Wherever Johanna Schöntag went she was treated with loving-kindness.
Even her relatives with whom she lived treated her with tender
considerateness. This tended to lower rather than to raise her in her
own self-esteem. She considered subtly: “If I please these, what can I
possibly amount to?”
She said: “It is ever so funny that I should be living in this city of
egoists. I am the direct antithesis of such brave persons.”
Nothing seemed worth doing to her, not even what her heart demanded
loudly--the setting out to find Christian. She waited for some
compulsion, but none came. She lost herself in trivial fancies. She
would sit in a corner, and watch things and people with her clever
eyes. “If that bearded man,” she thought, “had the nose of his bald
neighbour he might look quite human.” Or: “Why are there six stucco
roses above the door? Why not five or seven?” She tormented herself
with these things. The wrongly placed nose and the perverse number of
the stucco roses incited her to plan the world’s improvement. Suddenly
she would laugh, and then blush if people looked her way.
Every night, before she fell asleep, she thought, in spite of herself,
of Amadeus Voss and of her promise to write him. Then she would take
flight in sleep and forget the morrow. His long letter weighed on her
memory as the most painful experience of her life. Words that made
her restless emerged from it in her consciousness--the saying, for
instance, concerning the shadow’s yearning for its body. The words’
mystery lured her on. All voices in the outer world warned her. Their
warning but heightened the sting of allurement. She enjoyed her fear
and let it grow. The reflection of mirrored things in other mirrors of
the mind confused her. At last she wrote; an arrow flew from the taut
string.
They met on Kurfürsten Square, and walked up the avenue of chestnut
trees toward Charlottenburg. In order to limit the interview, Johanna
announced that she must be home at the end of an hour. But the path
they chose robbed her of the hope of a quite brief interview. She
yielded. To hide her embarrassment, she remarked jestingly on the
trees, houses, monuments, beasts, and men. Voss preserved a dry
seriousness. She turned to him impatiently. “Well, teacher, aren’t you
going to talk a bit to the well-behaved little pupil with whom you’re
taking a walk?”
But Voss had no understanding of the nervous humour of her gentle
rebuke. He said: “I am an easy prey; you have but to mock, and I
am without defence. I must accustom myself to such lightness and
smoothness. It is a bad tone for us to use. You keep looking at me
searchingly, as though my sleeve might be torn or my collar stained. I
had determined to speak to you as to a comrade. It cannot be done. You
are a young lady, and I am hopelessly spoiled for your kind.”
Johanna answered sarcastically that at all events it calmed her to
see her person and presence extorting a consideration from him which
she had not always enjoyed. Voss started. Her contemptuous expression
revealed her meaning to him. He lowered his head, and for a while said
nothing. Then bitterness gathered on his features. Johanna, gazing
straight ahead, felt the danger to herself; she could have averted it;
she knew that a courteous phrase would have robbed him of courage. But
she disdained the way out. She wanted to defy him, and said frankly
that she was not in the least hurt by his disappointment in her, since
it was scarcely her ambition to impress him. Voss endured this in
silence, too, but seemed to crouch as for an attack. Johanna asked
with an innocent air whether he was still in Christian Wahnschaffe’s
apartment, and still had charge of his friend’s private correspondence.
Voss’s answer was dry and objective. He said that he had moved,
since his means did not permit him such luxury. The mocking smile on
Johanna’s lips showed him that she was acquainted with the situation.
He added that he had better say that the source of his income had given
out. He was living, he told her, in quarters befitting a student in
Ansbacher Street, and had made the acquaintance of poverty again. He
was not yet so poor, however, that he had to deny himself the pleasure
of a guest; so he asked her whether she would take tea with him some
day. He did not understand her laughter. Ah, yes, she was a young lady;
he had forgotten. Well, perhaps she would condescend to the shop of a
confiseur.
His talk aroused her scorn and her impatience.
It was Sunday, and the weather was gloomy. Night was falling. Music
resounded from the pavilions in the public gardens. They met many
soldiers, each with his girl. Johanna opened her umbrella and walked
wearily. “It isn’t raining,” said Voss. She answered: “I do it so
as not to have to think of the rain.” The real reason was that
the umbrella widened the distance between them. “When do you see
Christian?” she suddenly asked in a high-pitched voice, and looked away
from him to the other side. “Do you see him often?” She regretted her
question at once. It bared her heart to these ambushed eyes.
But Voss had not even heard her. “You still resent the matter of your
letter. You can’t forgive me for having spied upon your secret. You
have no notion of what I gave you in return. You waste no thought
on the fact that I revealed my whole soul to you. Perhaps it wasn’t
even clear to you that all I wrote you in regard to Wahnschaffe was a
confession such as one human being rarely makes to another. It was done
by implication, and you, evidently, do not understand that method. I
probably overestimated both your understanding and your good will.”
“Probably,” Johanna replied; “and likewise my good nature, for here
you’ve been as rude as possible again. You would be quite right in what
you said, if you didn’t leave out one very important thing: there must
first be a basic sympathy between two people before you can expect such
demands to be honoured.”
“Sympathy!” Voss jeered. “A phrase--a conventional formula! What
you call sympathy is the Philistine’s first resort--tepid, flat,
colourless. True sympathy requires such delicate insight of the soul
that he who feels it scorns to use the shop-worn, vulgar word. I did
not reckon on sympathy. A cleft, such as the cleft between you and me,
cannot be bridged by cheap trappings. Do you think I had no instinctive
knowledge of your coldness, your aloofness, your irony? Do you take
me for the type of pachydermatous animal that leaps into a hedge of
roses, because it knows the thorns cannot wound him? Oh, no! Every
thorn penetrates my skin. I tell you this in order that you may know
henceforth just what you are doing. Each thorn pierces me till I bleed.
That was clear to me from the beginning, and yet I took the risk. I
have staked all that I am on this game; I have gathered my whole self
together and cast it at your feet, careless of the result. Once I
desired to deliver myself utterly into the hands of fate.”
“I must turn back,” Johanna said, and shut her umbrella. “I must take a
cab. Where are we?”
“I live on Ansbacher Street, corner of Augsburger, in the third story
of the third house. Come to me for one hour; let it be as a sign
that I am an equal in your eyes. You cannot imagine what depends on
it for me. It is a wretched and desolate hole. If ever you cross its
threshold, it will be a place in which I can breathe. I am not in the
habit of begging, but I beg you for this favour. The suspicion which
I see in your eyes is fully justified. I have planned to beg you for
this, to bring it about. But this plan of mine did not originate to-day
or yesterday. It is weeks old; it is older than I know. But that is
all. Any other distrust you feel is unjustified.”
He stammered these words and gasped them. Johanna looked helplessly
away. She was too weak to withstand the passionate eloquence of the
man, repulsive and fear-inspiring as he was. Also there was a fearful
lure in the daring, in the presence of a flame, in fanning it, in
danger, and in watching what would happen. Her life was empty. She
needed something to expect and court and fear. She needed the brink of
some abyss, some bitter fume, some transcendence of common boundaries.
But for the moment she needed to gain time. “Not to-day,” she said,
with a veiled expression, “some other time. Next week. No, don’t urge
me. But perhaps toward the end of the week; perhaps Friday. I don’t see
your purpose, but if you wish it, I’ll come Friday.”
“It is agreed then. Friday at the same hour.” He held out his hand.
Hesitatingly she put hers into it. She felt imprisoned in her own
aversion, but her glance was firm and almost challenging.