in your presence.” It seemed to him that this silence of his was like a cry; but it was not heard, and so his brother seemed again to become his foe. Thus he kept passing from darkness, through fires and fumes, back into the darkness.

He suffered from his own embarrassment and importunateness. In the midst of luxury and plenty, into which he had been transferred by a fabulous turn of fortune, he suffered from the memories of his former poverty, still felt how it had bound and throttled him, and still rebelled against what was gone. He could not freely take what was given him, but closed his eyes, and shuddered with both desire and a pang of conscience. He would not look upon the pattern of his web of life. He turned its texture around, and brooded over the significance of the intricately knotted threads. And there was no human relationship which did not rouse his suspicion, no harmless conversation in which he did not seek a sting directed toward himself, no face that did not feed his hatred, no beauty whose counter part of ugliness he did not see. To him everything turned to poison and decay, all blossoms became noxious weeds, all velvet a Nessus shirt, all light an evil smouldering, every stimulus a wound: on every wall he saw the flaming letters, mene tekel upharsim.

He could not yield himself or conquer the stubbornness of his heart. With the object of his desire in his very hands, his envy burned on. Whatever had once humiliated him spurred his vengefulness through retrospection. Chastisements which his father had inflicted distorted the old man’s image beyond the grave; his fellow pupils in the seminary had once strewn pepper into his coffee, and he could not forget it; he could not forget the expression on the face of Adeline Ribbeck with which she had given him his first month’s salary in a closed envelope; he remembered the contempt and contumely of hundreds, who had inflicted upon him their revenge for the oppression or degradation which they themselves had endured. He could not conquer these things nor forgive fate. The marks that had been burned into his flesh throbbed like new wounds.

But at other times he would cast himself into the dust in prayer and in great need of forgiveness. Religious scruples plagued him into remorse; he panted for an hour’s release from consciousness, judged himself with cruel severity, and condemned himself to ascetic practices.

And these hurled him into the other extreme of a wild, undiscriminating, and senseless dissipation and a mad waste of money. He could no longer resist the excitement of gambling, and fell into the hands of sharpers, drifted into loathsome dives, where he acted the part of a wealthy man and an aristocrat in incognito, for he desired to test this human mask and prove its worthlessness to himself. Since his companions took him seriously in this rÔle, which filled his own mind with shame and despair, he took his high losses with apparent calm, and overlooked the open cheating. One evening the den in which he happened to be was raided by the police, and he escaped by a hair’s breadth. One creature clung to him, frightened him with possible dangers ahead, threatened exposure, and wrung from him a considerable sum of hush money.

He became the prey of cocottes. He bought them jewels and frocks and instituted nightly revels. In his eyes they were outcasts that he used as a famishing man might slake his thirst at a mud puddle with no clean water within reach. And he was brutally frank with them. He paid them to endure his contempt. They were surprised, resisted only his most infamous abuses, and laughed at his unconquerable traits of the churchly hypocrite. Once he remained alone with a girl who was young and pretty. He had blindfolded himself. But suddenly he fled as though the furies were at his heels.

Thrice he had set the date for his departure and as many times had put it off. The image of Johanna had joined that of Eva in his soul, and both raged in his brain. Both belonged to an unattainable world. Yet Johanna seemed less alien; she might conceivably hear his plea. Eva and her beauty were like a strident jeer at all he was. He had heard so much and read so much of her art that he determined to await her appearance, in order (as he told Christian) to form a judgment of his own, and be no longer at the mercy of those who fed her on mere adulation and brazen flattery.

The audience was in full evening dress. Amadeus sat next to Christian in the magnificent and radiant hall, in which had gathered royal and princely persons, the senators of the free city, the heads of the official and financial world, and representatives of every valley and city of Germany. Christian had bought seats near the stage. Crammon, who was an expert in matters of artistic perspective, had preferred the first row in the balcony. With him were Johanna and Botho von ThÜngen, to whom he had emphatically explained that the play of the dancer’s feet and legs was interfered with by the dark line of the stage below, while from their present position its full harmony would be visible.

Amadeus Voss had almost determined to remain rigid in mind. He hardly resisted actively, for he did not expect anything powerful enough to make resistance worth while. He was cold, dull, unseeing. Suddenly there floated upon the stage a bird-like vision, a being miraculously eased of human heaviness, one who was all rhythm, and turned the rhythm of motion into music. She broke the chains of the soul, and made every emotion an image, every action a myth, every step a conquest over space and matter. But the face of Amadeus seemed to say: How can that serve me? How does that serve you? Filled by the fury of sex, he saw only a scabrous exhibition, and when the thunder of applause burst out, he showed his teeth.

Eva’s last number was a little dramatic episode, a charming jeu d’esprit, which she had invented and worked out, to be accompanied by a composition of Delibes. It was very simple. She was Pierrot playing with a top. She regulated and guided the whimsical course of the toy. In ever new positions, turns, and rhythms, she finally drove the top toward a hole into which it disappeared. But this trivial action was so filled with life by the wealth and variety of her rhythmic gestures, so radiant with spirit and swiftest grace, so fresh in inspiration, so heightened in the perfection of its art, that the audience watched breathlessly, and released its own tensity in a fury of applause.

In the foyer Crammon rushed up to Christian, and drew him through the crowd along the dim passage way that led back of the stage. Amadeus Voss, unnoticed by Crammon, followed them unthinkingly and morosely. The sight of the wings, of cliffs and trees, of discarded drops, electrical apparatus and pulleys and of the hurrying stage-hands, stirred in him a dull and hostile curiosity.

An excited crowd thronged toward Eva’s dressing-room. She sat in the silken Pierrot costume of black and white, the dainty silver whip still in her hand, amid a forest of flowers. Before her kneeled Johanna SchÖntag with an adoring moisture in her eyes. Susan gave her mistress a glass of cool champagne. Then in a mixture of five or six languages she tried to make it clear to the unbidden guests that they were in the way. But each wanted a look, a word, a smile of Eva for himself.

Next to the room in which Eva sat, and separated from it by a thin partition with an open door, was a second dressing-room, which contained only her costumes and a tall mirror. Accidentally pushed in that direction, and not through any will of his own, Amadeus Voss suddenly found himself alone in this little chamber. Having entered it, his courage grew, and he ventured a little farther in.

He looked around and stared at the garments that lay and hung here—the shimmering silks, the red, green, blue, white, and yellow shawls and veils, the fragrant webs of gauze, batiste, and tulle. There were wholly transparent textures and the heaviest brocades. One frock glowed like pure gold, another gleamed like silver; one seemed made of rose-leaves, another knitted of spun glass, one of white foam and one of amethyst. And there stood dainty shoes—a long row of them, shoes of Morocco leather and of kid and silk; and there were hose of all colours, and laces and ribands and antique beads and brooches. The air was drenched with a fragrance that stung his senses—a fragrance of precious creams and unguents, of a woman’s skin and hair. His pulses throbbed and his face turned grey. Involuntarily he stretched out his hand, and grasped a painted Spanish shawl. Angrily, greedily, beside himself, he crushed it in his hands, and buried his mouth and nose in it and trembled in every limb.

At that moment Susan Rappard saw him, and pointed to him with a gesture of astonishment. Eva saw him too, gently thrust Johanna aside, arose, and approached the threshold. When she saw the man in his strange and absorbed ecstasy, she felt as though she had been spattered with filth, and uttered a soft, brief cry. Amadeus Voss twitched and dropped the shawl. His eyes were wild and guilty. With a light laugh and an expression of transcendent contempt, which summed up a long dislike, Eva raised the little silver whip and struck him full in the face. His features grew very white, in a contortion of voluptuousness and terror.

In the tense silence Christian went up to Eva, took the silver whip from her hand, and said in a tone scarcely distinguishable from his habitual one: “Oh, no, Eva, I shall not let you do that.” He held the handle of the whip firmly at both ends, and bent it until the fragile metal snapped. Then he threw the two pieces on the floor.

They gazed at each other. Disgust at Amadeus still flamed in Eva’s face. It yielded to her astonishment at Christian’s temerity. But Christian thought: “How beautiful she is!” And he loved her. He loved her in her black and white Pierrot’s costume with the black velvet buttons, he loved her with that little cap and its impudent little tassel on her head; he loved her, and she seemed incomparable to him, and his blood cried out after her as in those nights from which she had driven him forth. But he also asked himself: “Why has she grown evil?” And a strange compassion for her stole over him, and a stranger sense of liberation. And he smiled. But to all who were watching, this smile of his seemed a little empty.

Again Amadeus Voss read in the Scripture: “What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the Lord will strike with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day will the Lord take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods and the veils. And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sack-cloth; and burning instead of beauty. Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground.”

On the same evening he left for Berlin.

XI

Lorm and Judith had a magnificent apartment near the Tiergarten in Berlin.

Edgar Lorm flourished. Order and regularity ruled his life. With childlike boastfulness he spoke of his home. His manager and friend, Dr. Emanuel Herbst, congratulated him on his visible rejuvenation.

He introduced to Judith the people whom he had long valued; but she judged most of them sharply and without sympathy. Her characteristic arrogance drove away many who meant well. But under the sway of his new comforts Lorm submitted to her opinions.

But he would not give up Emanuel Herbst. When Judith mocked at his waddling gait, his homeliness, his piping voice, his tactless jokes, Lorm grew serious. “I’ve known him for over twenty years. The things that annoy you endear him to me quite as much as those precious qualities in him which I know well, and which you’ve had no chance to discover.”

“No doubt he’s a monster of virtue,” Judith replied, “but he bores me to extinction.”

Lorm said: “One should get used to the idea that other people don’t exist exclusively for our pleasure. Your point of view is too narrowly that of use and luxury. There are human qualities that I value more highly than a handsome face or polished manners. One of these is trustworthiness. People with whom one has professional dealings often refuse to honour the demands of common decency—especially in regard to the keeping of their given word—with a calm frivolity that makes one’s gorge rise. So I’m intensely grateful to Herbst, since it means so infinitely much to me, for this—that our relations have never been shadowed by distrust, and that our simplest verbal agreements are as firm and as valid as a written contract.”

Judith recognized that in this case she would have to change her tactics. She was amiable, as though she were convinced of his virtues, and sought to gain his favour. Dr. Herbst saw through her, but showed no consciousness of his insight. He treated her with an elaborate courtesy that seemed a trifle old-fashioned, and effectually concealed his reservations.

Sometimes in the evening she would sit with the two men, and join in their shop talk of playwrights and plays, actors and actresses, successes and failures. And while she seemed attentive, and even asked an occasional question, she thought of her dressmaker, of her cook, of her weekly account, or of her old life, that was so different and had perished so utterly. And her eyes would grow hard.

It would happen that she would pass through the rooms with a bitter expression on her face and a hostile glance for the things about her. She hated the many mirrors which Lorm required, the rugs that had been recently bought, the pretentious furniture and paintings, the countless bibelots, photographs, ornaments, books, and piously guarded souvenirs.

She had never before lived in a house where other tenants above and below reminded her of their repulsive and unfamiliar lives. She listened to the slightest noises, and felt that she had fallen into a slum.

It was hardly in harmony with her nature to wait each morning until her husband happened to rise, to see that the breakfast was complete, to stand aside while the barber, the masseur, the chauffeur, the messenger of the theatre, and the secretary had completed their tasks or received their instructions; to wait again until he returned from rehearsal, tired, annoyed, and hungry, and then to watch him at luncheon—a meal that he required to be both rich and exquisite—gobble his food; to guard him from noise and interruption when he memorized his lines; to answer strange voices on the telephone, to give information, refuse invitations, to send the troublesome away and to soothe the impatient. She was wholly out of her natural element, but she forced herself to endure even as she had endured bodily pain when the long needle had been thrust through her arm.

Emanuel Herbst, who was a keen observer and a learned student of human nature, quietly analysed the relations of this husband and this wife. He said to himself: “Lorm is not fulfilling her expectations; so much is clear. She fancied she could peel him the way one peels an onion, and that the removal of each layer would reveal something so new and surprising as to make up to her for all she has renounced. She will soon discover her miscalculation, for Lorm is always the same. He can’t be stripped. He wears his costumes and puts on make-up. She will soon reproach him for this very ability to fill empty forms with a beautiful content, and to remain, in his own person, but a humble servitor of his art. And the more guilty he becomes in her eyes, the more power over him will she gain. For he is tired—tired to death of the affected, the flatterers and sentimentalists, of the sweets and easements of his daily life. Terribly spoiled as he is, he yearns unconsciously for chains and a keeper.”

The result of his reflection filled Emanuel Herbst with anxious apprehension.

But Judith remembered her dream—how she had lain beside a fish because it pleased her, and then beaten it in sudden rage over its cool, moist, slippery, opalescent scales. And she lay beside the fish and struck it, and the fish became more and more subservient and her own.

Her constant terror was this thought: “I am poor, impoverished, dependent, without security.” The thought tormented her to such a degree that she once expressed it to the housekeeper. The latter was astonished and replied: “But in addition to your pin money, the master gives you two thousand marks a month for the house. Why should you yield to morbid fancies?”

Judith looked at the woman suspiciously. She distrusted all whom she paid. The moment they mentioned money she fancied herself robbed.

One day the cook gave notice. She was the fourth since the establishment of the household. A quantity of sugar was missing. There was a quarrel, an ugly one, and Judith was told things that no one had ever dared to tell her before.

The secretary mislaid a key. When at last it was found Judith rushed to the drawer which it fitted to see whether the stationery, the pencils, and the pen-points were intact.

The housekeeper had bought twenty yards of linen. Judith thought the price paid too high. She drove to the shop herself. The taxi-fare amounted to more than she could possibly have saved on the purchase. Then she chaffered with the clerk for a reduction, until it was granted her through sheer weariness. She told Lorm the story with a triumphant air. He neglected to praise her. She jumped up from the table, locked herself in her room, and went to bed. Whenever she thought that she had some reason for anger, she went to bed.

Lorm came to her door, knocked softly, and asked her to open it. She let him stand long enough to regret his conduct, and then opened the door. She told her story all over, and he listened with a charming curiosity on his face. “You’re a jewel,” he said, and stroked her cheek and hand.

But it would also happen, if she really wanted something, that she would spend sums out of all proportion to her wretched little economies. She would see a hat, a frock, an ornament in a show window, and not be able to tear herself away. Then she would go into the shop, and pay the price asked at once.

One day she visited an auction sale, and happened to come in just as an old Viennese bon-bon dish was offered for sale. It was one of those objects that make little show, but which delight the collector’s heart. At first the dish didn’t tempt her at all. Then the high bidding for it excited her, and she herself began to bid for it. It kindled something in her, and she made bid after bid, and drove all competitors from the field.

Hot and excited, she came home and rushed into Lorm’s study. Emanuel Herbst was with him. The two men sat by the fire in familiar talk. Judith disregarded Herbst. She stood before her husband, unwrapped the dish, and said: “Look at this exquisite thing I bought, Edgar.”

It was toward evening, but no lights had been lit. Lorm loved the twilight and the flicker of the fire in his chimney, which was, alas, only a metropolitan imitation of a log fire. In the rich, red, wavering reflection of the glow, Judith looked charming in her delight and mobility.

Lorm took the dish, regarded it with polite interest, drew up his lips a little, and said: “It’s pretty.” Herbst’s face puckered into innumerable ironical little wrinkles.

Judith grew angry. “Pretty? Don’t you see that it’s magical, a perfect little dream, the sweetest and rarest thing imaginable? The connoisseurs were wild after it! Do you know what it cost? Eighteen hundred marks. And I had six or seven rabid competitors bidding against me. Pretty!” She gave a hard little laugh. “Give it to me. You handle it too clumsily.”

“Calm yourself, sweetheart,” said Lorm gently. “I suppose its virtues are subtle.”

But Judith was hurt, more by Herbst’s silent mockery than by Lorm’s lack of appreciation. She threw back her head, rustled through the room, and slammed the door behind her. When she was angry, her own manners had, at times, a touch of commonness.

For a while the two men were silent. Then Lorm, embarrassed and with a deprecating smile, said: “A little dream ... for eighteen hundred marks.... Oh, well! There’s something childlike about her.”

Emanuel Herbst rubbed his tongue up and down between his teeth and his upper lip. It made him look like an ancient baby. Then he ventured: “You ought to make it clear to her that eighteen hundred marks are one thousand eight hundred times one mark.”

“She won’t get that far,” answered Lorm. “Somebody who has always lived on the open sea, and is suddenly transported to a little inland lake, finds it hard to get the new measurements and perspectives. But women are queer creatures.” He sighed and smiled. “Have a nip of whiskey, old man?”

Sorrowfully Herbst rocked his CÆsarean head. “Why queer? They are as they are, and one must treat them accordingly. Only one mustn’t be under any mistaken impression as to what one has. For instance: A horseshoe is not birch wood. It looks like a bow, but you can’t bend it—not with all your might. If you string it, the string droops slackly and will never propel your arrow. All right, let’s have your whiskey.”

“But occasionally,” Lorm replied cheerfully, and filled the tiny glasses, “you can turn a horseshoe into the finest Damascene steel.”

“Bravo! A good retort! You’re as ready as Cardinal Richelieu. Your health!”

“If you’ll let me be Richelieu, I’ll appoint you to be my Father Joseph. A great rÔle, by the way. Your health, old man!”

XII

Crammon and Johanna SchÖntag planned to drive to Stellingen to see Hagenbeck’s famous zoological gardens, and Crammon begged Christian to lend them his car. They were just about to start when Christian issued from the hotel. “Why don’t you come along?” Crammon asked. “Have you anything better to do? The three of us can have a very amusing time.”

Christian was about to refuse, when he caught Johanna’s urgent and beseeching look. She had the art of putting her wishes into her eyes in such a way that one was drawn by them and lost the power to resist. So he said: “Very well, I’ll come along,” and took the seat next to Johanna’s. But he was silent on the whole drive.

It was a sunny day of October.

They wandered through the park, and Johanna made droll comments on the animals. She stopped in front of a seal, and exclaimed: “He looks quite like Herr Livholm, don’t you think so?” She talked to a bear as though he were a simple sort of man, and fed him bits of sugar. She said that the camels were incredible, and only pretended to look that way to live up to the descriptions in the books of natural history. “They’re almost as ugly as I am,” she added; and then, with a crooked smile: “Only more useful. At least I was told at school that their stomachs are reservoirs of water. Isn’t the world a queer place?”

Christian wondered why she spoke so contemptuously of herself. She bent over a stone balustrade, and the sight of her neck somehow touched him. She seemed to him a vessel of poor and hurt things.

Crammon discoursed. “It is very curious about animals. Scientists declare they have a great deal of instinct. But what is instinct? I’ve usually found them to be of an unlimited stupidity. On the estate where I passed my childhood, we had a horse, a fat, timid, gentle horse. It had but one vice: it was very ticklish. I and my playmates were strictly enjoined from tickling it. Naturally we were constantly tempted to tickle it. There were five of us little fellows—no higher than table legs. Each procured a little felt hat with a cock’s feather in it. And as the horse stood dull-eyed in front of the stable, we marched in single file under the belly of the stupid beast, tickling it with our feathers as we passed. The feathers tickled so frightfully that he kicked with all fours like a mule. It’s a riddle to me to this day how one of us, at least, failed to be killed. But it was amusing and grotesque, and there was no sign of instinct anywhere.”

They went to the monkey house. A crowd stood about a little platform, on which a dainty little monkey was showing off its tricks under the guidance of a trainer. “I have a horror of monkeys,” said Crammon. “They annoy me through memory. Science bids me feel a relationship with them; but after all one has one’s pride. No, I don’t acknowledge this devilish atavism.” He turned around, and left the building in order to wait outside.

Alone with Christian, a wave of courage conquered Johanna’s timidity. She took Christian’s arm and drew him nearer to the platform. She was utterly charmed, and her delight was childlike. “How dear, how sweet, how humble!” she cried. A spiritual warmth came from her to Christian. He yielded himself to it, for he needed it. Her boyish voice, however, stirred his senses and aroused his fear. She stood very close by him; he felt her quiver, the response to the hidden erotic power that was in him, and the other voices of his soul were silenced.

He took her hand into his. She did not struggle, but a painful tension showed in her face.

Suddenly the little monkey stopped in its droll performance and turned its lightless little eyes in terror toward the spectators. Some shy perception had frightened it; it seemed, somehow, to think and to recollect itself. As it became aware of the many faces, the indistinctness of its vision seemed to take on outline and form. Perhaps for a second it had a sight of the world and of men, and that sight was to it a source of boundless horror. It trembled as in a fever; it uttered a piercing cry of lamentation; it fled, and when the trainer tried to grasp it, it leaped from the platform and frantically sought a hiding-place. Tears glittered in its eyes and its teeth chattered, and in spite of the animal characteristics of these gestures and expressions, there was in them something so human and soulful that only a few very coarse people ventured to laugh.

To Christian there came from the little beast a breath from an alien region of earth and forests and loneliness. His heart seemed to expand and then to contract. “Let us go,” he said, and his own voice sounded unpleasantly in his ears.

Johanna listened to his words. She was all willingness to listen, all tension and all sweet humility.

XIII

Randolph von Stettner had arrived. There were still several days before the date of his sailing, and he was on his way to LÜbeck, where he wished to say good-bye to a married sister. Christian hesitated to promise to be in Hamburg on his friend’s return. Only after much urging did he consent to stay.

They dined in Christian’s room, discussed conditions in their native province, and exchanged reminiscences. Christian, laconic as usual, was silently amazed at the distance of all these things from his present self.

When the waiter had removed the dishes, Stettner gave an account of all that had driven him to the determination to expatriate himself. While he talked he stared with an unchanging look and expression at the table cover.

“You know that for some years I’ve not been comfortable in my uniform. I saw no aim ahead except the slow and distant moments of advancement. Some of my comrades hoped for war. Well, the life makes that hope natural. In war one can prove one’s self in the only way that has any meaning to a professional soldier in any army. But personally I couldn’t share that hope. Others marry money, still others go in for sports and gambling. None of these things attracted me. The service itself left me utterly dissatisfied. I seemed to myself in reality an idler who lives pretentiously on others.

“Imagine this: you stand in the barracks yard; it’s raining, the water makes the sand gleam; the few wretched trees drip and drip; the men await some command with the watchfulness of well-trained dogs; the water pours from their packs, the sergeant roars, the corporals grit their teeth in zeal and rage; but you? With a monotony like that of the drops that trickle from your cap, you think: ‘What will to-night be like? And to-morrow morning? And to-morrow night?’ And the whole year lies ahead of you like a soaked and muddy road. You think of your desolate room with its three dozen books, the meaningless pictures, and the carpet worn thin by many feet; you think of the report you’ve got to hand in, and the canteen accounts you’ve got to audit, and the stable inspection, and the next regimental ball, where the arrogant wives of your superior officers will bore you to the point of illness with their shallow talk; you think your way through the whole circle of your life, and find nothing but what is trivial and cheerless as a rainy day. Is that endurable?

“One day I put the question to myself: What was I really accomplishing, and what was the nature of my reward? The answer was that, from a human and intellectual point of view, my accomplishment was an absolute zero. My reward consisted of a number of privileges, the sum of which raised me very high in the social scale, but gave me this position only at the cost of surrendering my personality wholly. I had to obey my superiors and to command my inferiors. That was all. The power to command was conditioned in the duty to obey. And each man in the service, whatever his station, is bound in the identical way, and is simply a connective apparatus in a great electrical circuit. Only the humblest, the great mass of privates, were confined to obedience. The ultimate responsibility at the very top was lost in the vague. In spite of its ultimate primitiveness, the structure of every military organization has a mystery at its core. But between the arbitrary will of a very few and the touching and incomprehensible humility of the great mass, the parts function according to iron laws. Whoever refuses to function, or rebels, is crushed.

“There are those who assert that this compulsion has a moral effect and subserves a higher conception of freedom. I was myself of that opinion for a long time; but I did not find it permanently tenable. I felt myself weakening, and a rebellion seething in my blood. I pulled myself together, and fought against criticism and doubt. In vain. Something had gone out of me. I lost the readiness to obey and the security to command. It was torment. Above me I saw implacable idols, below me defenceless victims. I myself was both idol and victim, implacable and defenceless at once. It seemed to me that humanity ceased where the circle of my activity began. My life seemed to me no longer a part of the general life of mankind, but a fossilized petrefaction conditioned in certain formulÆ of command and obedience.

“This condition could, of course, not remain hidden. My comrades withdrew their confidence from me. I was observed and distrusted. Before I had time to clarify either my mind or my affairs, an incident occurred which forced me to a decision. A fellow officer in my regiment, Captain von Otto, was engaged to the daughter of an eminent judge. The wedding, although the date had been set, could not take place. Otto had a slight attack of pulmonary trouble and had to go South for cure. About four weeks after his departure, there was a celebration in honour of the emperor’s birthday, and among the ladies invited was the captain’s betrothed. Everybody was rather gay and giddy that evening, especially a dear friend of mine, Georg Mattershausen, a sincere, kindly chap who had just received a promotion in rank. The captain’s betrothed, who had been his neighbour at table, was infected by his merriment, and on the way home he begged her for a kiss. She refused, and he was going to steal one. She now grew very serious; he at once came to his senses, apologized with the utmost sincerity, and, at the very door of her paternal house, received her solemn promise to mention the incident to no one. When, however, seventeen weeks later, Captain von Otto returned, the girl was seized by some queer scruple, and thought it her duty to tell him of the incident between herself and Mattershausen. The result was a challenge. The conditions were extraordinarily severe: ten paces distance, drawn revolvers, half a minute to aim, exchange of shots to the disablement of either combatant. I was Mattershausen’s second. Otto, who had held himself to be affronted and had sent the challenge, had the first shot. He aimed carefully at the head of his adversary. I saw that. But the bullet whistled past my friend’s ear. Mattershausen aimed, but his revolver did not go off. This was counted a shot. New pistols were brought. Otto aimed as carefully as before and this time shot Mattershausen straight through the heart. Death was immediate.

“I wonder whether you, too, think that that was a harsh punishment for a moment of youthful thoughtlessness and impropriety. To me it seemed terribly harsh. I felt profoundly that a crime had been committed against my friend. Our fossilized caste had perpetrated a murder. Two days later, in the officers’ mess, I expressed this opinion quite frankly. There was general astonishment. One or two sharp replies were made. Some one asked me what I would have done in such a situation. I answered that I would certainly not have sent a challenge, that I could never approve a notion of honour so morbid and self-centred as to demand a human life for a trifle. Even if the young girl’s over-tender conscience had persuaded her to break her promise, I would have caused no further trouble, and let the little incident glide into forgetfulness. At that there was general indignation—a great shaking of heads, angry or troubled faces, an exchange of significant glances. But I kept on. Mattershausen’s wretched end had hit me damned hard, and I relieved my whole mind. So I added that, if I had been in Mattershausen’s place, I would have refused the challenge, quite regardless of consequences. That statement fell among them like a bomb, and a painful silence followed. ‘I imagine you would have reconsidered,’ said the ranking major, ‘I don’t think you would have disregarded all the consequences.’ ‘All,’ I insisted, ‘certainly, all!’ At that moment Captain von Otto, who had been sitting at another table, arose, and asked frostily: ‘You would have risked the odium of cowardice?’ I too arose, and answered: ‘Under such circumstances I would have risked that too.’ Captain von Otto smiled a contorted smile, and said with an emphasis that could not be misinterpreted: ‘Then I don’t understand your sitting at the same table with officers of His Majesty.’ He bowed stiffly, and went out.

“The die had been cast. No one was curious as to what I would do; no one doubted but that there was only one thing left for me to do. But I was determined to push the matter to its logical conclusion. That super-idol, known as the code of honour, had issued its decree; but I was determined to refuse obedience and take the consequences upon myself. That very evening, when I came home, two comrades were awaiting me to offer me their services. I refused courteously. They looked at me as though I had gone mad, and went off in absurd haste.

“The inevitable consequences followed. You can understand that I could no longer breathe in that air. You cannot outrage the fetishes of your social group and go unpunished. I had to avoid insult, and learned what it was to be an outcast. And that is bad. The imagination alone cannot quite grasp the full horror of it. I saw clearly that there was no place left for me in my fatherland. The way out was obvious.”

Christian had listened to his friend’s story with unmoved countenance. He got up, took a few turns through the room, and returned to his seat. Then he said: “I think you did the right thing. I am sorry you must leave us, but you did right.”

Stettner looked up. How strange that sounded: You did right. A question hovered on his lips. But it was not uttered. For Christian feared that question, and silenced it by a sudden conventionality of demeanour.

XIV

Christian, the brothers Maelbeek, who had followed Eva from Holland, Botho von ThÜngen, a Russian councillor of state named Koch, and Crammon sat at luncheon in the dining hall of the hotel.

They were talking about a woman of the streets who had been murdered. The police had already caught the murderer. He was a man who had once belonged to good society, but had gradually gone to the dogs. He had throttled the woman and robbed her in a sailor’s tavern.

Now all the prostitutes in the city had unanimously determined to show their sister, who had sacrificed her life to her calling, a last and very public mark of respect, and to follow her coffin to the grave. The respectable citizens of Hamburg felt this to be a sort of challenge and protested. But there was no legal provision by which the demonstration could be stopped.

“We ought to see the spectacle,” said Crammon, “even if we have to sacrifice our siesta.”

“Then there’s no time to be lost,” the elder Maelbeek declared, and looked at his watch. “The friends will assemble at the house of mourning at three sharp.” He smiled, and thought this way of putting the matter rather witty.

Christian said that he would go too. The motor took them to a crossing that had been closed by the police. Here they left the car, and Herr von ThÜngen persuaded the police captain to let them pass.

They were at once surrounded by a great throng of humble folk—sailors, fishermen, workingmen, women, and children. The windows of the houses were thronged with heads. The Maelbeeks and Koch stopped here, and called ThÜngen to join them. Christian walked farther. Somehow the behaviour of his companions irritated him. He felt the kind of curiosity which filled them as something disagreeable. He was curious too, but in another way. Or, at least, it seemed different to him.

Crammon remained by his side. But the throng grew rowdy. “Where are you going?” Crammon asked peevishly. “There is no use in going farther. Let us wait here.”

Christian shook his head.

“Very well. I take my stand here,” Crammon decided, and separated from Christian.

The latter made his way up to the dirty, old house at the door of which the hearse was standing. It was a foggy day. The black wagon was like a dark hole punched into the grey. Christian wanted to go a little farther, but some young fellows purposely blocked his way. They turned their heads, looked him over, and suspected him of being a “toff.” Their own garb was cheap and flashy; their faces and gestures made it clear what trade they drove. One of them was a young giant. He was half a head taller than Christian, and his brows joined over the bridge of his nose. On the index finger of his left hand he wore a huge carnelian ring.

Christian looked about him quite unintimidated. He saw hundreds of women, literally hundreds, ranging in age from sixteen to fifty, and in condition from bloom to utter decay, and from luxury to rags and filth.

They had all gathered—those who had passed the zenith of their troubled course, and those who had barely emerged from childhood, frivolous, sanguine, vain, and already tainted with the mire of the great city. They had come from all streets; they were recruited from all nations and all classes; some had escaped from a sheltered youth, others had risen from even direr depths; there were those who felt themselves pariahs and had the outcast’s hatred in their eyes, and there were others who showed a certain pride in their calling and held themselves aloof. He saw cynical and careworn faces, lovely and hardened ones, indifferent and troubled, greedy and gentle faces. Some were painted and some pallid; and the latter seemed strangely naked.

He was familiar with them from the streets and houses of many cities, as every man is. He knew the type, the unfailing stamp, the acquired gesture and look—this hard, rigid, dull, clinging, lightless look. But he had never before seen them except when they were exercising their function behind the gates of their calling, dissembling their real selves and under the curse of sex. To see many hundreds of them separated from all that, to see them as human beings stripped of the stimulus and breath of a turbid sexuality—that was what seemed to sweep a cloud from his eyes.

Suddenly he thought: “I must order my hunting lodge to be sold, and the hounds too.”

The coffin was being carried from the house. It was covered with flowers and wreaths; and from the wreaths fluttered ribands with gilt inscriptions. Christian tried to read the inscriptions, but it was impossible. The coffin had small, silver-plated feet that looked like the paws of a cat. By some accident one of these had been broken off, and that touched Christian, he hardly knew why, as unbearably pitiful. An old woman followed the coffin. She seemed more vexed and angry than grief-stricken. She wore a black dress, but the seam under one arm was ripped open. And that too seemed unbearably pitiful.

The hearse started off. Six men carrying lighted candles walked in front of it. The murmur of voices became silent. The women, walking by fours, followed the hearse. Christian stood still close pressed against a wall, and let the procession pass him by. In a quarter of an hour the street was quite desolate. The windows of the houses were closed. He remained alone in the street, in the fog.

As he walked away he reflected: “I’ve asked my father to take care of my collection of rings. There are over four thousand of them, and many are beautiful and costly. They could be sold too. I don’t need them. I shall have them sold.”

He wandered on and on, and lost all sense of the passing of time. Evening came, and the city lights glowed through the fog. Everything became moist, even to the gloves on his hands.

He thought of the missing foot on the coffin of the murdered harlot, and of the torn seam of the old woman’s dress.

He passed over one of the great bridges of the Elbe, and then walked along the river bank. It was a desolate region. He stopped near the light of a street lamp, gazed into the water, drew forth his wallet, took out a bank note of a hundred marks, turned it about in his hands, shook his head, and then, with a gesture of disgust, threw it into the water. He took a second and did the same. There were twenty bank notes in his wallet. He took them out one by one, and with that expression half of disgust, half of dreaminess, he let them glide into the river.

The street lamps illuminated the inky water for a short distance, and he saw the bank notes drift away.

And he smiled and went on.

XV

When he reached the hotel he felt an urgent need of warmth. By turns he entered the library, the reception hall, the dining-room. All these places were well heated, but their warmth did not suffice him. He attributed his chill to walking so long in the damp.

He took the lift and rode up to his own rooms. He changed his clothes, wrapped himself warmly, and sat down beside the radiator, in which the steam hissed like a caged animal.

Yet he did not grow warm. At last he knew that his shivering was not due to the moisture and the fog, but to some inner cause.

Toward eleven o’clock he arose and went out into the corridor. The stuccoed walls were divided into great squares by gilt moulding; the floor was covered by pieces of carpet that had been joined together to appear continuous. Christian felt a revulsion against all this false splendour. He approached the wall, touched the stucco, and shrugged his shoulders in contempt.

At the end of the long corridor was Eva’s suite. He had passed the door several times. As he passed it again he heard the sound of a piano. Only a few keys were being gently touched. After a moment’s reflection he knocked, opened the door, and entered.

Susan Rappard was alone in the room. Wrapped in a fur coat, she sat at the piano. On the music rack was propped a book that she was reading. Her fingers passed with ghostly swiftness over the keys, but she struck one only quite rarely. She turned her head and asked rudely: “What do you want, Monsieur?”

Christian answered: “If it’s possible, I should like to speak to Madame. I want to ask her a question.”

“Now? At night?” Susan was amazed. “We’re tired. We’re always tired at night in this hyperborean climate, where the sun is a legend. The fog weighs on us. Thank God, in four days we have our last performance. Then we’ll go where the sky is blue. We’re longing for Paris.”

“I should be very happy if I could see Madame,” Christian said.

Susan shook her head. “You have a strange kind of patience,” she said maliciously. “I hadn’t suspected you of being so romantic. You’re pursuing a very foolish policy, I assure you. Go in, if you want to, however. Ce petit laideron est chez elle, demoiselle SchÖntag. She acts the part of a court fool. Everything in the world is amusing to her—herself not least. Well, that is coming to an end too.”

Voices and clear laughter could be heard. The door of Eva’s rooms opened, and she and Johanna appeared on the threshold. Eva wore a simple white garment, unadorned but for one great chrysoprase that held it on the left shoulder. Her skin had an amber gleam, the quiver of her nostrils betrayed a secret irritation. The beautiful woman and the plain one stood there side by side, each with an acute feminine consciousness of her precise qualities: the one vital, alluring, pulsing with distinction and freedom; the other all adoration and yearning ambition for that vitality and that freedom.

Tenderly and delicately Johanna had put her arm about Eva and touched her friend’s bare shoulder with her cheek. With her bizarre smile she said: “No one knows how it came that Rumpelstilzkin is my name.”

They had not yet observed Christian. A gesture of Susan’s called their attention to him. He stood in the shadow of the door. Johanna turned pale, and her shy glance passed from Eva to Christian. She released Eva, bowed swiftly to kiss Eva’s hand, and with a whispered good-night slipped past Christian.

Although Christian’s eyes were cast down, they grasped the vision of Eva wholly. He saw the feet that he had once held naked in his hands; under her diaphanous garment he saw the exquisite firmness of her little breasts; he saw the arms that had once embraced him and the perfect hands that had once caressed him. All his bodily being was still vibrantly conscious of the smoothness and delicacy of their touch. And he saw her before him, quite near and hopelessly unattainable, and felt a last lure and an ultimate renunciation.

“Monsieur has a request,” said Susan Rappard mockingly, and preparing to leave them.

“Stay!” Eva commanded, and the look she gave Christian was like that she gave a lackey.

“I wanted to ask you,” Christian said softly, “what is the meaning of the name Eidolon by which you used to call me. My question is belated, I know, and it may seem foolish to-day.” He smiled an embarrassed smile. “But it torments me not to know when I think about it, and I determined to ask you.”

Susan gave a soundless laugh. In its belated and unmotivated urgency, the question did, indeed, sound a little foolish. Eva seemed amused too, but she concealed the fact. She looked at her hands and said: “It is hard to tell you what it means—something that one sacrifices, or a god to whom one sacrifices, a lovely and serene spirit. It means either or perhaps both at once. Why remind ourselves of it? There is no Eidolon any more. Eidolon was shattered, and one should not exhibit the shards to me. Shards are ugly things.”

She shivered a little, and her eyes shone. She turned to Susan. “Let me sleep to-morrow till I wake. I have such evil dreams nowadays, and find no rest till toward morning.”

XVI

Passing back through the corridor Christian saw a figure standing very still in the semi-darkness. He recognized Johanna, and he felt that this thing was fated—that she should be standing here and waiting for him.

She did not look at him; she looked at the floor. Not until he came quite close to her did she raise her eyes, and then she looked timidly away. Her lips quivered. A question hovered on them. She knew all that had passed between Eva and Christian. That they had once been lovers only increased her enthusiastic admiration for them both. But what happened between them now—her brief presence made her sure of its character—seemed to her both shameful and incomprehensible.

She was imaginative and sensitive, and loved those who were nobly proud; and she suffered when such noble pride and dignity were humbled. Her whole heart was given over to her ideal of spiritual distinction. Sometimes she would misunderstand her own ideal, and take external forms and modes as expressions of it. And this division in her soul, to which she was not equal, sometimes delivered her into the power of mere frivolity. “It is late,” she whispered timidly. It was not a statement; it was an attempt to save herself. Each time that Christian had been mentioned, three things had struck her mind: his elegance, his fine pride, his power over all hearts. That was the combination that called to her and stirred her and filled her days with longing.

Thus she had followed Crammon in search of the great adventure, although she had said of him but an hour after she had met him: “He is grandiosely and grotesquely comic.” She had followed him like a slave to a market of slaves, hoping to catch the eye of the khalif.

But she had no faith in her own power. Voluntarily and intentionally she crumbled the passions of her being into small desires. She suffered from that very process and jeered at herself. She was too timid to take greatly what she wanted. She nibbled at life and had not the adventurousness of great enjoyments. And she mocked at her own unhappy nature, and suffered the more.

And now he stood before her. It frightened and surprised her, even though she had waited for him. Since he stayed, she wanted to think him bold and brave. But she could not, and at once she shrank into self-contempt. “It is late,” she whispered again, nodded a good-night, and opened the door of her room.

But Christian begged silently with an expression that was irresistible. He crossed the threshold behind the trembling girl. Her face grew hard. But she was too fine to play a coquettish game. Before her blood was stirred her eyes had yielded. The pallor of her face lit it with a new charm. There was no hint of plainness any more. The stormy expectation of her heart harmonized the lines of her features and melted them into softness, gentleness, and delicacy.

Of her power over the senses of men she was secure. She had tested her magnetism on those whom one granted little and who gave less. Flirtations had been used as anodynes in her social group. One had played with false counters, and by a silent compact avoided serious moments. But her experience failed her to-night, for here there was not lightness but austerity. She yielded herself to this night, oblivious of the future and its responsibilities.

XVII

Stephen Gunderam had to go to Montevideo. In that city there was a German physician who had considerable skill in the treatment of nervous disorders; and the bull-necked giant suffered from insomnia and nocturnal hallucinations. Furthermore, there was to be a yacht race at Montevideo, on the results of which Stephen had bet heavily.

He appointed Demetrios and Esmeralda as Letitia’s guardians. He said to them: “If anything happens to my wife or she does anything unseemly, I’ll break every bone in your bodies.” Demetrios grinned. Esmeralda demanded that he bring her a box of sweets on his return.

Their leave-taking was touching. Stephen bit Letitia’s ear, and said: “Be true to me.”

Letitia immediately began to play upon the mood of her guardians. She gave Demetrios a hundred pesos and Esmeralda a gold bracelet. She corresponded secretly with the naval lieutenant, Friedrich Pestel. An Indian lad, of whose secrecy and reliability she was sure, served as messenger. Within a week Pestel’s ship was to proceed to Cape Town, so there was little time to be lost. He did not think he would be able to return to the Argentine until the following winter. And Letitia loved him dearly.

Two miles from the estate there was an observatory in the lonely pampas. A wealthy German cattle-man had built it, and now a German professor with his two assistants lived there and watched the firmament. Letitia had often asked to see the observatory, but Stephen had always refused to let her visit it. Now she intended to make it the scene of her meeting with Friedrich Pestel. She yearned for a long talk with him.

To use an observatory as a refuge for forlorn lovers—it was a notion that delighted Letitia and made her ready to run any risk. The day and the hour were set, and all circumstances were favourable. Riccardo and Paolo had gone hunting; Demetrios had been sent by his father to a farm far to the north; the old people slept. Esmeralda alone had to be deceived. Fortunately the girl had a headache, and Letitia persuaded her to go to bed. When twilight approached, Letitia put on a bright, airy frock in which she could ride. She did not hesitate in spite of her pregnancy. Then, as though taking a harmless walk, she left the house and proceeded to the avenue of palms, where the Indian boy awaited her with two ponies.

It was beautiful to ride out freely into the endless plain. In the west there still shone a reddish glow, into which projected in lacy outline the chain of mountains. The earth suffered from drought; it had not rained for long, and crooked fissures split the ground. Hundreds of grasshopper traps were set up in the fields, and the pits behind them, which were from two to three metres deep, were filled with the insects.

When she reached the observatory, it was dark. The building was like an oriental house of prayer. From a low structure of brick arose the mighty iron dome, the upper part of which rotated on a movable axis. The shutters of the windows were closed, and there was no light to be seen. Friedrich Pestel waited at the gate; he had tethered his horse to a post. He told her that the professor and his two assistants had been absent for a week. She and he, he added, could enter the building nevertheless. The caretaker, an old, fever-stricken mulatto, had given him the key.

The Indian boy lit the lantern that he had carried tied to his saddle. Pestel took it, and preceded Letitia through a desolate brick hallway, then up a wooden and finally up a spiral iron stairway. “Fortune is kind to us,” he said. “Next week there’s going to be an eclipse of the sun, and astronomers are arriving in Buenos Ayres from Europe. The professor and his assistants have gone to receive them.”

Letitia’s heart beat very fast. In the high vault of the observatory, the little light of the lantern made only the faintest impression. The great telescope was a terrifying shadow; the drawing instruments and the photographic apparatus on its stand looked like the skeletons of animals; the charts on the wall, with their strange dots and lines, reminded her of black magic. The whole room seemed to her like the cave of a wizard.

Yet there was a smile of childlike curiosity and satisfaction on Letitia’s lips. Her famished imagination needed such an hour as this. She forgot Stephen and his jealousy, the eternally quarrelling brothers, the wicked old man, the shrewish DoÑa Barbara, the treacherous Esmeralda, the house in which she lived like a prisoner—she forgot all that completely in this room with its magic implements, in this darkness lit only by the dim flicker of the lantern, beside this charming young man who would soon kiss her. At least, she hoped he would.

But Pestel was timid. He went up to the telescope, unscrewed the gleaming brass cover, and said: “Let us take a look at the stars.” He looked in. Then he asked Letitia to do the same. Letitia saw a milky mist and flashing, leaping fires. “Are those the stars?” she asked, with a coquettish melancholy in her voice.

Then Pestel told her about the stars. She listened with radiant eyes, although it didn’t in the least interest her to know how many millions of miles distant from the earth either Sirius or Aldebaran happened to be, and what precisely was the mystery which puzzled scientists in regard to the southern heavens.

“Ah,” she breathed, and there was indulgence and a dreamy scepticism in that sound.

The lieutenant, abandoning the cosmos and its infinities, talked about himself and his life, of Letitia and of the impression she had made on him, and of the fact that he thought only of her by day and by night.

Letitia remained very, very still in order not to turn his thoughts in another direction and thus disturb the sweet suspense of her mood.

As befitted a man with a highly developed conscience, Pestel had definitely laid his plans for the future. When he returned at the end of six months, ways and means were to be found for Letitia’s divorce from Stephen and her remarriage to him. He thought of flight only as an extreme measure.

He told her that he was poor. Only a very small capital was deposited in his name in Stuttgart. He was a Suabian—simple-hearted, sober, and accurate.

“Ah,” Letitia sighed again, half-astonished and half-saddened. “It doesn’t matter,” she said with determination. “I’m rich. I own a great tract of forest land. My aunt, the Countess Brainitz, gave it to me as a wedding present.”

“A forest? Where?” Pestel asked, and smiled.

“In Germany. Near Heiligenkreuz in the RhÖn region. It’s as big as a city, and when it’s sold it will bring a lot of money. I’ve never been there, but I’ve been told that it contains large deposits of some ore. That would have to be found and exploited. Then I’d be even richer than if I sold the forest.” These facts had grown in Letitia’s imagination; they were the children of the dreams and wishes she had harboured since her slavery in this strange land. She was not lying; she had quite forgotten that she had invented it all. She wished this thing to be so, and it had taken on reality in her mind.

“It’s too good, altogether too good to be true,” Pestel commented thoughtfully.

His words moved Letitia. She began to sob and threw herself on his breast. Her young life seemed hard to her and ugly and surrounded by dangers. Nothing she had hoped for had become reality. All her pretty soap-bubbles had burst in the wind. Her tears sprang from her deep realization of this fact and out of her fear of men and of her fate. She yearned for a pair of strong arms to give her protection and security.

Pestel was also moved. He put his arms about her and ventured to kiss her forehead. She sobbed more pitifully, and so he kissed her mouth. Then she smiled. He said that he would love her until he died, that no woman had ever inspired such feelings in him.

She confessed to him that she was with child by the unloved husband to whom she was chained. Pestel pressed her to his bosom, and said: “The child is blood of your blood, and I shall regard it as my own.”

The time was speeding dangerously. Holding each other’s hands they went down the stairs. They parted with the promise to write each other daily.

“When he returns from Africa I’ll flee with him on his ship,” Letitia determined, as she rode home slowly across the dark plain. Everything else seemed ugly and a bore to her. “Oh, if only it were to be soon,” she thought in her anxiety and heart-ache. And curiosity stirred in her to know how Pestel would behave and master the dangers and the difficulties involved. She believed in him, and gave herself up to tender and tempting dreams of the future.

In the house her absence had finally been noticed, and servants had been sent out to look for her. She slipped into the house by obscure paths, and then emerged from her room with an air of innocence.

XVIII

Stettner had returned to Hamburg. His ship was to sail on that very evening. He had several errands in the city, and Christian and Crammon waited for him in order to accompany him to the pier.

Crammon said: “A captain of Hussars who suddenly turns up in mufti—I can’t help it, there’s something desperate about it to me. I feel as though I were on a perpetual visit of condolence. After all, he’s dÉclassÉ, and I don’t like people in that situation. Social classes are a divine institution; a man who interferes with them wounds his own character. One doesn’t throw up one’s profession the way one tosses aside a rotten apple. These are delicate and difficult matters. Common sense may disregard them; the higher intelligence reverences them. What is he going to do among the Yankees? What good can come of it?”

“He’s a chemist by inclination, and scholarly in his line,” Christian answered. “That will help.”

“What do the Yankees care about that? He’s more likely to catch consumption and be trodden under. He’ll be stripped of pride and dignity. It’s a country for thieves, waiters, and renegades. Did he have to go as far as all this?”

“Yes,” Christian answered, “I believe he did.”

An hour later they and Stettner arrived at the harbour. Cargoes and luggage were still being stowed, and they strolled, Stettner between Crammon and Christian, up and down a narrow alley lined with cotton-bales, boxes, barrels, and baskets. The arc lamps cast radiant light from the tall masts, and a tumult of carts and cranes, motors and bells, criers and whistles rolled through the fog. The asphalt was wet; there was no sky to be seen.

“Don’t forget me wholly here in the old land,” said Stettner. A silence followed.

“I don’t know whether we shall be as well off in the old country in the future as we have been in the past,” said Crammon, who occasionally had pessimistic attacks and forebodings. “Hitherto we haven’t suffered. Our larders and cellars have been well-stocked, nor have the higher needs been neglected. But times are getting worse, and, unless I mistake, clouds are gathering on the political horizon. So I can’t call it a bad idea, my dear Stettner, to slip away quietly and amiably. I only hope that you’ll find some secure position over there from which you may calmly watch the spectacle of our dÉbÂcle. And when the waves rise very high, you might think of us and have a mass said for us, that is for me, because Christian has been expelled from the bosom of Holy Church.”

Stettner smiled at this speech. But he became serious again at once. “It seems to me too that, in a sense, we’re all trapped here. Yet I have never felt myself so deeply and devotedly a German as at this moment when I am probably leaving my fatherland forever. But in that feeling there is a stab of pain. It seems to me as though I should hurry from one to another and sound a warning. But what to warn them of, or why warn them at all—I don’t know.”

Crammon answered weightily. “My dear old Aglaia wrote me the other day that she had dreamed of black cats all night long. She is deep, she has a prophetic soul, and dreams like that are of evil presage. I may enter a monastery. It is actually within the realm of the possible. Don’t laugh, Christian; don’t laugh, my dearest boy! You don’t know all my possibilities.”

It had not occurred to Christian to laugh.

Stettner stopped and gave his hands to his friends. “Good-bye, Crammon,” he said cordially. “I’m grateful that you accompanied me. Good-bye, dear Christian, good-bye.” He pressed Christian’s hand long and firmly. Then he tore himself away, hastened toward the gang-plank, and was lost in the crowd.

“A nice fellow,” Crammon murmured. “A very nice fellow. What a pity!”

When the car met them Christian said: “I’d like to walk a bit, either back to the hotel or somewhere else. Will you come, Bernard?”

“If you want me, yes. Toddling along is my portion.”

Christian dismissed his car. He had a strange foreboding, as though something fateful were lying in wait for him.

“Ariel’s days here are numbered,” said Crammon. “Duty calls me away. I must look after my two old ladies. Then I must join Franz Lothar in Styria. We’ll hunt heath-cocks. After that I’ve agreed to meet young Sinsheim in St. Moritz. What are your plans, my dear boy?”

“I leave for Berlin to-morrow or the day after.”

“And what in God’s name are you going to do there?”

“I’m going to work.”

Crammon stopped, and opened his mouth very wide. “Work?” he gasped, quite beside himself. “What at? What for, O misguided one?”

“I’m going to take courses at the university, under the faculty of medicine.”

Horrified, Crammon shook his head. “Work ... courses ... medicine.... Merciful Providence, what does this mean? Is there not enough sweat in the world, not enough bungling and half-wisdom and ugly ambition and useless turmoil? You’re not serious.”

“You exaggerate as usual, Bernard,” Christian answered, with a smile. “Don’t always be a Jeremiah. What I’m going to do is something quite simple and conventional. And I’m only going to try. I may not even succeed; but I must try it. So much is sure.”

Crammon raised his hand, lifted a warning index finger, and said with great solemnity: “You are upon an evil path, Christian, upon a path of destruction. For many, many days I have had a presentiment of terrible things. The sleep of my nights has been embittered; a sorrow gnaws at me and my peace has flown. How am I to hunt in the mountains when I know you to be among the Pharisees? How shall I cast my line into clear streams when my inner eye sees you bending over greasy volumes or handling diseased bodies? No wine will glitter beautifully in my glass, no girl’s eyes seem friendly any more, no pear yield me its delicate flavour!”

“Oh, yes, they will,” Christian said, laughing. “More than that: I hope you’ll come to see me from time to time, to convince yourself that you needn’t cast me off entirely.”

Crammon sighed. “Indeed I shall come. I must come and soon, else the spirit of evil will get entire control of you. Which may God forbid!”

XIX

Johanna told Eva, whom she adored, about her life. Eva thus received an unexpected insight into the grey depths of middle-class existence. The account sounded repulsive. But it was stimulating to offer a spiritual refuge to so much thirst and flight.

She herself often seemed to her own soul like one in flight. But she had her bulwarks. The wind of time seemed cold to her, and when she felt a horror of the busy marionettes whose strings were in her hands, she felt herself growing harder. The friendship which she gave to this devoted girl seemed to her a rest in the mad race of her fate.

They were so intimate that Susan Rappard complained. The latter opened her eyes wide and her jealousy led her to become a spy. She became aware of the relations that had developed between Johanna and Christian.

At dinner there had been much merriment. Johanna had bought a number of peaked, woollen caps. She had wrapped them carefully in white paper, written some witty verses on each bundle, and distributed them as favours to Eva’s guests. No one had been vexed. For despite her mockery and gentle eccentricity, there was a charm about her that disarmed every one.

“How gay you are to-day, Rumpelstilzkin,” Eva said. She, too, used that nickname. The word, which she pronounced with some difficulty, had a peculiar charm upon her lips.

“It is the gaiety that precedes tears,” Johanna answered, and yielded as entirely to her superstitious terror as she had to her jesting mood.

A wealthy ship-owner had invited Eva to view his private picture gallery. His house was in the suburbs. She drove there with Johanna.

Arm in arm they stood before the paintings. And in that absorbed union there was something purifying. Johanna loved it as she loved their common reading of poetry, when they would sit with their cheeks almost touching. Extinguished in her selfless adoration, she forgot what lay behind her—the anxious, sticky, unworthily ambitious life of her family of brokers; she forgot what lay before her—oppression and force, an inevitable and appointed way.

Her gestures revealed a gentle glow of tenderness.

On their way back she seemed pale. “You are cold,” Eva said, and wrapped the robe more firmly about her friend.

Johanna squeezed Eva’s hand gratefully. “How dear of you! I shall always need some one to tell me when I’m hot or cold.”

This melancholy jest moved Eva deeply. “Why do you act so humble?” she cried. “Why do you shrink and hide and turn your vision away from yourself? Why do you not dare to be happy?”

Johanna answered: “Do you not know that I am a Jewess?”

“Well?” Eva asked in her turn. “I know some very extraordinary people who are Jews—some of the proudest, wisest, most impassioned in the world.”

Johanna shook her head. “In the Middle Ages the Jews were forced to wear yellow badges on their garments,” she said. “I wear the yellow badge upon my soul.”

Eva was putting on a tea gown. Susan Rappard was helping her. “What’s new with us, Susan?” Eva asked, and took the clasps out of her hair.

Susan answered: “What is good is not new, and what is new is not good. Your ugly little court fool is having an affair with M. Wahnschaffe. They are very secretive, but there are whispers. I don’t understand him. He is easily and quickly consoled. I have always said that he has neither a mind nor a heart. Now it is plain that he has no eyes either.”

Eva had flushed very dark. Now she became very pale. “It is a lie,” she said.

Susan’s voice was quite dry. “It is the truth. Ask her. I don’t think she’ll deny it.”

Shortly thereafter Johanna slipped into the room. She had on a dress of simple, black velvet which set off her figure charmingly. Eva sat before the mirror. Susan was arranging her hair. She had a book in her hand and read without looking up.

On a chair near the dressing-table lay an open jewel case. Johanna stood before it, smiled timidly, and took out of it a beautifully cut cameo, which she playfully fastened to her bosom; she looked admiringly at a diadem and put it in her hair; she slipped on a few rings and a pearl bracelet over her sleeve. Thus adorned she went, half hesitatingly, half with an air of self-mockery, up to Eva.

Slowly Eva lifted her eyes from the book, looked at Johanna, and asked: “Is it true?” She let a few seconds pass, and then with wider open eyes she asked once more: “Is it true?”

Johanna drew back, and the colour left her cheeks. She suspected and knew and began to tremble.

Then Eva arose and went close up to her and stripped the cameo from the girl’s bosom, the diadem from her hair, the rings from her fingers, the bracelet from her arm, and threw the things back into the case. Then she sat down again, took up her book, and said: “Hurry, Susan! I want to rest a little.”

Johanna’s breath failed her. She looked like one who has been struck. A tender blossom in her heart was crushed forever, and from its sudden withering arose a subtle miasma. Almost on the point of fainting she left the room.

As though to seal the end of a period in her life and warn her of evil things to come, she received within two hours a telegram from her mother which informed her of a catastrophe and urgently summoned her home. FrÄulein Grabmeier began packing at once. They were to catch the train at five o’clock in the morning.

From midnight on Johanna sat waiting in Christian’s room. She lit no light. In the darkness she sat beside a table, resting her head in her hands. She did not move, and her eyes were fixed on vacancy.

XX

In the course of their talk Christian and Crammon had wandered farther and farther into the tangled alleys around the harbour. “Let us turn back and seek a way out,” Crammon suggested. “It isn’t very nice here. A damnable neighbourhood, in fact.”

He peered about, and Christian too looked around. When they had gone a few steps farther, they came upon a man lying flat on his belly on the pavement. He struggled convulsively, croaked obscene curses, and shook his fist threateningly toward a red-curtained, brightly lit door.

Suddenly the door opened, and a second man flew out. A paper box, an umbrella, and a derby hat were pitched out after him. He stumbled down the steps with outstretched arms, fell beside the first man, and remained sitting there with heavy eyes.

Christian and Crammon looked in through the open door. In the smoky light twenty or thirty people were crouching. The monotonous crying of a woman became audible. At times it became shriller.

The glass door was flung shut.

“I shall see what goes on in there,” said Christian, and mounted the steps to the door. Crammon had only time to utter a horrified warning. But he followed. The reek of cheap whiskey struck him as he entered the room behind Christian.

Beside tables and on the floor crouched men and women. In every corner lay people, sleeping or drunk. The eyes which were turned toward the newcomers were glassy. The faces here looked like lumps of earth. The room, with its dirty tables, glasses, and bottles had a colour-scheme of scarlet and yellow. Two sturdy fellows stood behind the bar.

The woman whose crying had penetrated to the street sat on a bench beside the wall. Blood was streaming down her face, and she continued to utter her monotonous and almost bestial whine. In front of her, trying hard to keep erect on legs stretched far apart, stood the huge fellow whom Christian had observed at the public funeral of the murdered harlot. In a hoarse voice, in the extreme jargon of the Berlin populace, he was shouting: “Yuh gonna git what’s comin’ to yuh! I’ll show yuh what’s what! I’ll blow off yer dam’ head-piece’n yuh cin go fetch it in the moon!”

On the threshold of an open door in the rear stood a stout man with innumerable watch-charms dangling across his checked waistcoat. A fat cigar was held between his yellow teeth. He regarded the scene with a superior calm. It was the proprietor of the place. When he saw the two strangers his brows went up. He first took them to be detectives, and hastened to meet them. Then he saw his mistake and was the more amazed. “Come into my office, gentlemen,” he said in a greasy voice, and without removing the cigar. “Come back there, and I’ll give you a drink of something good.” He drew Christian along by the arm. A woman with a yellow head-kerchief arose from the floor, stretched out her arms toward Christian, and begged for ten pfennigs. Christian drew back as from a worm.

An old man tried to prevent the gigantic lout from maltreating the bleeding woman any more. He called him Mesecke and fawned upon him. But Mesecke gave him a blow under the chin that sent him spinning and moaning. Murmurs of protest sounded, but no one dared to offend the giant. The proprietor whispered to Christian: “What he wants is brass; wants her to go on the street again and earn a little. Nothing to be done right now.”

He grasped Crammon by the sleeve too, and drew them both through the door into a dark hall. “I suppose you gentlemen are interested in my establishment?” he asked anxiously. He opened a door and forced them to enter. The room into which they came showed a tasteless attempt at such luxury as is represented by red plush and gilt frames. The place was small, and the furniture stood huddled together. Crossed swords hung above a bunch of peacock feathers, and above the swords the gay cap of a student fraternity. Between two windows stood a slanting desk covered with ledgers. An emaciated man with a yellowish face sat at the desk and made entries in a book. He quivered when the proprietor entered the room, and bent more zealously over his work.

The proprietor said: “I’ve got to take care of you gents or something might happen. When that son of a gun is quiet you can go back and look the place over. I guess you’re strangers here, eh?” From a shelf he took down a bottle. “Brandy,” he whispered. “Prime stuff. You must try it. I sell it by the bottle and by the case. A number one! Here you are!” Crammon regarded Christian, whose face was without any sign of disquiet. With a sombre expression he went to the table and, as though unseeing, touched his lips to the glass which the proprietor had filled. It was a momentary refuge, at all events.

In the meantime a frightful noise penetrated from the outer room. “Fighting again,” said the proprietor, listened for a moment, and then disappeared. The noise increased furiously for a moment. Then silence fell. The book-keeper, without raising his waxy face, said: “Nobody can stand that. It’s that way every night. And the books here show the profits. That man Hillebohm is a millionaire, and he rakes in more and more money without mercy, without compassion. Nobody can stand that.”

The words sounded like those of a madman.

“Are we going to permit ourselves to be locked up here?” Crammon asked indignantly. “It’s rank impudence.”

Christian opened the door, and Crammon drew from his back pocket the Browning revolver that was his constant companion. They passed through the hall and stopped on the threshold of the outer room. Mesecke had vanished. Many arms had finally expelled him. The woman from whom he had been trying to get money was washing the blood from her face. The old man who had been beaten when he had pleaded for her said consolingly: “Don’t yuh howl, Karen. Things’ll get better. Keep up, says I!” The woman hardly listened. She looked treacherous and angry.

A tangle of yellow hair flamed on her head, high as a helmet and unkempt. While she was bleeding she had wiped the blood with her naked hand, and then stained her hair with it.

“You go home now,” the proprietor commanded. “Wash your paws and give our regards to God if you see him. Hurry up, or your sweetheart’ll be back and give you a little more.”

She did not move. “Well, how about it, Karen,” a woman shrilled. “Hurry. D’yuh want some more beating?”

But the woman did not stir. She breathed heavily, and suddenly looked at Christian.

“Come with us,” Christian said unexpectedly. The bar-tenders roared with laughter. Crammon laid a hand of desperate warning on Christian’s shoulder.

“Come with us,” Christian repeated calmly. “We will take you home.”

A dozen glassy eyes stared their mockery. A voice brayed: “Hell, hell, but you’re gettin’ somethin’ elegant.” Another hummed as though scanning verses: “If that don’t kill the bedbugs dead, I dunno what’ll do instead! Don’t yuh be scared, Karen. Hurry! Use your legs!”

Karen got up. She had not taken her shy and sombre eyes from Christian. His beauty overwhelmed her. A crooked, frightened, cynical smile glided over her full lips.

She was rather tall. She had fine shoulders and a well-developed bosom. She was with child—perhaps five months; it was obvious when she stood. She wore a dark green dress with iridescent buttons, and at her neck a flaming red riband fastened by a brooch that represented in silver, set with garnets, a Venetian gondola, and bore the inscription: Ricordo di Venezia. Her shoes were clumsy and muddy. Her hat—made of imitation kid and trimmed with cherries of rubber—lay beside her on the bench. She grasped it with a strange ferocity.

Christian looked at the riband and at the silver brooch with its inscription: Ricordo di Venezia.

Crammon sought to protect their backs. For new guests were coming in—fellows with dangerous faces. He had simply yielded to the inevitable and incomprehensible, and determined to give a good account of himself. He gritted his teeth over the absence of proper police protection, and said to himself: “We won’t get out of this hole alive, old boy.” And he thought of his comfortable hotel-bed, his delicious, fragrant bath, his excellent breakfast, and of the box of chocolates on his table. He thought of young girls who exhaled the fresh sweetness of linen, of all pleasant fragrances, of Ariel’s smile and Rumpelstilzkin’s gaiety, and of the express train that was to have taken him to Vienna. He thought of all these things as though his last hour had come.

Two sailors came in dragging between them a girl who was pale and stiff with drunkenness. Roughly they threw her on the floor. The creature moaned, and had an expression of ghastly voluptuousness, of strange lasciviousness on her face. She lay there stiff as a board. The sailors, with a challenge in their voices, asked after Mesecke. He had evidently met them and complained to them. They wanted to get even with the proprietor. One of them had a scarlet scratch across his forehead; the other’s arms were naked up to his shoulders and tattooed until they were blue all over. The tattooing represented a snake, a winged wheel, an anchor, a skull, a phallus, a scale, a fish, and many other objects.

Both sailors measured Christian and Crammon with impudent glances. The one with the tattooed arms pointed to the revolver in Crammon’s hand, and said: “If you don’t put up that there pistol I’ll make you, by God!”

The other went up to Christian and stood so close to him that he turned pale. Vulgarity had never yet touched him, nor had the obscene things of the gutter splashed his garments. Contempt and disgust arose hotly in him. These might force him to abandon his new road; for they were more terrible than the vision of evil he had had in the house of Szilaghin.

But when he looked into the man’s eyes, he became aware of the fact that the latter could not endure his glance. Those eyes twitched and flickered and fled. And this perception gave Christian courage and a feeling of inner power, the full effectiveness of which was still uncertain.

“Quiet there!” the proprietor roared at the two sailors. “I want order. You want to get the police here, do you? That’d be fine for us all, eh? You’re a bit crazy, eh? The girl can go with the gentlemen, if they’ll pay her score. Two glasses champagne—that’s one mark fifty. And that ends it.”

Crammon laid a two-mark piece on the table. Karen Engelschall had put on her hat, and turned toward the door. Christian and Crammon followed her, and the proprietor followed them with sarcastic courtesy, while the two sturdy bar-tenders formed an additional bodyguard. A few half-drunken men sent the strains of a jeering song behind them.

The street was empty. Karen gazed up and down it, and seemed uncertain in which direction she should go. Crammon asked her where she lived. She answered harshly that she didn’t want to go home. “Then where shall we take you?” Crammon asked, forcing himself to be patient and considerate. She shrugged her shoulders. “It don’t matter,” she said. Then, after a while, she added defiantly. “I don’t need you.”

They went toward the harbour, Karen between the two men. For a moment she stopped and murmured with a shudder of fear: “But I mustn’t run into him. No, I mustn’t.”

“Will you suggest something then?” Crammon said to her. His impulse was simply to decamp, but for Christian’s sake, and in the hope of saving him uninjured from this mesh of adventures, he played the part of interest and compassion.

Karen Engelschall did not answer, but hurried more swiftly as she caught sight of a figure in the light of a street lamp. Until she was beyond its vision she gasped with terror.

“Shall we give you money?” Crammon asked again.

She answered furiously: “I don’t need your money. I want no money.” Surreptitiously she gazed at Christian, and her face grew malicious and stubborn.

Crammon went over beside Christian, and spoke to him in French. “The best thing would be to take her to an inn where she can get a room and a bed. We can deposit a sum of money there, so that she is sheltered for a while. Then she can help herself.”

“Quite right. That will be best,” Christian replied. And, as though he could not bear to address her, he added: “Tell her that.”

Karen stopped. She lifted her shoulders as though she were cold, and said in a hoarse voice: “Leave me alone. What are you two talking about? I won’t walk another step. I’m tired. Don’t pay no attention to me!” She leaned against the wall of a house, and her hat was pushed forward over her forehead. She was as sorry and dissipated a looking object as one could possibly imagine.

“Isn’t that the sign of an inn?” Crammon asked and pointed to an illuminated sign at the far end of the street.

Christian, who had very keen eyes, looked and answered: “Yes. It says ‘King of Greece.’ Do go and inquire.”

“A lovely neighbourhood and a lovely errand,” Crammon said plaintively. “I am paying for my sins.” But he went.

Christian remained with the woman, who looked down silently and angrily. Her fingers scratched at her riband. Christian listened to the beating of the tower-clock. It struck two. At last Crammon reappeared. He beckoned from a distance and cried: “Ready.”

Christian addressed the girl for the first time. “We’ve found a shelter for you,” he said, a little throatily, and, quite contrary to his wont, blinked his eyes. His own voice sounded disagreeably in his ears. “You can stay there for some days.”

She looked at him with eyes that glowed with hatred. An indescribable but evil curiosity burned in her glance. Then she lowered her eyes again. Christian was forced to speak again: “I think you will be safe from that man there. Try to rest. Perhaps you are ill. We could summon a physician.”

She laughed a soft, sarcastic laugh. Her breath smelt of whiskey.

Crammon called out again.

“Come on then,” Christian said, mastering his aversion with difficulty.

His voice and his words made the same overwhelming impression on her that his appearance had done. She started to go as though she were being propelled from behind.

A sleepy porter in slippers stood at the door of the inn. His servile courtesy proved that Crammon had known how to treat him. “Number 14 on the second floor is vacant,” he said.

“Send some one to your lodgings to-morrow for your things,” Crammon advised the girl.

She did not seem to hear him. Without a word of thanks or greeting she followed the porter up the soiled red carpet of the stairs. The rubber cherries tapped audibly against the brim of her hat. Her clumsy form disappeared in the blackness.

Crammon breathed a sigh of relief. “My kingdom for a four-wheeler,” he moaned. At a nearby corner they found a cab.

XXI

When Christian entered his room and switched on the electric light, he was surprised to find Johanna sitting at the table. She shaded her eyes from the sudden glare. He remained at the door. His frown disappeared when he saw the deadly pallor of the girl’s face.

“I must leave,” Johanna breathed. “I’ve received a telegram and I must start for Vienna at once.”

“I am about to leave, too,” Christian answered.

For a while there was silence. Then Johanna said: “Shall I see you again? Will you want me to? Dare I?” Her timid questions showed the old division of her soul. She smiled a smile of patience and renunciation.

“I shall be in Berlin,” Christian answered. “I don’t know yet where I shall live. But whenever you want to know, ask Crammon. He is easily reached. His two old ladies send him all letters.”

“If you desire it, I can come to Berlin,” Johanna said with the same patient and resigned smile. “I have relatives there. But I don’t think that you do desire it.” Then, after a pause, during which her gentle eyes wandered aimlessly, she said: “Then is this to be the end?” She held her breath; she was taut as a bow-string.

Christian went up to the table and rested the index finger of one hand on its top. With lowered head he said slowly: “Don’t demand a decision of me. I cannot make one. I should hate to hurt you. I don’t want something to happen again that has happened so often before in my life. If you feel impelled to come—come! Don’t consider me. Don’t think, above all, that I would then leave you in the lurch. But just now is a critical time in my life. More I cannot say.”

Johanna could gather nothing but what was hopeless for herself from these words. Yet through them there sounded a note that softened their merely selfish regretfulness. With a characteristically pliant gesture, she stretched out her arm to Christian. Her pose was formal and her smile faint, as she said: “Then, au revoir—perhaps!”

XXII

When the girl had gone, Christian lay down on the sofa and folded his hands beneath his head. Thus he lay until dawn. He neither switched off the light nor did he close his eyes.

He saw the paintless stairs that led to the den where he had been and the red carpet of the inn soiled by many feet; he saw the lamp in the desolate street and the watch charms on the proprietor’s waistcoat; he saw the brandy bottle on the shelf, and the green shawl of one of the drunken women, and the tattooed symbols on the sailor’s naked arm: the anchor, the winged wheel, the phallus, the fish, the snake; he saw the rubber cherries on the prostitute’s hat and the silver brooch with the garnets and the foolish motto: Ricordo di Venezia.

And more and more as he thought of these things they awakened in him an ever surer feeling of freedom and of liberation, and seemed to release him from other things that he had hitherto loved, the rare and precious things that he had loved so exclusively and fruitlessly. And they seemed to release him likewise from men and women whose friendship or love had been sterile in the end.

As he lay there and gazed into space, he lived in these poor and mean things, and all fruitless occupations and human relationships lost their importance; and even the thought of Eva ceased to torment him and betray him into fruitless humiliation.

That radiant and regal creature allured him no more, when he thought of the blood-stained face of the harlot. For the latter aroused in him a feeling akin to curiosity that gradually filled his soul so entirely that it left room for nothing else.

Toward dawn he slumbered for an hour. Then he arose, and bathed his face in cold water, left the hotel, hired a cab, and drove to the inn called “The King of Greece.”

The nightwatchman was still at his post. He recognized this early guest and guided him with disagreeable eagerness up two flights of stairs to the room of Karen Engelschall.

Christian knocked. There was no answer. “You just go in, sir,” said the porter. “There ain’t no key and the latch don’t work. All kinds of things will happen, and it’s better for us to have the doors unlocked.”

Christian entered. It was a room with ugly brown furnishings, a dark-red plush sofa, a round mirror with a crack across its middle, an electric bulb at the end of a naked wire, and a chromo-lithograph of the emperor. Everything was dusty, worn, shabby, used-up, poor and mean.

Karen Engelschall lay in the bed asleep. She was on her back, and her dishevelled hair looked like a bundle of straw; her face was pale and a little puffy. Recent scars showed on her forehead and right cheek. Her full but flaccid breasts protruded above the coverings.

His old and violent dislike of sleeping people stirred in Christian, but he mastered it and regarded her face. He wondered from what social class she had come, whether she was a sailor’s or a fisherman’s daughter, a girl of the lower middle-classes, of the proletariat or the peasantry. Thus his curiosity employed his mind for a while until he became fully aware of the indescribable perturbation of that face. It was as void of evil as of good; but as it lay there it seemed distraught by the unheard of torment of its dreams. Then Christian thought of the carnelian on Mesecke’s hand, and the repulsively red stone which was like a beetle or a piece of raw flesh became extraordinarily vivid to him.

He made a movement and knocked against a chair; the noise awakened Karen Engelschall. She opened her lids, and fear and horror burned in her eyes when she observed a figure in her room; her features became distorted with fury, and her mouth rounded itself for a cry. Then she saw who the intruder was, and with a sigh of relief slid back among the pillows. Her face reassumed its expression of stubbornness and of enforced yielding. She watched, not knowing what to make of this visit, and seemed to wonder and reflect. She drew the covers up under her chin, and smiled a shallow, flattered smile.

Involuntarily Christian’s eyes looked for the red riband and the silver brooch. The girl’s garments had been flung pell-mell on a chair. The hat with the rubber cherries lay on the table.

“Why do you stand?” Karen Engelschall asked in a cheerful voice. “Sit down.” Again, as in the night, his splendour and distinction overwhelmed her. Smiling her empty smile, she wondered whether he was a baron or a count. She had slept soundly and felt refreshed.

“You cannot stay in this house very long,” Christian said courteously. “I have considered what had better be done for you. Your condition requires care. You must not expose yourself to the brutality of that man. It would be best if you left the city.”

Karen Engelschall laughed a harsh laugh. “Leave the city? How’s that going to be done? Girls like me have to stay where they are.”

“Has any one a special claim on you?” Christian asked.

“Claim? Why? How do you mean? Oh, I see. No, no. It’s the way things are in our business. The feller to whom you give your money, he protects you, and the others mind him. If he’s strong and has many friends you’re safe. They’re all rotten, but you got no choice. You get no rest day or night, and your flesh gets tired, I can tell you.”

“I can imagine that,” Christian replied, and for a second looked into Karen’s round and lightless eyes, “and for that reason I wanted to put myself at your disposal. I shall leave Hamburg either to-day or to-morrow, and probably stay in Berlin for some months. I am ready to take you with me. But you must not delay your decision, because I have not yet any address in Berlin, I don’t know yet where I shall live, and if a plan like this is delayed it is usually not carried out at all. At the moment you have eluded your pursuer, and so the opportunity to escape is good. You don’t need to send for your things. I can get you whatever you need when we arrive.”

Those words, spoken with real friendliness, did not have the effect which Christian expected. Karen Engelschall could not realize the simplicity and frankness of their intention. A mocking suspicion arose in her mind. She knew of Vice Crusaders and Preachers of Salvation; and these men her world as a rule fears as much as it does the emissaries of the police. But she looked at Christian more sharply, and an instinct told her that she was on the wrong track. Clumsily considering, she drifted to other suppositions that had a tinge of cheap romance. She thought of plots and kidnapping and a possible fate more terrible than that under the heel of her old tormentor. She brooded over these thoughts in haste and rage, with convulsed features and clenched fist, passing from fear to hope and from hope to distrust, and yet, even as on the day before, compelled by something irresistible, a force from which she could not withdraw and which made her struggles futile.

“What do you want to do with me?” she asked, and gave him a penetrating glance.

Christian considered in order to weigh his answer carefully. “Nothing but what I have told you.”

She became silent and stared at her hands. “My mother lives in Berlin,” she murmured. “Maybe you’d want me to go back to her. I don’t want to.”

“You are to go with me.” Christian’s tone was firm and almost hard. His chest filled with breath and exhaled the air painfully. The final word had been spoken.

Karen looked at him again. But now her eyes were serious and awake to reality. “And what shall I do when I’m with you?”

Christian answered hesitatingly: “I’ve come to no decision about that. I must think it over.”

Karen folded her hands. “But I’ve got to know who you are.”

He spoke his name.

“I am a pregnant woman,” she said with a sombre look, and for the first time her voice trembled, “a street-walker who’s pregnant. Do you know that? I’m the lowest and vilest thing in the whole world! Do you know that?”

“I know it,” said Christian, and cast down his eyes.

“Well, what does a fine gentleman like you want to do with me? Why do you take such an interest in me?”

“I can’t explain that to you at the moment,” Christian answered diffidently.

“What am I to do? Go with you? Right away?”

“If you are willing, I shall call for you at two, and we can drive to the station.”

“And you won’t be ashamed of me?”

“No, I shall not be ashamed.”

“You know how I look? Suppose people point their fingers at the whore travelling with such an elegant gentleman?”

“It does not matter what people do.”

“All right. I’ll wait for you.” She crossed her arms over her breast and stared at the ceiling and did not stir. Christian arose and nodded and went out. Nor did Karen move when he was gone. A deep furrow appeared on her forehead, the fresh scars gleamed like burns upon her earthy skin, a dull and primitive amazement turned her eyes to stone.

XXIII

When Christian crossed the reception room of the hotel he saw Crammon sitting sadly in a chair. Christian stopped and smiled and held out his hand. “Did you sleep well, Bernard?” he asked.

“If that were my only difficulty I should not complain,” Crammon answered. “I always sleep well. The troubles begin when I’m awake. Age with his stealing steps! The old pleasures no longer sting, the old delights are worn out. One counts on gratitude and affection, and gets care and disappointment. I think a monastery would be the best place for me. I must look into that plan more closely.”

Christian laughed. “Come now, Bernard, you would be a very unsuitable person in a monastery. Drive the black thoughts away and let us have breakfast.”

“All right, let us have breakfast.” Crammon arose. “Have you any idea why poor Rumpelstilzkin suddenly fled by night? She had bad news from home, I am told, but that’s no reason why she should have gone without a word. It was not nice or considerate. And in a few hours Ariel too will be lost to us. Her rooms are filled with cases and boxes, and M. Chinard is bursting with self-importance. Black clouds are over us, and all our lovely rainbows fade. This caviare, by the way, is excellent. I shall withdraw into an utterly private life. Perhaps I shall hire a secretary, either a man or a fat, appetizing, and discreet woman, and begin to dictate my memoirs. You, my dear fellow, seem in more excellent spirits than for a long time.”

“Yes, excellent,” Christian said, and his smile revealed his beautiful teeth. “Excellent!” he repeated, and held out his hand to his astonished friend.

“So you have finally become reconciled to your loss?” he winked, and pointed upward with a significant gesture.

Christian guessed his meaning. “Entirely,” he said cheerily. “I’m completely recovered.”

“Bravo!” said Crammon, and, comfortably eating, he philosophized: “It would be saddening were it otherwise. I repeat what I have often said: Ariel was born for the stars. There are blessed stars and fateful stars. Some are inhabited by good spirits, others by demons. We have known that from times immemorial. Let them wage their battles among themselves. If it comes to collisions and catastrophes, it is a cosmic matter in which we mortals have no share. When all is said and done, you are but a mortal too, though one so blessed that you were even granted a stay in the happy hunting grounds of the gods. But excesses are evil. You cannot compete with Muscovite autocrats. Siegfried can conquer the dragons in the end; were Lucifer to attack him with fire-breathing steeds, the hero would but risk his skin in vain. Your renunciation is as wise as it is delightful. I drink to your pleasant future, dearest boy!”

Christian went to a buffet where magnificent fruit was exposed for sale. He knew Crammon’s passionate delight in rare and lovely fruit. He selected a woven basket and placed in the middle a pine-apple cut open so that its golden inside showed. He surrounded it with a wreath of flawless apples and of great, amber-coloured peaches from the South of France. They were elastic and yet firm. He added seven enormous clusters of California grapes. He arranged the fruit artistically, carried the basket to Crammon, and presented it to him with jesting solemnity.

They separated. When, late that afternoon, Crammon returned to the hotel, he learned to his bitter amazement that Christian had left.

He could not compose himself. It seemed to him that he was the victim of some secret cabal. “They all leave me in the lurch,” he murmured angrily to himself; “they make a mock of me. It’s like an epidemic. You are through with life, Bernard Gervasius, you are in every one’s way. Go to your cell and bemoan your fate.”

He ordered his valet to pack, and to secure accommodations on the train to Vienna. Then he placed the basket of fruit on the table, and in his sad reflections plucked berry after berry of the grape.

XXIV

In his quiet little house, furnished in the style of the age of Maria Theresa, he forgot what he had suffered. He lived an idyl.

He accompanied the two pious ladies to church, and out of considerateness and kindness to them even prayed occasionally. His chief prayer was: Lord, forgive those who have trespassed against me and lead me not into temptation. On sunny afternoons the carriage appeared and took the three for a ride through the parks. In the evening the bill of fare for the following day was determined on, and the national and traditional dishes were given the preference. Then he read to the devoutly attentive Misses Aglaia and Constantine classical poems: a canto of Klopstock’s “Messiah,” Schiller’s “Walk,” or something by RÜckert. And he still imitated the voice and intonation of Edgar Lorm. Also he related harmless anecdotes connected with his life; and he adorned and purified them so that they would have been worthy of a schoolgirl’s library.

Not till the two ladies had retired did he light his short pipe or pour himself out a glass of cognac; he practised reminiscence or introspection, or became absorbed in his little museum of treasures, which he had gathered during many years.

Shortly before his proposed meeting with Franz Lothar von Westernach, he received an alarming letter from Christian’s mother.

Frau Wahnschaffe informed him that Christian had ordered all his possessions to be sold—Christian’s Rest, Waldleiningen, the hunting lodge, the stables and kennels, the motor cars, the collections, including the wonderful collection of rings. This incomprehensible plan was actually being carried out, and no one had an inkling of the motive. She herself was in the utmost despair, and begged Crammon for some explanation and, if possible, to come to the castle. She besought him in God’s name for some hint in regard to Christian’s actions and state of mind. No news of her son had reached her for weeks; he seemed lost, and they were groping in the dark. The family did not, of course, desire his possessions to pass into the hands of strangers, and would bid in everything, although it was both difficult and hateful to oppose the impudent offers and the tricky manoeuvres which the auction ordered by Christian would entail. Above all, however, there was her personal anxiety about Christian. She expected Crammon to stand by her in her hour of need, and justify the high opinion she had formed both of his friendship for her son and of his attachment to her family.

Crammon re-read the lines that mentioned the sale of Christian’s Rest and of the collections. He shook his head long and sadly, pressed his chin into his hands, and two large tears rolled down his cheeks.

END OF VOL. I

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