In spite of the warmth of the room Johanna sat wrapped in her cloak.
Amadeus Voss told her a story: “I know of a holy priest who lived in
France in the seventeenth century and whose name was Louis Gaufridy.
In those days the people still believed in magic and witchcraft, and
that was well, since it served as an antidote to godless desires.
To-day a few chosen spirits believe in magic again, and thus exorcize
the evil spirit which is called science. Louis Gaufridy was considered
the most devout man of his age. Not even his enemies denied that. In a
convent which he served as father confessor, there was a nun who was
called Madeleine de la Palud. This woman’s imagination had embraced the
Saviour under the aspect of the flesh, and the chronicles say that she
had fed her evil desires upon His picture. This fact was written in
her troubled looks, and the priest Gaufridy saw the truth and desired
to liberate her through the grace of confession. But the demons sealed
her lips and hardened her heart. They took possession of her, and the
devils Asmodeus and Leviathan spoke through her. She who had hitherto
been chaste had unchaste hallucinations, and accused the priest of
having bewitched and misused her. Gaufridy was arrested and examined
under torture and confronted with Madeleine. He swore by God and all
His saints that he was being falsely accused. But the nun, misled by
her hallucinations, swore that he was the prince of magicians, that he
had misused her during confession, and had poisoned her soul. Before
the judges the priest implored Madeleine to give up her delusion and
confess the truth; but she was incapable of truth. Beside herself, she
cried out that he had pledged himself to the devil in his own blood
and that he had forced her to do the same. Thereupon he was cruelly
tortured once more, and publicly burned on the Dominican’s Square at
Aix.”
Johanna smiled a tormented smile.
“That is the story of Madeleine de la Palud,” said Voss, “the profound
story concerning the heavenly and the earthly Eros and the Fata Morgana
of the senses. Who was the guilty one? Madeleine, who had blasphemed
and defiled the image of the Saviour with fleshly desires, or Gaufridy,
who had plunged her into a consciousness of sin by creating in her
the division between spirit and flesh? For that he had to suffer, as
every one has to suffer. But what I feel, and what our sources indeed
hint at, is that he was seized by a mysterious and terrible love for
Madeleine de la Palud even when she was thrusting him into the torture
chamber, and that this love mitigated for him even the horrors of his
fiery death. In every human breast love arises but once and for but
one being. All else is misunderstanding, and a sterile attempt to
resuscitate what is dead. It leads to falsehood and to torture.”
Johanna smiled a tormented smile.
“I walked with a harlot yesterday,” Voss said suddenly, and stared into
space.
Johanna did not stir.
“It is an old horror that draws me toward harlots,” he said in a
hollow voice. “Sometimes when I walked the streets penniless, sick
with longing, utterly deserted, I gazed after them and envied the men
who could go with them. It is an old feeling and springs from a deep
source. I cannot get rid of it, least of all now that I err in the
darkness and the ground is melting under my feet.”
“You talk and talk,” said Johanna, and arose. “If I had learned to
speak I could tell you what you ... do!”
“I suffer in the flesh,” he answered, and his glance burned her.
Twice she walked up and down the room. She hated her own tread, her
own perceptions, and her own thoughts. She had so deep a longing for
some human touch, some friendly, handsome, kindly word, that she
would not admit even to herself how far it might lead her. She only
had a dim vision of herself sitting in that rear room in Stolpische
Street, waiting for Christian many hours, whole nights, it mattered
not how long, but just to wait and to be there at his coming, to smile
with her lips though her heart were weeping--she knew that condition
so well--without explanation or confessions or complaints, as is the
custom among well-bred people who settle their inner difficulties in
silence and alone. Just to be there and nothing else, in order that the
temperature of her heart might rise by a few degrees.
But to plan or undertake or hope for anything from any source was so
criminal, it seemed, and so stupid. An empty thing--like a hungry bird
picking at painted grains of wheat.
“You told me the other day that you weren’t able to pay your rent.
Permit me to help you out.” She spoke in her frugal, pointed way, and
with an angular gesture placed some money on the table. “Do not speak.
Just this once, please do not speak.”
He looked at her devouringly, and laughed with a jeer.
She stood very cold and still. He kissed her.
She endured it like one to whose throat a knife is put.