When Christian opened the door, his father stood before him. It was he
who had rung the bell.
The emotion which this unexpected sight aroused in him was so
restrained in its expression that the Privy Councillor’s eyes lost
their brief brightness and grew dark again.
“May one enter?” he asked, and crossed the threshold.
He walked to the middle of the room, placed his hat on the table, and
looked about him with astonishment held in check. It was better than
he had imagined and also worse. It was cleaner, more respectable, more
habitable; it was also more lonely and desolate. “So this is where you
live,” he said.
“Yes, this is where I live,” Christian repeated, with some
embarrassment. “Here and in a room across the court I have lived until
now. These were Karen’s rooms.”
“Why do you say until now? Are you planning to move again?”
Since Christian hesitated to answer, the Privy Councillor, not without
embarrassment in his turn, went on: “You must forgive me for coming
upon you so suddenly. I could not know whether you would consent
to such an explanation as has become necessary, and so I made no
announcement of my coming. You will understand that this step was not
an easy one to take.”
Christian nodded. “Won’t you sit down?” he asked, courteously.
“Not yet, if you don’t mind. There are things that cannot be discussed
while one is sitting still. They have not been thought out in that
posture either.” The Privy Councillor opened his fur-coat. His attitude
was one of superiority and dignity. His silvery, carefully trimmed
beard contrasted picturesquely with the silky blackness of his fur.
There was an oppressive pause. “Is mother well?” Christian asked.
The Privy Councillor’s face twitched. The conventional tone of the
question made it seem frivolous to him.
Worn out for a moment by this dumb summons to laws of life that had
lost their content and their meaning for him, Christian said: “Will
you permit me to withdraw for five minutes? I had been sleeping when
you rang. I think it was a sleep of many hours, and in my clothes,
too, so I must wash. And I want also to beg you to take along a little
package for mother. It contains an object that she values. I’m sorry
that I haven’t the right to explain more fully. Perhaps, if you desire,
she will give you the explanation herself, since the whole matter now
belongs to the past. So pardon me for a few minutes; I shall be at your
service almost immediately.”
He went into the adjoining room. The Privy Councillor looked after him
with consternation in his large, blue eyes. While he was alone, he did
not stir nor move a muscle of his body.
Christian re-entered. He had bathed his face and combed his hair.
He gave the Privy Councillor a little package tied with a cord. On
the white paper wrapping he had written: “For my mother. Gratefully
returned on the day of final parting. One piece is lacking through the
force of unavoidable circumstances; its value has been made up to me a
thousandfold. Greeting and farewell. Christian.”
The Privy Councillor read the words. “More riddles?” he asked, coldly.
“Why riddles on a placard? Have you not time to write a letter? Your
ways were more courtly once.”
“Mother will understand,” Christian replied.
“And have you no other message for her?”
“None.”
“May I ask the meaning of these words: ‘on the day of final parting’?
You referred once before to departure....”
“It would be more practical, perhaps, if you first told me the purpose
of your visit.”
“You have still your old technique of evasion.”
“You are mistaken,” said Christian. “I am not trying to evade at all.
You come to me like an enemy and you speak like one. I suspect you have
come to try to arrange something in the nature of a pact between us.
Wouldn’t it be simpler if you were frankly to state your proposals? It
may be that our intentions coincide. You want all to be rid of me, I
suppose. I believe that I can remove myself from your path.”
“It is so indeed,” the Privy Councillor said, with a rigid and aimless
glance. “The situation will brook no further delay. Your brother feels
himself trammelled and menaced in his vital interests. You are a source
of offence and anger to your sister. Although she has herself left
the appointed way, she feels your eccentricity like a deformity of
her flesh. Kinsmen of every degree declare the name and honour of the
family defiled and demand action. I shall not speak of your mother,
nor should I speak of myself. You cannot be ignorant of the fact that
you have struck at me where I was most vulnerable. I have been urged to
use force, but I have resisted. Force is painful and futile, and merely
recoils against him who uses it. Your plan of simply disappearing--I do
not know who mentioned it first--has many advantages. Other continents
offer a more grateful soil for ideas so obviously abstruse as your own.
It would be easy for you to change the mere scene of your activities,
and it would free us from a constant nightmare.”
“To disappear--that is precisely my intention,” Christian said. “I
used that very word to myself. If you had come yesterday, I should
probably not have been able to give you as complete satisfaction as I
can do to-day. Events have so shaped themselves, however, that we find
ourselves at the same point at the same time.”
“Since I do not know what events you mean, I cannot, to my regret,
follow you,” the Privy Councillor said, icily.
Without regarding the interruption, Christian continued, with his
vision lost in space. “It is, however, rather difficult to disappear.
In our world it is a difficult task. It means to renounce one’s very
personality, one’s home, one’s friends, and last of all one’s very
name. That is the hardest thing of all, but I shall try to do it.”
Roused to suspicion by his easy victory, the Privy Councillor asked:
“And is that what you meant by your final parting?”
“It was.”
“And whither have you determined to go?”
“It is not clear to me yet. It is better for you not to know.”
“And you will go without means, in shameful dependence and poverty?”
“Without means and in poverty. Not in dependence.”
“Folly!”
“What can hard words avail to-day, father?”
“And is this an irrevocable necessity?”
“Yes, irrevocable.”
“And also the parting between ourselves and you?”
“It is you who desire it; it has become a necessity to me.”
The Privy Councillor fell silent. Only a gentle swaying of his trunk
gave evidence that inwardly he was a broken man. Up to this moment
he had nursed a hope; he had not believed in the inevitable. He had
followed a faint beam of light, which had now vanished and left him in
the darkness. His heart crumbled in a vain love for the son who had
faced him with an inevitability which he could not comprehend. And all
that he had conquered in this world--power, wealth, honours, a golden
station in a realm of splendour--suddenly became to him frightfully
meaningless and desolate.
Once more he heard Christian’s clear and gentle voice. “You wanted
to fetter me through my inheritance; you sought to buy me with it. I
came to see that one must escape that snare. One must break even with
the love of those who proclaim: ‘You are ours, our property, and must
continue what we have begun.’ I could not be your heir; I could not
continue what you had begun, so I was in a snare. All whom I knew lived
in delight and all lived in guilt; yet though there was so much guilt,
no one was guilty. There was, in fact, a fundamental mistake in the
whole structure of life. I said to myself: the guilt that arises from
what men do is small and scarcely comparable to the guilt that arises
from what they fail to do. For what kinds of men are those, after
all, who become guilty through their deeds? Poor, wretched, driven,
desperate, half-mad creatures, who lift themselves up and bite the foot
that treads them under. Yet they are made responsible and held guilty
and punished with endless torments. But those who are guilty through
failure in action are spared and are always secure, and have ready and
reasonable subterfuges and excuses; yet they are, so far as I can see,
the true criminals. All evil comes from them. That was the snare I had
to escape.”
The Privy Councillor struggled for an expression of his confused
and painful feelings. It was all so different from anything he had
expected. A human being spoke to him--a man. Words came to him to
which he had to reconcile himself. They held the memory of recent and
unhealed wounds that had been dealt him. Arguments refused to come to
him. It was false and it was true. It depended on one’s attitude--on
one’s measure of imagination and willingness to see, on one’s insight
or fear, on one’s stubbornness or one’s courage to render an accounting
to oneself. The ground which had long been swaying under his feet
seemed suddenly to show huge cracks and fissures. The pride of his
caste still tried in that last moment to raise barricades and search
for weapons, but its power was spent.
Without hope of a favourable answer, he asked: “And do not the bonds of
blood exist for you any longer?”
“When you stand before me and I see you, I feel that they exist,” was
the answer. “When you speak and act, I feel them no longer.”
“Can there be such a thing as an accounting between father and son?”
“Why not? If sincerity and truth are to prevail, why not? Father and
son must begin anew, it seems to me, and as equals. They must cease to
depend on what has been, on what has been formulated and is prescribed
by use. Every mature consciousness is worthy of respect. The relation
must become a more delicate one than any other, since it is more
vulnerable; but because nature created it, men believe that it will
bear boundless burdens without breaking. It was necessary for me to
ease it of some burdens, and you regarded that action as a sin. It is
only worldly ideas that have chilled and blinded you to me.”
“Am I chilled and blinded?” The Privy Councillor’s voice was very low.
“Does it seem so to you?”
“Yes, since I renounced your wealth, it has been so. You have
constantly been tempted to use all the force you control against me.
You face me now with the demands of an affronted authority; and all
that, simply because I dared to break with the views of property and
acquisition current in the class in which I grew up. On the one hand,
you did not venture to violate my freedom, because in addition to
social and external considerations, you were conscious of a relation
between your heart and mine. I am afraid that prejudice and custom had
more to do with sustaining that relation than insight and sympathy;
but it exists, and I respect it. On the other hand, you were unable to
escape the influences of your surroundings and your worldly station,
and so you assumed that I was guilty of ugly and foolish and aimless
things. What are those ugly and foolish and aimless things that you
think me concerned with? And how do they hinder you and disturb you,
even granting their ugliness and folly and futility? Wherein do they
disturb Judith or Wolfgang, except in a few empty notions and fancied
advantages? And yet if it were more than that--would that little more
count? No, it would not count. No annoyance that they might suffer
through me would really count. And how have I wounded you, as you say,
and affronted your authority? I am your son and you are my father; does
that mean serf and lord? I am no longer of your world; your world has
made me its adversary. Son and adversary--only that combination will
ever change your world. Obedience without conviction--what is it? The
root of all evil. You do not truly see me; the father no longer sees
the son. The world of the sons must rise up against the world of the
fathers, if any change is to be wrought.”
He had sat down at the table and rested his head upon his hands. He
had suddenly abandoned the uses of society and his own conventional
courtesy. His words had risen from sobriety to passion; his face was
pale, and his eyes had a fevered glow. The Privy Councillor, who had
believed him incapable of such outbursts and such transformations,
gazed down at him rigidly. “These assertions are difficult to refute,”
he murmured, as he buttoned his fur-coat with trembling fingers. “And
what shall a debate avail us at this hour? You spoke of those who fail
through not doing. What will you do? It would mean much to me to hear
that from you. What will you do, and what have you done hitherto?”
“Until now it was all a mere preparation,” Christian said more calmly.
“Closely looked upon, it was nothing; it was something only as measured
by my powers and ability. I still cling too much to the surface.
My character has been against me; I do not succeed in breaking the
crust that separates me from the depth. The depth--ah, what is that
really? It is impossible to discuss it; every word is forwardness and
falsehood. I wish to perform no works, to accomplish nothing good or
useful or great. I want to sink, to steep, to hide, to bury myself in
the life of man. I care nothing for myself, I would know nothing of
myself. But I would know everything about human beings, for they, you
see, they are the mystery and the terror, and all that torments and
affrights and causes suffering.... To go to one, always to a single
one, then to the next, and to the third, and know and learn and reveal
and take his suffering from him, as one takes out the vitals of a
fowl.... But it is impossible to talk about it; it is too terrible.
The great thing is to guard against weariness of the heart. The heart
must not grow weary--that is the supreme matter. And what I shall do
first of all you know,” he ended with a winning, boyish smile, “I shall
vanish.”
“It would be a kind of death,” said the Privy Councillor.
“Or another kind of life,” Christian replied. “Yes, that is quite the
right name for it and also its purpose--to create another kind of
life. For this,” he arose, and his eyes burned, “this way of life is
unendurable. Yours is unendurable.”
The Privy Councillor came closer. “And surely, surely you will go on
living? That anxiety need not torment me too, need it?”
“Oh,” Christian said, vividly and serenely, “I must. What are you
thinking of? I must live!”
“You speak of it with a cheerfulness, and I ... and we ... Christian!”
the Privy Councillor cried in his despair. “I had none but you! Do you
not know it? Did you not? I have no one but you. What is to happen now,
and what is to be done?”
Christian stretched out his hand toward his father, who took it with
the gesture of a broken man. With a mighty effort he controlled
himself. “If it be inevitable, let us not drag it out,” he said. “God
guard you, Christian. In reality I never knew you; I do not now. It
is hard to be forced to say: ‘I had a firstborn son; he lives and has
died to me.’ But I shall submit. I see that there is something in you
to which one must submit. But perhaps the day will come when that
something within you will not utterly suffice; perhaps you will demand
something more. Well, I am sixty-two; it would avail me little. God
guard you, Christian.”
Restrained, erect, he turned to go.