I killed her. I killed her, and when she lay a flat, lifeless heap by
the window, beyond which shone the dead-white plain, I put my foot on
her corpse, and burst into a fit of laughter. It was not the laugh of a
madman; oh, no! I laughed because my bosom heaved lightly and evenly,
and within it all was cheerful, peaceful, and void, and because from my
heart had fallen the worm which had been gnawing it. And bending down I
looked into her dead eyes. Great, greedy of the light, they remained
open, and were like the eyes of a wax doll—so round and dull were they,
as though covered with mica. I was able to touch them with my fingers,
open and shut them, and I was not afraid, because in those black,
inscrutable pupils there lived no longer that demon of lying and doubt,
which so long, so greedily, had sucked my blood.
When they arrested me I laughed. And this seemed terrible and wild to
those who seized me. Some of them turned away from me in disgust, and
went aside; others advanced threateningly straight towards me, with
condemnation on their lips, but when my bright, cheerful glance met
their eyes, their faces blanched, and their feet became rooted to the
ground.
“Mad!” they said, and it seemed to me that they found comfort in the
word, because it helped to solve the enigma of how I could love and yet
kill the beloved—and laugh. One of them only, a man of full habit and
sanguine temperament, called me by another name, which I felt as a
blow, and which extinguished the light in my eyes.
“Poor man!” said he in compassion, although devoid of anger—for he was
stout and cheerful. “Poor fellow!”
“Don’t!” cried I. “Don’t call me that!”
I know not why I threw myself upon him. Indeed, I had no desire to kill
him, or even to touch him; but all these cowed people who looked on me
as a madman and a villain, were all the more frightened, and cried out
so that it seemed to me again quite ludicrous.
When they were leading me out of the room where the corpse lay, I
repeated loudly and persistently, looking at the stout, cheerful man:
“I am happy, happy!”
And that was the truth.
V
Once, when I was a child, I saw in a menagerie a panther, which struck
my imagination and for long held my thoughts captive. It was not like
the other wild beasts, which dozed without thought or angrily gazed at
the visitors. It walked from corner to corner, in one and the same
line, with mathematical precision, each time turning on exactly the
same spot, each time grazing with its tawny side one and the same metal
bar of the cage. Its sharp, ravenous head was bent down, and its eyes
looked straight before it, never once turning aside. For whole days a
noisily chattering crowd trooped before its cage, but it kept up its
tramp, and never once turned an eye on the spectators. A few of the
crowd laughed, but the majority looked seriously, even sadly, at that
living picture of heavy, hopeless brooding, and went away with a sigh.
And as they retired, they cast once more round at her a doubting,
inquiring glance and sighed—as though there was something in common
between their own lot, free as they were, and that of the unhappy,
eager wild beast. And when later on I was grown up, and people, or
books, spoke to me of eternity, I called to mind the panther, and it
seemed to me that I knew eternity and its pains.
Such a panther did I become in my stone cage. I walked and thought. I
walked in one line right across my cage from corner to corner, and
along one short line travelled my thoughts, so heavy that it seemed
that my shoulders carried not a head, but a whole world. But it
consisted of but one word, but what an immense, what a torturing, what
an ominous word it was.
“Lie!” that was the word.
Once more it crept forth hissing from all the corners, and twined
itself about my soul; but it had ceased to be a little snake, it had
developed into a great, glittering, fierce serpent. It bit me, and
stifled me in its iron coils, and when I began to cry out with pain, as
though my whole bosom were swarming with reptiles, I could only utter
that abominable, hissing, serpent-like sound: “Lie!”
And as I walked, and thought, the grey level asphalt of the floor
changed before my eyes into a grey, transparent abyss. My feet ceased
to feel the touch of the floor, and I seemed to be soaring at a
limitless height above the fog and mist. And when my bosom gave forth
its hissing groan, thence—from below—from under that rarifying, but
still impenetrable shroud, there slowly issued a terrible echo. So slow
and dull was it, as though it were passing through a thousand years.
And every now and then, as the fog lifted, the sound became less loud,
and I understood that there—below—it was still whistling like a wind,
that tears down the trees, while it reached my ears in a short, ominous
whisper:
“Lie!”
This mean whisper worked me up into a rage, and I stamped on the floor
and cried:
“There is no lie! I killed the lie.”
Then I purposely turned aside, for I knew what it would reply. And it
did reply slowly from the depths of the bottomless abyss:
“Lie!”
The fact is, as you perceive, that I had made a grievous mistake. I had
killed the woman, but made the lie immortal. Kill not a woman till you
have, by prayer, by fire, and torture, torn from her soul the truth!
So thought I, and continued my endless tramp from corner to corner of
the cell.