“Beloved—!” said Freder, Joh Fredersen’s son.
It was the softest, the most cautious call of which a human voice is
capable. But Maria answered it just as little as she had answered
the shouts of despair with which the man who loved her had wished to
re-awaken her to consciousness of herself.
She lay couched upon the steps of the high altar, stretched out in her
slenderness, her head in Freder’s arm, her hands in Freder’s hand, and
the gentle fire of the lofty church-windows burnt upon her quite white
face and upon her quite white hands. Her heart beat, slowly, barely,
perceptibly. She did not breathe. She lay sunken in the depths of an
exhaustion from which no shout, no entreaty, no cry of despair could
have dragged her. She was as though dead.
A hand was laid upon Freder’s shoulder.
He turned his head. He looked into the face of his father.
Was that his father? Was that Joh Fredersen, the master over the great
Metropolis? Had his father such white hair? And so tormented a brow?
And such tortured eyes?
Was there, in this world, after this night of madness, nothing but
horror and death and destruction and agony—without end—?
“What do you want here?” asked Freder, Joh Fredersen’s son. “Do you
want to take her away from me? Have you made plans to part her and me?
Is there some mighty undertaking in danger, to which she and I are to
be sacrificed?”
“To whom are you speaking, Freder?” his father asked, very gently.
Freder did not answer. His eyes opened inquiringly, for he had heard a
voice never heard before. He was silent.
“If you are speaking of Joh Fredersen,” continued the very gentle
voice, “then be informed that, this night, Joh Fredersen died a
sevenfold death....”
Freder’s eyes, burnt with suffering, were raised to the eyes which were
above him. A piteously sobbing sound came from out his lips.
“Oh my God—Father—! Father ... you—!”
Joh Fredersen stooped down above him and above the girl who lay in
Freder’s lap.
“She is dying, father.... Can’t you see she is dying—?”
Joh Fredersen shook his head.
“No, no!” said his gentle voice. “No, Freder. There was an hour in my
life in which I knelt, as you, holding in my arms the woman I loved.
But she died, indeed. I have studied the face of the dying to the full.
I know it perfectly and shall never again forget it.... The girl is but
sleeping. Do not awaken her by force.”
And, with a gesture of inexpressible tenderness, his hand slipped from
Freder’s shoulder to the hair of the sleeping girl.
“Dearest child!” he said. “Dearest child....”
And from out of the depth of her dream the sweetness of a smile
responded to him, before which Joh Fredersen bowed himself, as before a
revelation, not of this world.
Then he left his son and the girl and passed through the cathedral,
made glorious and pleasant by the gay-coloured ribbons of sunshine.
Freder watched him go until his gaze grew misty. And all at once, with
a sudden, violent, groaning fervour, he raised the girl’s mouth to
his mouth and kissed her, as though he wished to die of it. For, from
out the marvel of light, spun into ribbons, the knowledge had come
upon him that it was day, that the invulnerable transformation of
darkness into light was becoming consummate, in its greatness, in its
kindliness, over the world.
“Come to yourself, Maria, beloved!” he said, entreating her with his
caresses, with his love. “Come to me, beloved! Come to me!”
The soft response of her heart-beat, of her breathing, caused a laugh
to well up from his throat and the fervour of his whispered words died
on her lips.
Joh Fredersen caught the sound of his son’s laugh. He was already
near the door of the cathedral. He stopped and looked at the stack of
pillars, in the delicate, canopied niches of which stood the saintly
men and women, smiling gently.
“You have suffered,” thought his dream-filled brain. “You have been
redeemed by suffering. You have attained to bliss.... Is it worth while
to suffer?—Yes.”
And he walked out of the cathedral on feet which were still as though
dead, tentatively, he stepped through the mighty doorway, stood dazzled
in the light and swayed as though drunken.
For the wine of suffering which he had drunk, was very heavy, and
intoxicating, and white-hot.
His soul spoke within him as he reeled along:
“I will go home and look for my mother.”