And now things had gone so far with Johanna that she had given herself
to him whom she despised. At last she had the valid proof of her own
feebleness of soul. She needed no longer to fear an inner voice that
would defend her, nor any hope that might counsel her to guard herself.
It was superfluous now to spare her body, and no longer necessary to
keep up the little self-deceptions that bolstered up her brittle pride.
She was unmasked in her own eyes, and, in a sense so different from the
ordinary moral one, dishonoured ... dishonoured for all time and all
eternity ... branded.... She had become what she had always suspected
herself capable of becoming. Things were settled.
From the moment that he had waited for her in the street that day,
Amadeus Voss had not left her side. From time to time he had repeated
with mad monotony: “I love you, Johanna.” She had made no reply. With
compressed lips and lowered eyes she had walked on and on, for more
than an hour. The fear of human glances and human presences had kept
her from fleeing by tram. Furthermore it was he who chose their path
by a silent command. At last he had stopped in front of a little
coffee-house. He neither asked her nor invited her in. He took it for
granted that she would follow, and she did.
In a dim corner they sat facing each other. He took out a pencil
and drew mystic symbols on the marble top of the table. This
oppressive state of silence had lasted nearly half an hour. At last
he had spoken: “To utter the word ‘love’ is to become guilty of an
enormous triviality. It has been flattened out and savours of cheap
fiction. Speak it and you become secondhand. The feeling is unique,
incomparable, strange, and wondrous--an unheard-of adventure, a dream
of dreams. The word is a base sound taken from a tattered reader. But
how shall one communicate with another when the feeling strangles and
shakes you, and your days are the days of a madman? I came to the age
of twenty-six without knowing this magic and this wonder. No hand was
stretched out toward me, no eye sought me out, and so I looked with
hatred upon all who were in the grip of what seemed to be a blasphemous
passion. Among the playmates of my childhood little erotic friendships
were common. Every boy had his little sweetheart with whom he flirted
instinctively and yet innocently. I excluded myself from all that and
hated. On Sunday afternoon they would stroll out beyond the village. I
would follow some couple, and if the boy and girl sat down somewhere to
chat, I would observe them from some ambush with rage and bitterness.
You have a keen enough insight to realize how I felt then and later
and until this very day. Longing--yes, well, that’s another of those
pale, drained concepts. Occasionally I stretched out my hand in my
confusion and my cowardly desire, and trembled when a woman’s sleeve
brushed mine. I became the fool of one who sought to trap me, and I
let the accursed dancer poison my blood. Sometimes I flung myself into
the gutter, and became defiled merely to silence the pitiless voice of
nature, which is a heritage of the Evil One and the work of Satan.”
She had not raised her eyes from the table, and the hieroglyphs covered
half of its top. “I won’t make any promises in the name of my so-called
love,” he continued, and his bowed face became a mask of pain. “I don’t
know whither it will lead either me or her who elects to be mine. To be
mine--that has a sound of horror, hasn’t it? All I can say is that that
woman will contribute to my salvation and redeem me from torment. You
may reply: ‘What have I to do with your salvation or with the torments
of a lost soul?’ Very well. Let us not bring that in. But consider
whether in all the world there is another man whom you can win
wholly, utterly, body and soul? Every step and every breath of yours
is infinitely precious to me; there is an equal life and loveliness to
me in the lashes of your eyes and the hem of your garment. I am within
your very body, and throb in the pulsing of your heart. There is a fear
that one feels of one’s own heart-beats; and there is one that is felt
of another’s. Shall I use more words? These are enough. All words are
unholy, and creep on the fringe of experience.”
The woman in Johanna had succumbed. A terrible curiosity had enslaved
her. Because all that she was and did seemed unnatural and distorted
to her, and because she was weary and sore, she let herself glide into
those desperately outstretched arms.
She seemed to fall into a depth where heat and glow corroded what they
touched. Shattering ecstasy and crushing weariness alternated. Scenes
pallid and terrible flitted by as on the screen of a cinematograph, and
the hours raced to their hideous death.
She wrote to her sister in Bucharest: “You’re so very near the Orient,
and I’ve always been told that it is full of mighty wizards. Couldn’t
you, please, use your well-tried charms to get the better of one of
them, and steal from him some magic formula by virtue of which one can
lose the consciousness of one’s self? Mine, you see, is quite ragged
and tattered. And if I could exchange it for a nice, new, fashionable
one, I’d be helped so much! I could marry a nice Jewish manufacturer
and have babies and eat chocolates and flirt with the _jeunesse
dorée_ and realize similar ideals. I beseech you, Clarisse, find me a
wizard--young or old, it doesn’t matter. But I must have a wizard to be
saved.”