What Crammon saw and what Christian saw was not the same thing.
Crammon saw a dimly lit room, with old chests of drawers that were
smoke-stained, with a bed and the girl Katherine on it covered by the
coarse, red-checked linen, with a cradle in which lay a whining baby.
He saw clothes drying by the oven, the boatman sitting and eating
potato soup, a bench on which a lad was sleeping, and many other
unclean, ugly things.
To Christian it was like a strange dream of falling. He, too, saw
the boatman and the poor woman and the girl, whose glassy eyes and
convulsed features brought home to him at once the reason for his
visit. But he saw these things as one sees pictures while gliding down
a shaft, pictures that recur at intervals, but are displaced by others
that slip in between them.
Thus he saw Eva Sorel feeding a walnut to one of her little monkeys.
The boatman got up and took off his cap. And suddenly Christian saw
Denis Lay and Lord Westmoreland giving each other their white-gloved
hands. It was an insignificant thing; but his vision of it was glaring
and incisive.
Now the lad on the bench awakened, stretched himself, sat up with a
start, and gave a sombre stare of astonishment at the strangers. The
girl, ill from her horrible experience, turned her head away, and
pulled the coverlet up to her chin. And suddenly Christian saw the
charming vision of Letitia, playing at ball in the great room crossed
by the gleams of lightning; and each thing that he saw had a relation
to some other thing in that other world.
The curiosity that had brought him hither still kept that unwonted
smile on his face. But he looked helplessly at Crammon now, and he was
sensitive to the indecency of his silent, stupid presence there, the
purposelessness and folly of the whole nocturnal excursion. It seemed
almost intolerable to him now to stay longer in this low-ceiled room,
amid the odour of ill-washed bodies, and clothing that had been worn
for years.
Up to the last moment he had imagined that he would talk to the girl.
But it was precisely this that he found it impossible to do. He did
not even dare to turn his head to where she lay. Yet he was acutely
conscious of her as he had seen her out there, reeling from the tables
with loose hair and torn bodice.
When he thought over the words that he might say to her, each seemed
strikingly superfluous and vulgar.
The boatman looked at him, the woman looked at him. The lad stared
with malevolently squinting eyes, as though he planned a personal
attack. And now there emerged also an old man from behind a partition
where potatoes were stored, and regarded him with dim glances. In the
embarrassment caused him by all these eyes, he advanced a few steps
toward Katherine’s bed. She had turned her face to the wall, and did
not move. In his sudden angry despair he put his hands into pocket
after pocket, found nothing, hardly knew indeed what he sought, felt
the diamond ring on his finger which was a gift of his mother, hastily
drew it off, and threw it on the bed, into the very hands of the girl.
It was the act of one who desired to buy absolution.
Katherine moved her head, saw the magnificent ring, and contempt and
astonishment, delight and fear, struggled in her face. She looked
up, and then down again, and grew pale. Her face was not beautiful,
and it was disfigured by the emotions she had experienced during the
past hours. An impulse that was utterly mysterious to himself caused
Christian suddenly to laugh cheerfully and heartily. At the same time
he turned with a commanding gesture to Crammon, demanding that they go.
Crammon had meantime determined to ease the painfulness of the
situation in a practical way. He addressed a few words to the boatman,
who answered in the dialect of Cologne. Then he drew forth two bank
notes and laid them on the table. The boatman looked at the money; the
hands of the woman were stretched out after it. Crammon walked to the
door.
Five minutes after they had entered the house, they left it again. And
they left it swiftly, like men fleeing.
While the cab drove over the rough stones of the street, Crammon said
peevishly: “You owe your paymaster a hundred marks. I won’t charge you
for anything except the money. You can’t, I suppose, give me back my
lost sleep.”
“I shall give you for it the Chinese apple of amber-coloured ivory
about which you were so enthusiastic at Amsterdam,” Christian replied.
“Do that, my son,” Crammon said, “and do it quickly, or my rage over
this whole business will make me ill.”
When he got up at noon thoroughly rested, Crammon reflected on the
incident with that philosophic mildness of which, under the right
circumstances, he was capable. After they had had a delightful
breakfast, he filled his short pipe, and discoursed: “Such
extravagances in the style of Haroun al Rashid get you nowhere, my dear
boy. You can’t fathom those sombre depths. Why hunt in unknown lands,
when the familiar ones still have so many charms? Even your humble
servant who sits opposite you is still a very treasure of riddles and
mysteries. That is what a wise poet has strikingly expressed:
“What know we of the stars, of water or of wind?
What of the dead, to whom the earth is kind?
Of father and mother, or of child and wife?
Our hearts are hungry, but our eyes are blind.”
Christian smiled coolly. Verses, he thought contemptuously, verses....
V
When they reached the magnificent structure in the forest of
Schwanheim, they found a great restlessness there and a crowd of
guests. Letitia had not yet arrived; Felix Imhof was expected hourly;
purveyors and postmen came and went uninterruptedly. The place hummed
like a hive.
Frau Wahnschaffe greeted Christian with restraint and dignity, although
her joy gave her eyes a phosphorescent gleam. Judith looked exhausted,
and paid little attention to her brother. But one evening she suddenly
rushed into his arms, with a strange wild cry that betrayed the
impatience and the hidden desires that had so long preyed on the cold
and ambitious girl.
Christian felt the cry like a discord, and disengaged himself.
He and Crammon went hunting or took trips to the neighbouring cities.
Nothing held Christian anywhere. He wanted always to go farther or
elsewhere. His very eyes became restless. When they walked through the
streets, he glanced surreptitiously into the windows of apartments and
into the halls of houses.
One night they sat in a wine cellar at Mainz, drinking a vintage
that was thirty years old and had a rare bouquet. Crammon, who was
a connoisseur through and through, kept filling his glass with an
enchanted air. “It’s sublime,” he said, and began eating his caviare
sandwich, “simply sublime. These are the realities of life. Here are
my altars, my books of devotion, my relics, the scenes of my silent
prayers. The immortal soul is at rest, and the lofty and unapproachable
lies in the dust behind me.”
“Talk like a decent man,” said Christian.
But Crammon, who felt the ecstasy of wine, was not to be deflected. “I
have drunk the draught of earthly delight. I have done it, O friend and
brother, in huts and palaces, North and South, on sea and land. Only
the final fulfilment was denied me. O Ariel, why did you cast me forth?”
He sighed, and drew from his inner pocket a tiny album in a precious
binding. He always had it with him, for it contained twelve exquisite
photographs of the dancer, Eva Sorel. “She is like a boy,” he said,
wholly absorbed in the pictures, “a slender, swift, unapproachable
boy. She stands on the mystic boundary line of the sexes; she is that
equivocal and twofold thing that maddens men if they but think of flesh
and blood. Elusive she is as a lizard, and chill in love as an Amazon.
Do you not feel a touch of horror, Christian? Does not a cold ichor
trickle through your veins, when you imagine her in your arms, breast
to breast? I feel that horror! For there would be something of the
perverse in it--something of an unnatural violation. He who has touched
her lips is lost. We saw that for ourselves.”
Christian suddenly felt a yearning to be alone in a forest, in a dark
and silent forest. He did feel a sense of horror, but in a way utterly
alien to Crammon’s thought. He looked at the older man, and it was
hard for him to comprehend that there, opposite him, sat his familiar
friend, whose face and form he had seen a thousand times unreflectively.
Crammon, contemplating the photograph on which Eva appeared dancing
with a basket of grapes, began again: “Sweetest Ariel, they are all
harlots, all, all, all, whether shameless and wild or fearful and
secretive: you alone are pure--a vestal, a half-ghost, a weaver of
silk, like the spider, who conquers the air upon her half-spun web. Let
us drink, O friend! We are made of dirt, and must be medicined by fire!”
He drained his glass, rested his head upon his hand, and sank into
melancholy contemplation.
Suddenly Christian said: “Bernard, I believe that we must part.”
Crammon stared at him, as though he had not heard right.
“I believe that we must part,” Christian repeated softly and with an
indistinct smile. “I fear that we are no longer suited to each other.
You must go your ways, and I shall go mine.”
Crammon’s face became dark red with astonishment and rage. He brought
his fist down on the table and gritted his teeth. “What do you mean? Do
you think you can send me packing as though I were a servant? Me?” He
arose, took his hat and coat, and went.
Christian sat there for long with his thoughts. The indistinct smile
remained on his lips.
When Christian, on awakening next day, rang for his valet, Crammon
entered the room in the man’s stead and made a deep bow. Over his
left arm he had Christian’s garments, in his right hand his boots. He
said good-morning quite in the valet’s tone, laid the clothes on a
chair, set the boots on the floor, asked whether the bath was to be
prepared at once, and what Herr Wahnschaffe desired for breakfast. And
he did all this with complete seriousness, with an almost melancholy
seriousness, and with a certain charm within the rôle he was assuming
that could not fail to be pleasing.
Christian was forced to laugh. He held out his hand to Crammon. But
the latter, refusing to abandon his acting, drew back, and bowed in
embarrassment. He pulled the curtains aside, opened the windows, spread
the fresh shirt, the socks, the cravat, and went, only to return a
little later with the breakfast tray. After he had set the table and
put the plates and cups in order, he stood with heels touching and
head gently inclined forward. Finally, when Christian laughed again,
the expression of his features altered, and he asked half-mockingly,
half-defiantly: “Are you still prepared to assert that you can get
along without me?”
“It’s impossible to close accounts with you, dear Bernard,” Christian
answered.
“It is not one of my habits to leave the table when only the soup has
been served,” Crammon said. “When my time comes I trundle myself off
without urging. But I don’t permit myself to be sent away.”
“Stay, Bernard,” Christian answered. He was shamed by his friend. “Only
stay!” And their hands clasped.
But it almost seemed to Christian that his friend had really in a sense
become a servant, that he was one now, at all events, toward whom one
no longer had the duty of intimate openness, with whom no inner bond
united one--a companion merely.
From that time on, jests and superficial persiflage were dominant
in their conversations, and Crammon either did not see or failed
very intentionally to observe that his relations with Christian had
undergone a fundamental change.