Amadeus Voss lived in Zehlendorf, near the race track, in the gabled
attic of a new house. He had a view of meadows stretching toward a rim
of pine-woods. On the green plain projected a huge advertising sign
with gigantic letters: Zehlendorf-Grunewald Development Company, Ltd.
“They put that up within the last week so as to keep my soul within
proper bounds,” Voss said. “It’s a clever memento, isn’t it? I’m
told the company plans to build a church here. Magnificent! In the
neighbourhood there is also a bell-foundry.”
Johanna sat at the opposite window, through which the sunlight that
she sought shone in. Her little face had grown thin. Her beautifully
curved mouth with its sweet sadness lost its charm on account of her
homely nose. “You might get employment as a lay reader,” she said
impudently, and dangled her legs like a schoolgirl. “Or do you think
it’s a Protestant business? Of course, every one is Protestant here.
Why don’t you convert the unbelievers? You let your most solid talents
go to waste.”
Voss made a grimace. With dragging steps he went through the large
studio-like room. “To your kind of free thought all faith is an object
of barter,” he said bitterly. “Why do you mock even at yourself? See to
it lest the light that is in you be not darkness! That is the monition
of the Gospel. But what does that word ‘Gospel’ mean to you? A cultured
phrase, or something to buy and sell.”
Johanna, supporting her head on her hand, whispered inaudibly, “No one
knows how it came that Rumpelstilzkin is my name.” Aloud she said: “I’m
getting a bad report, I see. I’m resuming my seat, teacher. I know
that my laziness is obvious even from your exalted seat.”
Amadeus stopped in front of her. “Have you never believed? Has the
inscrutable never touched your heart? Have you never trembled before
Him? Have you no reverence? What kind of a world do you come from?”
She answered with biting sarcasm. “We spent our days dancing around
the golden calf--all of us, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and
child. Fancy that! It’s dizzying.”
Impervious to the mockery through which she expressed the fragile charm
of her clever mind, Voss fixed on her a look of sombre passion. “Do you
at least believe in me?” he asked, and grasped her shoulders.
She resisted and withdrew herself. She thrust her hands against his
chest and bent back her head. “I believe in nothing, nothing.” Her
whole body throbbed and shook. “Not in myself nor you nor God nor
anything. You are quite right. I don’t.” Her brows contracted with
pain. Yet she melted, as always, before his glow. It was her ultimate
of earth and life, her last anodyne, her weakness yearning for
destruction. Her lips grew soft and her lids closed.
With savage strength Amadeus lifted her in his arms. “Neither in
yourself nor God nor me,” he murmured. “But in him! Or perhaps you do
not believe in him either? Tell me!”
She opened her eyes again. “In whom?” she asked astonished.
“In him!” His utterance was tormented. She understood him, and with an
infinitely sinuous movement glided from his arms.
“What do you want of me?” she asked, and rearranged her abundant brown
hair with nervous gestures.
“I want to know,” he answered, “to know at last. I cannot bear this
any longer. What happened between you two? How do you explain the
intimate tone of your letter to him, and your questions whether he had
already forgotten you, whether you dared even ask? No doubt you played
the well-known game--the dangerous, lecherous game of moths in the
lamplight. I am not so stupid as not to have guessed that. But how far
did you venture toward the lamp--as far as the chimney or as far as the
flame? And when he left you, what demands had you the right to make?
What was he to you? What is he?”
It was the first time that Voss had spoken out. The question had been
strangling him. He had set little traps for Johanna and searched her
expression, resented her evasions and yet respected her delicacy. And
all that had heightened his impatience and suspicion. The fingers of
one hand clenched under his chin, he stood there lean and rocking
strangely to and fro.
Johanna said nothing. A smile, half mocking, half of suffering, hovered
about her lips. She wished that she were far away.
Voss gritted his teeth and went on: “Don’t think it’s jealousy. And if
it is--perhaps there is no other word--yet I do not mean what you were
taught to think it in the poisoned gardens in which you grew up. Why
have you not been frank with me? Am I not worthy of so much? Did you
not feel my dumb beseeching? I need not tell you what is at stake. If
you did not suspect it, you would not fear to speak. From my childhood
on I have lived in outer servitude and inner obedience. I have been
taught the lofty and sacred ideal of chastity of our faith. Only
despair over the unreachable farness of that ideal plunged me into the
sinks of the earth’s iniquity. And so I place on innocence and spotless
purity quite another value than the sleek little gentlemen, the trained
animals, of your world. I who stand before you am sin and the sense
of sin, with all its misery and uncleanness; and you can save me by a
word. I have confessed to you all the cries of my own breast. Have I
not said enough? Yet even what I have said seems shameless beside the
vanity of your reserve. Can I do nothing but sting your senses, you
heathen girl, and never reach your vitals or your soul? Confess, or I
will tear the truth from you with red-hot pincers. Shall I have waited
and renounced, to be fed on the leavings of another’s satiety? Did
you live with him? Speak! Did he cheat me of your purity--he who has
cheated me of everything? Speak!”
Johanna, aflame with indignation, took her hat and coat and left him.
He did not move. Scarcely had she closed the door behind her, scarcely
did he hear the sound of her retreating steps, when he raced after
her. With equal speed he returned for his hat. When she was leaving
the house he was beside her. “Hear me,” he stammered. “Don’t judge
me harshly.” She quickened her pace to escape him. He would not fall
behind. “My words were rough, Johanna, even brutal. But they were
inspired by the very humbleness of love.” She turned into the street
to the railway station. He blocked her path; he threatened to use
force if she persisted. Passers-by turned and looked at them. To avoid
a public scandal she had to go back with him. “At least,” she pleaded,
“let us not return to the house. I can’t stay in the room. We can talk
while we are out. But don’t come so near. People are laughing at us.”
“People, people! The world is full of people. They know nothing of us
nor we of them. Say that you forgive me, and I’ll be as calm as though
I had come from a card party.” He was pale to his forehead.
They walked in the wet, snowy air and over the soaking earth. The
street ran into a field-path. Above the setting sun the sky was full of
shredded clouds--red, yellow, green, blue. An express train thundered
past them. Electric signals trilled. It was tiring to walk over the
slippery leaves, but the damp wind cooled their faces.
Amadeus wore himself out in explanations. In the defence of himself,
the rejected and humiliated one, the tormented member of a caste and
race of the rejected and humiliated, he found expressions of such power
that they oppressed Johanna and bent her will. He spoke of his love
for her, of this terrible storm in his blood, from which he had hoped
purification and strength and liberation, but which was wasting and
crushing him instead. And so his doubt of her was like a doubt of God.
If a youth doubts God the world breaks down and sinks into pure agony.
And such was his case in the nights in which he panted for alleviation,
and the darkness became an abyss filled with a thousand purple tongues
of flame.
And like a blinded man turning in a circle, he began again to ask his
question, first carefully and slyly, then impetuously and with passion.
He pointed out incriminating details and circumstances that poisoned
his imagination. He appealed to her pity, her sense of honesty, to
some not wholly buried spark of piety within her. And again he painted
the state of his soul, besought her with uplifted hands, then became
silent, and with his sombre eyes looked helplessly about.
Johanna had been astonished from the beginning that the nature of her
brief contact with Christian, which shone to her from the past like
a bit of dawn, had not been obvious to him. If he had understood and
taken what had happened as a matter of course, she would probably have
admitted it quite naïvely. But his savagery and his avidity aroused her
defiance and her fear more and more. Every new attack of his made her
feel more unapproachable, and she suddenly felt that she had a secret
to guard from him, a deep and proud secret, which no assurances and no
persecutions would make her yield up. It was a possession that all good
spirits bade her keep, that she should never give up to him who would
regard it as a shameful thing and into whose unblessed power she had
fallen. So she built defences, and was ready to fight and to lie, to
endure all that was ugly and repulsive, reproof and degradation.
And these, indeed, she came to endure. All his obsessions concentrated
themselves on this one point. His glances searched and his words
probed her; behind every tenderness and every touch there lurked a
question. If she evaded him, he became enraged. If she soothed him,
he cast himself down and kissed her feet. She took pity on him, and
for the space of a few ecstatic hours deceived him with the liberally
invented details of a platonic relationship. He seemed to believe her
and begged her forgiveness, promising more gentleness and silence and
consideration. But hardly had a day passed before the old mischief
sprang up anew. His eye was sharpened as by acid. Christian Wahnschaffe
was the enemy, the thief, the adversary. What happened at such and
such a time? What did she say to him on such an occasion? What had he
answered? Whence had he come? Whither was he going? Did he ask her to
yield herself? Did she kiss him? Once? Many times? Had she desired his
kisses? When was she ever alone with him? How did the room look? What
sort of a dress had she worn? It was hopeless. It was like a drill that
turns and eats into wood. Johanna repulsed him violently; she jeered
and sighed and hid her face. She wept and she laughed, but she did not
yield by the breadth of a hair.
Next came utter exhaustion. She was often so worn out that she lay
on a sofa all day, pale and still. She let her relatives take her to
theatres, concerts, picture galleries. With dull eyes and freezing
indifference she endured these demands. The sympathy of people was a
burden to her. What could they do to soften her cruel self-contempt?
This killing contempt she transformed into a weapon, the two-edged
sword of her wit, and this she turned against her own breast. Her
sayings became famous in large circles of society. She described how
she had once been bathing by a lake and how a sudden gust of wind had
blown away her bath-chair. “And there,” she closed, “I stood as naked
as God had created me in His wrath.”
Her aversion from him who was her lover rose to such a point that a
cold fever shook her if she thought of him, that she secretly mocked
his gestures, his tones, his clerical speech, his voracious glance. She
made appointments with him which she did not keep. He sent telegrams
and special delivery letters and messengers. He lay in wait at her door
and questioned the servants until, beside herself, she went to him, and
in her indignation said icy and unspeakably cruel things. Then he would
become humble and rueful, and sincerely so. And the terror of losing
her would wring words from him that were mad and diabolical.
She wasted away. She scarcely ate and slept. Again and again she
determined to make an end of everything and leave the city. But
there was the element of perverse desire. Her over-refined body,
her over-subtle soul, her morbidly sensitive organism melted into a
yearning for the cruel, for mysterious voluptuousness, for slavery and
degradation, for every extremity of suffering and delight.
One evening she was crouching, half dressed, in a chair. Her long
hair flowed beautifully over her slender shoulders. She held her head
between her hands and looked like a disconsolate little harlequin, very
pale and still. Amadeus Voss sat at the table with folded arms, and
stared into the lamp. This isolation of two beings, without friends or
dignity or happiness, seemed to Johanna like the inexorable fate of
galley-slaves tied to the same oar. Suddenly she arose and gathered up
her hair with a graceful gesture, and said with a scurrilous dryness:
“Come in, ladies and gentlemen. This is the great modern show. The
latest, up to the minute. Sensation guaranteed. Magnificent suspense
interest. Revelation of all the secrets of modern woman and modern man.
Gorgeous finale. Don’t miss it!”
She went up to the mirror, gazed at her image as though she did not
know it, and made a comical bow.
Amadeus lowered his head in silence.