The Countess opened her eyes on something black, intersected with red
circles and rays. All around her was dark and strange. Somewhere on
high a faint light was glimmering in the room in which she lay. She was
on a sofa, fully dressed. She had never seen the room before, and all
its contents were unfamiliar. She lay there, trying to recall what had
happened, but she found it impossible. One moment alone stood out in
her memory: the recollection of the grey eyes of that Dr. Mabuse who
had told her of tigers--eyes which had held her as with the clutch of
a beast whose claws ran blood. She recalled something like a spring in
the air, a hold that left her breathless, feeling as if the very heart
were being torn from her body and she was sinking, sinking down into a
gulf.
Suddenly a door opened; where, exactly, she did not know, for she
felt rather than perceived it. She was expecting something, but her
imagination flowed back upon herself and she waited.
After a time a voice spoke out of the semi-darkness: “You are awake.
Would you like the light?”
It was a voice which seemed to the Countess at the first moment like
the trump of doom, but in an instant this sensation left her and she
felt incredulous. How came that voice into this mysterious obscurity?
It was the very last she could have expected to hear. She shrank
terrified within herself, and it seemed as if her whole body gradually
stiffened. There was a sound in her throat, but she was not conscious
of it. She stretched her hands in front of her as if warding off a
danger. Then suddenly the room was flooded with light.
Dr. Mabuse closed the door and approached the sofa. He said: “The
situation is exactly what I desired. I have brought you home!”
At these words the Countess regained control of herself. She rose from
the sofa, though she felt faintness stealing over her. What did this
man want with her?--but indeed she knew what he wanted. He was a tiger,
intent on his prey. Nevertheless, she asked him, “What do you want?”
“I have just told you,” he answered curtly.
“And now?”
“You will remain with me.”
“I will not!” cried the Countess. “I will go and help my husband!” And
at that moment she recollected clearly what had happened. Her husband
had cheated at cards. Oh, merciful Heaven, she thought, how could such
a thing have happened? She knew so well how utterly foreign to his
nature such a thing would be. What misery, what despair, what depths
of misfortune! And she herself had been with the woman who was an
accomplice in Hull’s murder, and had succumbed to her power. Everything
seemed to swim before her eyes, and she saw her husband’s unconscious
act through a mist of blood.
She heard the voice of the man beside her, stern and threatening: “You
will not? Have I asked you whether you will?”
He had not asked the tiger or the buffalo. Was he to ask a weak woman?
Was he to ask _her_? She, too, was his prey. This idea filled her with
a sort of voluptuous dread. She was the prey of the strongest man
whom she had ever known. How could she defend herself? He had simply
taken her. Were there men whose will was strong enough to give them
possession of a woman if they never even touched her?
“How did I come here?” she asked.
“We have something more important than that to talk about,” he answered
in a cold, harsh voice that made her tremble. “How are you going to
adapt yourself to the situation?”
“I will never adapt myself to it!” she cried; and it seemed as if
instruments of torture were engraven on her brain.
“That is not the question!” answered the voice, falling like a stone,
falling, lying, lying for thousands of years. “The question is, are you
going to remain with me of your own free will or as my prisoner?”
The Countess, now fully alive to the force and compulsion which
threatened her, strove to collect her wits. She looked, listened,
considered, and slowly began to ask herself, “Shall it be cunning or
resistance?” After a time she answered, “You cannot keep me as your
prisoner in Munich.”
Mabuse replied roughly, “How do you know that you are in Munich?”
“Have you run away with me?” she cried.
“I am not a gorilla.”
“Who _are_ you? What is your name?”
“Whatever you like to call me!”
“Then I shall call you a gorilla,” she was about to retort angrily,
but it seemed as if her tongue refused to utter the hateful name. It
would not be expressed, and something within her appeared to change
and soften the situation, to promise allurement in the distance and
play around her fancy like busy little elves of night. Yet something in
her conscience seemed to tell her that there could be no ease for her
while her husband was cast down by misfortune and her own future was so
uncertain, and she spoke defiantly, “What do you want with me?”
But the man looked at her long and steadily, and she felt as if her
question floated away, minute and unconsidered as a trifle on the
mighty ocean. The ocean was the breast of the man before her. There was
no breast more mighty or powerful; it represented what her inmost being
and her secret desires had yearned after. To rest upon it, to rest ...
as in the jungle....
Then, after he had looked at her in a silence fraught with meaning,
the man spoke. “The human race is too contemptible and inferior to
give its men and women such force as nature has provided for its other
creations; that the one sex should see, know and belong to the other as
naturally and inevitably as light belongs to day!”
“You mean to say,” said the Countess hesitatingly, “that you love me,
and that--is why you have brought me here!”
“I desire you, and that--for me--is stronger than love! You are here
because there is no resisting my desires. You may reign as a queen, in
this breast, and in my kingdom of Citopomar in Southern Brazil. A queen
ruling the virgin forest, its savage beasts, savage and civilized human
beings, valleys, rocks and heights. Who in this miserable continent can
offer you more?”
“No one!” said the Countess, under the secret dominion of the dream
which had so rapidly begun its twofold play in her spirit.
“You have decided, then, to remain of your own free will?” asked Mabuse.
The Countess once more realized her position. She shrank from him,
and tried to shelter herself behind the ottoman. She closed her lips
firmly, but at the same time she was torn by a conflict within; she
desired to go, and at the same time she felt a yearning in some part of
her being to remain and to submit.
He continued: “If it were like this: a man and a woman see each other
for the first time, and in the first glance that they exchange they say
to themselves, ‘There is nothing left to me of what I was. Everything
has vanished like a dissolving view, and thou, the only one, thou alone
remainest. It is inconceivable that there should be a single heart-beat
that does not belong to thee.’ It is as if all the races in all the
ages had united their powers in these two beings, instead of giving
each individual a beggarly portion of it. What a puny creature is man,
but if it were the other way with the race he would be the image of God
and of creation!”
The Countess felt as if a sudden force was stretching her between
two poles. She knew that she herself resembled both of them, and yet
they were unlike each other. “Must I proceed from the one extreme to
the other?” she asked herself, feeling very weary, “or can I remain
hovering between them, calm and comfortable, in the warm rays of a
sunshine that steals over me so pleasantly?”
There was always the inclination to follow the extraordinary and
unusual, that she might feel wherein she was most akin to humanity, and
yet most herself when surrounded by what did not belong to or affect
her. And over her spirit there stole again a feeling as of Paradise,
the scent of the Elysian Fields, the songs of enchanting sirens, and
it seemed as if the limits of her physical nature were dissolved and,
leaving her narrow horizon behind her, she floated as if in ether.
“What is happening to me?” she thought, as, struggling with herself,
she advanced yet nearer to the vision of Paradise which swam before her
eyes.
The eyes of this strange, compelling being flooded her like a spring
season of sunshine. He stood high as the clouds above her. The sunshine
overpowered the earth, but the earth yielded itself gladly to its
rays. Was that the secret of her nature too? she herself asked. The
season, now wild and stormy, advanced like a monster endued with power,
from beyond the horizon, over the forests, rivers, cities, mountains,
looking neither to right nor left and penetrating to the very heart
of things. “If this man overcomes me in such a way, fills my whole
being, is that indeed Paradise? Is it for me completion, redemption,
deliverance? Is this my second nature which I have never yet dared to
follow?”
She desired to resist, but a subtle and enchanting feebleness stole
over her, and she felt herself like a March field, dark and yielding.
A jackdaw was screeching in it, but somewhere or other a thrush was
singing behind her. And the screeching jackdaw and the singing thrush
were snatching at a maggot, a living maggot in the bark of the tree,
and even the bark of the tree seemed to be awaiting and expectant, and
there was a murmuring sound in its cells. And the thrush mounted high
into the air, singing triolets born of the spirit of the soil....
Woman was the thrush, and at the same time she was the maggot. She
yielded herself to the destroying force, and knew it not for the tumult
in her blood. She was stirred in her inmost being, plunged into the
depths and soared again, intangible as an air-bubble.... Above her rose
the call of the man like the rustling sound of the summer, calling the
sap to rise, to push forward the growth which should end in a glorious
harvest.