III

On the following day Bertrand excused himself from breakfasting with the family, then waylaid Joachim and told him that to his sincere regret he had been called away on business, and must leave the very next morning. Joachim’s first feeling was one of relief. “I’ll come with you,” he said, looking gratefully at Bertrand, who had, it was obvious, given Elisabeth up. And to show him that he too would renounce her he added kindly: “I don’t know of anything to keep me here.”

Joachim went to impart this decision to his father. But when Herr von Pasenow started in surprise and asked suspiciously, with his usual indiscretion: “How is that possible? He hasn’t had any letters since the day before yesterday,” Joachim too was startled: how, indeed, was that possible? What could have moved Bertrand to the renunciation? And along with a feeling of shame at becoming his father’s accomplice in indiscretion by posing these questions, the vision arose of a friendly triumph: it was because Elisabeth loved him, Joachim von Pasenow, that she had rebuffed Bertrand. Of course it was quite incredible that anyone should have had the face to propose to a lady so hastily, almost in the twinkling of an eye. But anything was possible to a business man who thought he had the chance of a rich heiress. Joachim was not able to pursue these reflections, for he was startled by the sudden change in his father’s appearance; he was huddled up in the chair by the writing-table and with a vacant stare was muttering: “The scoundrel, the scoundrel … he has broken his promise.” Then he looked at Joachim and screamed: “Out you get, you and your fine friend … you’re in the plot too!” “But, Father!” “Out you go, both of you; get out!” He had sprung to his feet, and advanced upon his retreating son, driving him in short rushes towards the door. And at every pause he thrust forward his head and spat at him: “Get out!” When Joachim was in the corridor the old man slammed the door, but opened it again immediately and stuck his head out: “And tell him not to dare to write to me. Tell him I’ve no further interest in him.” The door crashed to and Joachim heard the key being turned.

He found his mother in the garden; she showed no great consternation: “He’s not one to say much, but for some days he has seemed angry with you. I think he can’t forgive you for not giving up the army. Still, it is queer.” When they turned towards the house she added: “Perhaps he was offended, too, because you brought your friend down here so soon; I think it might be better for me to see him first alone.” Joachim escorted her upstairs; the door giving on the corridor was locked, and there was no answer to her knocking. It was a little uncanny, and so they went round to the large drawing-room, since it was just possible that he might have left his study by the other door. Through the chain of empty rooms they reached the study and found it unlocked. Frau von Pasenow opened the door and Joachim saw his father sitting motionless at the writing-table, a quill in his hand. He did not move even when Frau von Pasenow advanced and bent over him. He had pressed so heavily on the quill-point that it was splintered; and on the paper stood the words: “I disinherit for dishonourable conduct my …” and then came the splutter of ink made by the broken quill. “In the name of God, what has happened?” But he made no answer. Helplessly his wife regarded him; when she noticed that the inkpot too had been upset she hastily seized the blotting-pad and tried to mop up the mess. He thrust her away with his elbow and then caught sight of Joachim in the doorway, grinned malignantly, and attempted to go on writing with the broken quill. When it caught again in the paper and tore a hole in it he groaned aloud, pointed his forefinger at his son and cried: “Out with him!” At the same time he tried to rise, but apparently found it impossible, for he collapsed again in a huddle, disregarding the flowing ink, and sank forward over the writing-table with his face on his arms like a crying child. Joachim whispered to his mother: “I’ll call the doctor,” and ran downstairs to send a messenger to the village.

The doctor came and sent Herr von Pasenow to bed. He administered bromide and spoke of a cold-water cure; it was simply a nervous breakdown following on the death of his son. Yes, yes, that was the doctor’s banal explanation. But it was no explanation. There was more in it than that, and it could not be mere coincidence; the accident to Helmuth’s horse had been a kind of preliminary warning, and now when, in spite of everything, Joachim was about to triumph over Bertrand, now when Elisabeth for his sake had rebuffed Bertrand and he was making ready to play Bertrand false and to play Ruzena false, ostensibly in obedience to his father, now was the hour for fate to strike. An accomplice who betrayed his fellow-accomplices; accused, and rightly accused, by his father of plotting with Bertrand! Must not the whole web now fall to pieces, and treachery cancel treachery? And Bertrand must appropriate Ruzena again to convince the father that he was no longer the son’s accomplice and to avenge himself for Elisabeth’s refusal! In all the foul and hateful suspicion with which Joachim now regarded Bertrand’s departure to Berlin, he saw only his own departure postponed indefinitely, and that tormented him more than his anxiety about his afflicted father. The tangled web unravelled itself only to be knotted in fresh tangles. Was this what his father had in mind when he had pressed him to visit Lestow? And besides, it was impossible to discover what had happened between his father and Bertrand. Perhaps it might have been cleared up if he could have mentioned to Bertrand the old man’s dark insinuations, but he had to confine himself to announcing his sudden illness. He begged Bertrand to explain the situation to Ruzena; in any case he would himself come to Berlin soon for a few days, to get his leave extended and see to other things. Well, said Bertrand, as Joachim escorted him to the station, well, and what was to become of Ruzena now? Of course it was to be hoped that Herr von Pasenow would soon recover, but Joachim’s presence in Stolpin would none the less become more and more indispensable. “She ought to be provided with some regular occupation,” he observed; “something she enjoys doing; that would help her over the difficult times ahead.” Joachim was offended, for after all that was his own affair; he said hesitatingly: “But the theatre you got her into, she enjoys herself there.” Bertrand dismissed this statement with a wave of the hand, and Joachim stared at him uncomprehendingly. “But don’t you worry, Pasenow, we’ll find something or other.” And although it was a worry that had not previously occurred to Joachim, he was now sincerely glad to have it so lightly taken off his shoulders by Bertrand.

Since the old man’s illness, which still kept him in bed the greater part of the day, life had become curiously simplified. Joachim could now reflect more quietly on many things, and some of the riddles appeared less obscure, or at least more approachable. But now an almost insoluble problem confronted him, and it was no use trying to decipher it in Elisabeth’s face, for her face itself constituted the problem. Lying back in her chair she was gazing at the autumn landscape, and her up-tilted face, thrown back almost at a right angle to the taut line of the throat, was like an irregular roof set upon the pillar of her neck. One could perhaps say just as well that it rested like a leaf on the calyx of the throat, or that it was a lid covering the throat, for it was really no longer a face, merely a continuation of the throat, an extension from the throat, with a far-off resemblance to the head of a serpent. Joachim followed the line of her throat; the chin jutted out like a hill, behind which lay the landscape of her face. Softly rounded the rim of the crater which was her mouth, dark the cavern of the nose, divided by a white pillar. Like a miniature beard sprouted the hedge of the eyebrows, and beyond the clearing of the forehead, cut by finely ploughed furrows, was the edge of the forest. Joachim was again forced to ask the question why a woman can be desirable, but nothing gave him an answer; it remained insoluble and perplexing. He shut his eyelids a little and peered through the slits at the landscape of that extended face. It blended at once with the real landscape, the woodland verge of the hair bordered the yellowing leaves of the forest, and the glass balls that decorated the rose-beds in the garden glittered with the same light as the jewel that in the shadow of the cheek—ah, was it still a cheek?—shone as an ear-ring. This was both startling and comforting, and when the eye combined these separate things into a unity so strange, past all disjoining, one was curiously reminded of something, transposed into some mode that lay beyond convention far back in childhood, and the unsolved riddle was like a sign that had emerged from the sea of memory.

They were sitting in the shady front garden of the little inn; their horses were in the yard behind with the groom. From the rustling of the leaves above them one could tell that it was September. For it was no longer the clear, soft purling of spring leafage, nor yet the full note of summer: in summer the trees simply rustle without much variation, but in the early days of autumn a sharper, silvery metallic tone is already perceptible, as if the broad harmony in the flowing sap were breaking up. When autumn begins the midday hours are quite motionless; the sun still shines with summer warmth, and when a lighter, cooler breeze comes wandering through the branches there is, as it were, a streak of spring in the air. The leaves that drop from the trees on to the rough inn table are not yet yellowed, but dry and brittle for all their greenness, and the summer-like sunshine seems then doubly precious. With its bow pointing upstream the fisherman’s boat lies in the channel; the water glides past smoothly, as if moving in broad planes. These autumn days have none of the drowsiness of summer noons; a soft and watchful serenity lies over everything.

Elisabeth said: “Why do we live here? In the south there would be days like this all the year round.” Joachim recalled the southern face of the Italian with the black moustache. But in Elisabeth’s features it was impossible now to descry those of an Italian, or even of a brother, so removed were they from humanity, so akin to the landscape. He tried to find in them again their ordinary shape, and when it suddenly reappeared, when the nose became a nose again, the mouth a mouth, the eye an eye, the transformation was once more startling, and he was comforted only by the smoothness of her hair, which was not too insistently waved. “Why? Don’t you like the winter?” “Your friend’s right; one ought to travel,” was her answer. “He wants to go to India,” said Joachim, and thought of its olive-skinned races and of Ruzena. Why had he never once thought of travelling abroad with Ruzena? He was aware of Elisabeth’s eyes on his face, felt caught, and turned aside. But if anyone was to blame for this fever for travel it was Bertrand. His need to compensate himself for the lack of an ordered life and to deaden his regrets by business deals and exotic journeys was infectious, and if Elisabeth was yearning for the south it was perhaps because she regretted—even though she had refused Bertrand—that she was not travelling by his side. He heard Elisabeth’s voice: “How long have we known each other?” He cast it up; it wasn’t so easy to determine; when he was a twelve-year-old boy home for the holidays he had often visited Lestow with his parents. And at that time Elisabeth was only a few weeks old. “So I’ve known you always, all my life,” decided Elisabeth, “and yet I’ve never really been aware of you; I’ve always counted you among the grown-ups.” Joachim said nothing. “And I suppose you’ve never been aware of me either,” she went on. Oh yes, he said, he had, one day when she suddenly blossomed out as a young lady, all at once and most surprisingly. Elisabeth said: “But now we’re almost contemporaries.… When is your birthday, by the way?” And without waiting for an answer she added: “Can you still remember what I looked like as a child?” Joachim had to think back; in the Baroness’s drawing-room there hung a portrait of Elisabeth as a child that obstinately displaced the actual memory. “It’s queer,” he said; “I know very well what you looked like, and yet …” He wanted to say that he could not find the child’s face in hers, although of course it must be there, but as he looked at her once more her face ceased to be a face at all, and was simply hill and valley again, covered with something called skin. As if she wanted to challenge his thoughts she said: “With a little effort I can see what you looked like as a boy, in spite of the moustache.” She laughed. “That’s really funny; I must try to do it with my father too.” “Can you see me as an old man as well?” Elisabeth eyed him keenly: “That’s queer; no, I can’t … but wait a minute, yes, I can: you’ll be still more like your mother, with a nice, round face, and your moustache will be white and bushy.… But what about me as an old woman? Shall I create a very dignified impression?” Joachim declared himself incapable of imagining it. “Oh, don’t be gallant, do tell me.” “Excuse me, I’d rather not. There’s something unpleasant in suddenly looking like one’s parents or one’s brother or anything else than oneself … it makes so many things meaningless.” “Is that your friend Bertrand’s opinion too?” “No, not so far as I know: why should you think so?” “Oh, only that it would be like him.” “I don’t know, but Bertrand seems to me so much concerned with the external details of his busy life that he simply never thinks of things like that. He is never fully himself.” Elisabeth smiled. “You mean that he always sees things from a great distance? Through the eyes of a stranger, as it were?” What was she thinking of? What was she hinting at? He despised himself for his curiosity, he felt that he was unchivalrous, and at the same time realized anew that it was an unchivalrous proceeding to let a woman fall into another man’s hands instead of shielding her, shielding her from everybody. Yet he was really pledged to marry Elisabeth. But Elisabeth looked far from unhappy as she said: “It has been lovely; but now we must go home for lunch, they’re expecting us.”

They rode homewards, and the tower of Lestow was already in sight when she said, as if she had been reflecting on their conversation: “It’s queer, all the same, how closely intimacy and strangeness are knit together. Perhaps you are right in not wanting to think of growing old.” Joachim, preoccupied with thoughts of Ruzena, did not understand her in the least, but this time he did not concern himself about it.

If there was one thing that contributed to Herr von Pasenow’s recovery it was the mail-bag. One morning while he was still in bed the thought struck him: “Who’s looking after the post-bag? Joachim, I suppose.” No, Joachim wasn’t bothering about it. He grumbled that Joachim never bothered about anything, but seemed relieved, insisted on getting up, and slowly went to his study. When the messenger appeared the usual ritual was gone through, and it was rehearsed as usual from that day on. And if Frau von Pasenow happened to be in the room she had to listen to the usual complaint that nobody wrote to him. He asked often enough if Joachim was about the place, but he refused to see him. And when he heard that Joachim had to go for a few days to Berlin he said: “Inform him that I forbid it.” Sometimes he forgot this, and complained that not even his own children wrote to him; and this put the idea into his wife’s head of getting Joachim to write a letter of reconciliation to his father. Joachim remembered the congratulations that he and his brother had had to inscribe on rose-bordered paper whenever his parents had a birthday; it had been a frightful torment to him. He declined to submit to it again and announced that he was going away. They could conceal it from his father if they liked.

He set off without enthusiasm; if he had once objected to having a marriage prescribed for him, he now rebelled in the same way against the fact that his three days’ sojourn in Berlin plighted him to three nights with Ruzena. He found it degrading for Ruzena too. He would have preferred to put off their meeting as long as possible, and to prevent her at least from coming to the station he had omitted to mention the time of his arrival. In the train it occurred to him that he ought to bring her a present of some kind; but since neither partridges nor other game would have been suitable, the only thing he could do was to buy her something in Berlin; so it was a good thing she would not be at the station. He tried to think of a suitable gift for her, but his imagination lagged; he could not hit upon anything and wavered back and forward between perfume and gloves; oh, well, in Berlin he would find something or other.

When he reached his flat the first thing he did was to write a note to Bertrand, who would certainly be glad to have at last an opportunity of discussing with him the weird events of his last day at Stolpin. He wrote to Ruzena also, and sent both notes by a messenger with instructions to wait for an answer. He felt pleasantly at home in his flat. The warmth of summer still brooded captive behind the shuttered windows. Joachim opened a shutter and basked in the stillness of the street; it was late afternoon, rain might fall before night, there was a grey wall of cloud in the western sky. The vines on the fences of the front gardens were red, yellow chestnut leaves lay on the pavement, and the horses in the shafts of the four cabs at the corner of the street stood with their forelegs bent in peaceful resignation. Joachim leaned out of the window and watched his valet open the others; if the man had leaned out too Joachim would have smiled and nodded to him along the house-front. And while his bags were being unpacked he stayed there at the window, gazing at the quiet, darkening street. Then he drew his head in; the rooms had become cooler, only here and there a stray patch of summer still lingered in the air, filling him with a sweet melancholy. But it did him good to feel his uniform on him again; he walked about among his private belongings, surveying them and his books. Yes, he would do more reading this winter. Then he winced; in three days’ time he was due to leave all this again. He sat down as if to show that he was a settled occupant, ordered the windows to be shut, and asked for tea. Some time later the messenger, whom he had forgotten, came back: Herr von Bertrand was not in Berlin, but was expected in the next few days, and the lady had given no answer except simply that she was coming at once. To Joachim it was as if some slight hope had finally vanished; he could almost have wished that the messages were reversed and that it was Bertrand who was to come at once. Besides, he had intended to go out and buy a present. In a few minutes, however, the door-bell rang; Ruzena was there.

When he was a cadet and learning to swim he had balked at jumping in, until one day he was summarily thrown into the water by the swimming instructor; and after all it was simply pleasant in the water, and he had laughed. Ruzena came in like a whirlwind and flew to embrace him. It was pleasant in the water, and they sat hand in hand, exchanging kisses, and Ruzena babbled on about things that seemed irrelevant. None of his uneasiness remained, and his happiness would have been almost cloudless had not his vexation at forgetting Ruzena’s present suddenly obtruded itself with renewed force. But since God had arranged everything for good, if not for the best, He led Joachim to the cupboard in which the lace handkerchiefs had been lying unremembered for months. And while Ruzena, as usual, made ready their supper, Joachim found tissue-paper and a light blue ribbon and slipped the package under Ruzena’s plate. And before they knew where they were they had gone to bed.

It was not until next day that Joachim recollected how soon he must depart again. Hesitatingly he broke the news to Ruzena. But the outbreak of misery or anger that he had expected did not follow. Ruzena merely made the simple statement: “Can’t go; stay here.” Joachim was struck; she was right after all, why shouldn’t he stay? What spell could it have been that made him stray aimlessly about the yard at home and keep out of his father’s way? Moreover, it seemed imperatively necessary to wait in Berlin for Bertrand. Perhaps this was a breach of good form, a kind of civilian irregularity, into which Ruzena was enticing him, but it gave him a slight sense of freedom. He decided to sleep on the matter, and since he did so in Ruzena’s company he wrote next day to his mother saying that his military duties would keep him longer in Berlin than he had anticipated; a duplicate of the letter, which he enclosed, was for her to give to his father should she think it expedient. Later he reflected that there wasn’t much sense in doing that, since his father opened all the letters anyhow; but by that time it was too late; the letter was posted.

He had reported himself for duty, and was standing in the riding-school. The riding-masters were a sergeant-major and a corporal, each with a long whip, and along the walls was ranged a restive chain of horses mounted by recruits in coarse linen tunics. The place smelt like a vault, and the soft sand in which one’s feet sank reminded him with a faint nostalgia of Helmuth and the dust he had strewn upon him. The sergeant-major cracked his whip and ordered a trot. Rhythmically the linen-clad figures by the wall began to bob up and down. Elisabeth would soon be coming to Berlin for the autumn season. But that was not quite true: they never came until October, nor could the house possibly be ready for them yet. And indeed it wasn’t really Elisabeth he was waiting for, but Bertrand; of course it was Bertrand he meant. He saw Bertrand and Elisabeth riding before him at a trot, both rising and sinking in their stirrups. It was amazing how Elisabeth’s face had melted into the landscape and how he had strained to recapture it again. He wondered if the same could have happened to Bertrand’s face; he tried to imagine that one of the figures along the wall was Bertrand rising and sinking in his stirrups, but he abandoned the attempt; it was somehow blasphemous, and he was glad that Helmuth’s face had been hidden from him. Now the sergeant-major ordered a walking pace, and the white jumping-posts and hurdles were brought out. He was involuntarily reminded of clowns, and suddenly he understood a saying of Bertrand’s, that the Fatherland was defended by a set of circus clowns. It was still incomprehensible to him how he had managed to come a cropper over that tree.

He drove once more past Borsig’s engineering works. Once more there were workmen standing about. He had really had enough of that kind of thing. It wasn’t his world, and he had no need to barricade himself from it behind a gay uniform. True, Bertrand belonged to it, perhaps reluctantly, but still he was acclimatized; well, he had had enough of Bertrand too: the best thing after all would be to return to Stolpin. In spite of that, however, he stopped his carriage at Bertrand’s door, and was delighted to hear that Herr von Bertrand was expected that evening. Good; he would look in anyhow for a few minutes, and he left a note to that effect.

They went together to the theatre, where Ruzena displayed her mechanical gestures as a chorus girl. During the interval Bertrand said: “That’s no job for her; we’ll have to find her something else,” and Joachim once more had a feeling of security. When they were at supper Bertrand turned to Ruzena: “Tell me, Ruzena, you’re going to become a famous and marvellous actress now, aren’t you?” Of course she was, wasn’t that just what she was going to do!“Ah, but what if you should think better of it and change your mind? We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to give you the chance of becoming famous, and what if you should suddenly leave us in the lurch and make us look silly? What shall we do with you then?” Ruzena became reflective and suggested: “Well, there’s the Jäger Casino.” “No, no, Ruzena, one should never turn back when one has begun to climb. It must be something better than the theatre.” Ruzena began to cry: “There’s nothing at all for poor girl like me. He is bad friend, Joachim.” Joachim said: “Bertrand’s only joking, Ruzena.” But he himself was uncomfortable and thought that Bertrand was overstepping the limits of tact. Bertrand, however, laughed: “There’s no need to cry just because we’re considering how to make you rich and famous, Ruzena. You’ll have to keep all of us then.” Joachim was shocked; one could see how commercial life vulgarized a man.

Later he said to Bertrand: “Why do you torment her?” Bertrand answered: “Well, we have to prepare her, and one can operate only on a healthy body. Now’s the time.” He spoke like a surgeon.

What Joachim had half feared had now happened. His letter had fallen into his father’s hands, and the old man had obviously begun to rave again, for his mother wrote that there had been a fresh stroke. Joachim was amazed by his own indifference. He felt no obligation to go home, there was still plenty of time for that. Helmuth had charged him to stand by his mother, but it was little that one could do to help her; she would have to bear alone the fate she had taken upon herself. He wrote that he would come as soon as he could and stayed where he was, leaving things to take their own course, performing his duties, taking no steps whatever to make a change, and with an inexplicable fear thrusting aside every thought that suggested change. For it often required an actual effort to hold things firmly in their proper shapes, an effort so difficult that many a time all those people who bustled about as if all was in order seemed to him limited, blind and almost crazy. At first he had not thought much about it, but when for a second time he saw the military spectacle in terms of a circus he decided that Bertrand was to blame for everything. Why, even his uniform refused to sit upon him as well as formerly: the epaulets on his shoulders suddenly worried him, and the cuffs of his shirt, and one morning before the glass he asked himself why it should be on the left side that he had to wear his sword. He took refuge in thoughts of Ruzena, telling himself that his love for her, her love for him, was something exempt from all ambiguous conventions. And then, when he gazed long into her eyes and stroked her eyelids with a gently caressing finger, and she took it to be love, he was often merely losing himself in an agonizing game, letting her face grow dimmer and more indefinite, until it touched the boundary at which it threatened to lose its human character, and the face became no face at all. Things were elusive as a melody that one thinks one cannot forget and yet loses the thread of, only to be compelled to seek it again and again in anguish. It was an uncanny and hopeless game to play, and with angry irritation he wished that Bertrand could be saddled with the blame for that queer state of mind as well. Had he not, indeed, spoken of his demon? Ruzena divined Joachim’s irritation, and her suspicion of Bertrand, which had rankled in her since that last evening, flared out after a long, sullen silence with clumsy abruptness: “You not love me any more … or have to ask friend’s permission … or has Bertrand already forbidden?” And although they were angry and wounding words, Joachim was glad of them, for they came as a relief, confirming his own suspicion that the demonic root of all his afflictions was in Bertrand. And it even seemed to him like the final emanation of such an evil, Mephistophelian and treacherous influence that the aversion Ruzena shared with him should bring her no nearer, but rather, by provoking rude and uncontrolled outbursts, should put her more on a level with Bertrand and his equally offensive jokes; between his mistress and his friend, both unstable, between these two civilians, he felt as if caught and helplessly ground between two millstones of tactlessness. He felt the smell of bad company, and often could not tell whether Bertrand had led him to Ruzena, or Ruzena had been the means of bringing him to Bertrand, until in alarm he realized that he was no longer capable of grasping the evanescent, dissolving mass of life, and that he was slipping more and more quickly, more and more profoundly, into brain-sick confusion, and that everything had become unsure. But when he thought of finding in religion some way out of this chaos, the abyss opened afresh that parted him from the civilians, for it was on the other side of the abyss that there stood the civilian Bertrand, a Freethinker, and the Catholic Ruzena, both beyond his reach, and it almost looked as if they exulted in his isolation.

He was glad that he was due for church parade on Sunday. But even into this military rite he was dogged by civilian values. For the faces of the rank and file who had marched, as enjoined, in two parallel columns into the House of God, were the everyday faces of the drill-ground and the riding-school; not one of them was devout, not one was solemn. The men must have been recruited from Borsig’s engineering works; real peasants’ sons from the country would not have stood there so indifferently. Except for the non-commissioned officers, standing piously at attention, not one of them was listening to the sermon. The temptation to label this ritual, too, a circus came affrightingly near. Joachim shut his eyes and tried to pray, as he had tried to pray in the village church. Perhaps he was not praying, but when the soldiers joined in the anthem, his voice raised itself among the others, although he did not know it, for with the hymn that he had sung as a child there rose also the memory of a picture, the memory of a small, brightly coloured holy picture, and once the picture was clearly imaged he remembered, too, that it was the black-haired Polish cook who had brought it to him: he heard her deep, sing-song voice and saw her seamed finger, with its chapped tip, tracing its way over all that brightness, pointing out that here was the earth on which men lived, and up above it, not too remotely above it, the Holy Family sat peacefully together on a silvery rain-cloud portrayed in the brightest of colours, and the gold that adorned their garments rivalled in splendour their golden haloes. Even now he did not dare to recall how blissful it had been to imagine oneself as a member of that Catholic Holy Family, reposing on that silver cloud in the arms of the virgin Mother of God or in the lap of the black-haired Pole … that was a point he could not now decide, but he was sure that the rapture was permeated by fear at its blasphemous presumption and at the heresy in a born Protestant’s yielding to such a wish and such imagined bliss, and that he had not dared to make room for the wrathful Father in that picture; he did not want Him there at all. And while he strained his attention and bent his will to realize the picture more closely, it was as if the silver cloud floated up a little higher, as if it even began to evaporate upwards, and with it the figures that rested upon it; they seemed lightly to dissolve and float away on the melody of the anthem, a soft effluence that in no way effaced the remembered imagery, but rather illumined and defined it, so that for a moment he was even inclined to believe that it was the needful resolution into evangelical truth of a Catholic holy picture: the Virgin’s hair, too, seemed no longer dusky, and she was less like the Polish woman, nor was she Ruzena, but her locks brightened and became more golden, and might almost have been the maiden tresses of Elisabeth. All that was a little peculiar and yet a deliverance, a ray of light and the promise of coming grace in the midst of obscurity; for was it not an act of grace that permitted a Catholic picture to resolve itself into evangelical truth? And the fluidity of the figures, a fluidity as gracious as the murmuring of rain or the mist on a drizzling spring evening, made him aware that the dissolution he so feared of the human face into a blankness of mobile heights and hollows might be the first step towards its new and more radiant integration within the blissful company in the cloud, no mere rough copy of earthly features but an initiation into the pure image, the crystalline drop that falls singing from the cloud. And even if this more exalted countenance wore no earthly beauty or familiarity, but was at first alien and alarming, perhaps still more alarming than the blending of a face with a landscape, yet it was the first step upwards, the presentiment of an awful divinity, but also the surety for that divine life in which all earthly life is resolved, dissolving like the face of Ruzena and the face of Elisabeth, perhaps even dissolving like the shape of Bertrand. So it was no longer the childish picture of old, with an actual father and mother, that now displayed itself: true, it hovered still on the same spot, floating in the midst of the same silver cloud, and he himself still sat in the same way at the feet of the figures as once he had sat at his mother’s feet, himself a boyish Jesus; but the picture had grown in meaning, no longer the imagined wish of a boy, but the assurance of an attainable end, and he knew that he had taken the first painful step towards that end, that he had entered upon his probation, although only on the threshold of what was to come. His feeling was one almost of pride. But then the blissful picture faded; it vanished like an imperceptibly ceasing rain, and that Elisabeth was part of it came as a final drop of realization from the veiling mist. Perhaps that was a sign from God. He opened his eyes; the anthem was closing, and Joachim thought that he saw many of the young men gazing up to heaven with the same trust and resolute ardour as himself.

In the afternoon he met Ruzena. He said: “Bertrand is right; the theatre is no fit place for you. Would you not like to have a shop and sell pretty things, lace, for instance, and fine embroidery?” And in his mind’s eye he saw a glass door with a homely lamp burning behind it. But Ruzena looked at him quietly, and, as now often occurred, tears rose into her dark eyes. “Bad men you are,” she said, and held his hand.

In view of his patient’s fresh relapse the doctor had asked for a consultation, and it fell to Joachim, as a matter of course, to escort the nerve specialist to Stolpin. He regarded it as a part of the penance he was to undergo, and was more strongly confirmed in this belief when the doctor, with an amiable detachment, set to questioning him about the nature of the illness, the course it had previously run, and the general family situation. For these questions appeared to Joachim an inquisition, courteous enough, but none the less a keen and probing inquisition, and he expected the inquisitor suddenly to give him a severe look through his eyeglasses and to point an outstretched finger at him; already he heard the accusing damning sound of the frightful word: murderer. Yet the amiable old gentleman with the spectacles showed no disposition to utter that frightful but emancipating word, remarking merely that the shock of his son’s death had certainly occasioned the deplorable symptoms that were now afflicting Herr von Pasenow, although the original roots of the malady might lie deeper. Joachim began to regard the specialist with mistrust and yet with a certain satisfaction, being convinced that a man who expressed such opinions was incapable of helping the sufferer.

Then conversation died away, and Joachim saw the familiar fields and trees gliding past. The rhythm of the train had set the specialist nodding drowsily, his chin between the points of his stiff collar, and his white beard spread over his shirt-front. It was unimaginable to Joachim that he also might be as old as that one day, unimaginable too that the other had once been young and that a woman might have looked for kisses in his beard; surely some trace of that would still have been perceptible in the beard, like a feather or a straw. He drew his hand over his own face; it was an imposture on Elisabeth that of the kisses which Ruzena had given him in farewell not a trace remained: God was merciful to mankind in drawing a veil over the future, but pitiless in that He removed all traces of the past; would it not be merciful to brand a man’s deeds on him? But God seared the brand only on a man’s conscience, and not even a nerve specialist could discover it. Helmuth had been branded, and that was why he could not be looked at in his coffin. But his father too was branded; anyone who behaved as he did could not but look furtive.

Herr von Pasenow was out of bed, but in a state of complete apathy; nevertheless Joachim’s presence was concealed from him in case he should have a fresh outbreak of rage. He met the strange doctor with indifference, but presently took him for a notary and broached the subject of making a new will. Joachim was to be disinherited for dishonourable conduct, yes, but he wasn’t a hard father, he only wanted Joachim to beget him a grandson on Elisabeth. The child must thereupon be brought into the house and become the heir. After some reflection he added that Joachim must not be permitted to see the child, or it would be disinherited too. His mother hesitatingly informed Joachim of this, and, contrary to her custom, fell into lamentation: where was all this going to lead to! Joachim shrugged his shoulders; he merely felt again what a disgrace it was to have a parent who dared to mention the possibility of children by himself and Elisabeth.

The nerve specialist too had shrugged his shoulders; there was no need to give up hope, he said; Herr von Pasenow was still extraordinarily vigorous, but for the present there was nothing to do but await developments; only the patient should not be allowed to stay too much in bed, for that might lower his vitality, considering his years. Frau von Pasenow objected that her husband was very desirous of staying in bed, for he always felt cold, and it seemed, too, that he was tormented by some secret fear that abated only when he was in his bedroom. Well, of course, one must act according to the patient’s condition, observed the nerve specialist; all he could say was that in the care of his colleague—here the local doctor bowed his thanks—Herr von Pasenow was in the very best of hands.

It had grown late, the pastor had turned up, and the evening meal was served. Suddenly Herr von Pasenow appeared in the doorway: “So, there are supper-parties here without my knowledge; apparently because the new master of the house has arrived.” Joachim made to leave the room. “Stay where you are and keep your seat,” commanded Herr von Pasenow, setting himself down at the head of the table in the big chair that was left vacant for him even in his absence; obviously he was somewhat conciliated by this discovery. He insisted on having the courses served to him again: “Things need setting in order here. Herr Notary, have you been properly looked after? Have you been offered your choice of red or white wine? I see nothing but red wine. Why is there no champagne? A will should have a bottle of champagne cracked upon it.” He laughed to himself. “Well, what about that champagne?” he hectored the parlourmaid. “Must I go foraging myself?” The nerve specialist was the first to regain his composure, and to save the situation said he would gladly accept a glass of champagne. Triumphantly Herr von Pasenow surveyed the table: “Yes, things need setting in order again. Nobody has any sense of honour …” then in a low voice to the specialist, “Helmuth, you know, died for honour. But he never writes to me. Perhaps he’s still resentful …” he thought it over, “or this pastor here intercepts the letters. Wants to keep his own secrets, doesn’t want laymen to get a peep behind the scenes. But as soon as there’s any disorder in the churchyard he’ll take to his heels, the man of God. That I’ll go bail for.” “But, Herr von Pasenow, the churchyard is in the best of order.” “Apparently, Herr Notary, apparently, but it’s nothing but eyewash, only it’s not so easy for us to discover it because we don’t understand their language; they’re quite obviously hiding from us. We others only hear how silent they are, and yet they’re complaining to us all the time. That’s why everybody’s so afraid, and when a guest comes I have to take him out myself, old as I am,” he, darted a hostile look at Joachim, “a man without honour of course can’t screw up his courage to it and sneaks out of sight in the byre.” “Well, Herr von Pasenow, you must yourself have to see often enough that everything’s all right and inspect the fields; you must in any case go out.” “I like doing it, Herr Notary, and I do it too. But as soon as one sets foot outside the door they often block the road completely, the air’s so full of them, so full that not a sound can find its way past them.” He shuddered, seized the physician’s glass, and before anyone could hinder him emptied it at a gulp. “You must visit me often, Herr Notary, we’ll make wills together. And meanwhile won’t you write to me?” he implored. “Or will you disappoint me too,” he looked suspiciously at him, “and perhaps conspire with the others? … he has tricked me already with someone, that creature there.…” He had sprung to his feet, and his finger pointed at Joachim. Then he seized a plate, and, shutting one eye as if he were taking aim, screamed: “I’ve ordered him to get married.…” But the specialist was already beside him and laid a hand on his arm: “Come with me, Herr von Pasenow; we’ll go to your room and talk there for a little longer.” Herr von Pasenow gazed at him blankly; the other met his eye steadily: “Come along, we’ll have a little talk all by ourselves.” “All by ourselves, really? And I shan’t be afraid any more.…” He smiled helplessly and patted the doctor’s cheek. “Yes, we’ll let them see.” He made a contemptuous gesture towards the company and suffered himself to be led away.

Joachim had buried his face in his hands. Yes, his father had branded him; the blow had fallen now, and yet he rebelled against it. The pastor came up to him, and as if from afar he heard the banal words of comfort; his father was right in that, too: this minister of the Church was a poor makeshift, or else he would have known that the curse of a father lies irremediably upon his children; he would have known that it is the voice of God Himself that speaks through one’s father’s mouth and proclaims the hour of trial. Oh, that was why his father’s wits were clouded now, for no man could be God’s mouthpiece and not suffer for it. And of course the pastor must be a commonplace creature; for if he were really an instrument of God on earth he too would mouth strange sayings. Yet God had pointed the way to His grace without the mediation of priests; there was no getting away from that, one must win that grace alone and in suffering. Joachim said: “I thank you for your kindly words, Pastor; we shall certainly be often in need of your consolation.” Then the doctor returned; Herr von Pasenow had been given an injection and was now asleep.

The nerve specialist stayed in the house for two more days. And when shortly afterwards a profoundly disquieting telegram of Bertrand’s arrived from Berlin, and the invalid’s condition remained obviously unchanged, Joachim too was enabled to depart.

Bertrand had come back to Berlin. In the afternoon he went to visit Joachim, but found only Ruzena in the flat. She was tidying up the bedroom, and when Bertrand appeared she said: “I not speak to you.” “Hallo, Ruzena, you’re very amiable.” “I not speak to you, know what you are.” “Am I a bad friend again, my little Ruzena?” “Not your little Ruzena.” “Very well, then, what’s the matter?” “What’s matter! … know it all, you send him away. I spit on your lace-shop.” “All right, a lace-shop I may have, I don’t mind, but that’s no reason for not speaking to me. What’s the matter with my lace-shop?” In silence Ruzena went on putting underlinen into the chest of drawers; Bertrand drew up a chair and waited with amusement for what was to come. “If it was my flat, throw you out, not let you sit.” “Look here, Ruzena, in all seriousness what’s gone wrong? Has the old man been taken bad again, so that Pasenow had to go off?” “Not pretend you not know; I not so stupid.” “I’m afraid you are, little one.” She turned her back on him and went on with her task. “Not let you laugh over me … not let anybody laugh over me.” Bertrand went up to her and took her head between his hands to look into her face. She tore herself away. “Not touch me. First you send him away and then laugh over me.” Bertrand understood it all, except for the reference to the lace-shop. “Well, Ruzena, so you don’t believe that old Herr von Pasenow is ill?” “Believe nothing, you. all against me.” Bertrand grew a little impatient. “Apparently if the old man dies it will be just to spite the little Ruzena.” “If you kill him he die.” Bertrand would have liked to help her, but it was not easy; he knew that there was not much to be done with her in that mood, and he rose to go. “You should be killed,” said Ruzena in conclusion. Bertrand was amused. “All right,” he remarked, “I have no objection, but will that make things any better?” “So you have no objection, no objection?” Ruzena hunted excitedly in a drawer, “but make mock at me, yes?” … she went on hunting, “… no objection …” and found what she was looking for. Bristling with hostility, Joachim’s army revolver in her hand, she faced up to Bertrand. This is too silly, thought Bertrand. “Ruzena, put that down at once.” “You have no objection.” A touch of anger and even of shame prevented Bertrand from simply quitting the room; he took a step towards Ruzena with the idea of seizing the weapon, and all at once a shot rang out, followed by a second when the revolver that she had let fall hit the floor. “That’s really too stupid,” said Bertrand, and bent down to pick it up. The valet came rushing in, but Bertrand explained that the thing had fallen on the floor and gone off. “Tell the Lieutenant that he shouldn’t keep pistols lying about loaded.” The valet went out again. “Well, Ruzena, are you a silly goose or not?” Ruzena stood white and petrified, pointed to Bertrand and said: “There!” Blood was dripping from his sleeve. “Let me locked up,” she stammered. Bertrand took off his coat and undid the shirtsleeve; he had felt nothing; his arm seemed only grazed, but it would be necessary to see a doctor about it. He ordered the valet to call a cab. With some linen of Joachim’s he made a provisional bandage and bade Ruzena wash away the blood, but she was so upset and confused that he had to help her. “So, Ruzena; and you’d better come with me, for now I can’t let you stay here alone. You won’t be locked up if you’ll admit that you are a silly goose.” She followed him mechanically. At his doctor’s door he enjoined her to wait for him in the cab.

He told the doctor that by a clumsy accident he had had his arm grazed by a bullet. “Well, you’ve been lucky, but don’t treat the matter too lightly; you’d better lie up for a day or two in hospital.” Bertrand thought that this was exaggerated caution, but as he went down the steps he became aware that he felt dizzy. To his amazement he found no trace of Ruzena in the cab. Not very nice of her, he thought.

He drove home first and collected everything that a practical man of some standing needs for a sojourn in hospital, and after being admitted to a ward he sent a note to Ruzena with the request that she should come and visit him. The messenger returned with the news that the lady hadn’t come home yet. That was strange and almost disquieting; but he was not in the mood to take any fresh step that day. Next morning he sent another message; she had still not come home, nor had she been seen in Joachim’s flat. That decided him to send a wire to Stolpin, and two days later Joachim arrived.

Bertrand felt no call to give Joachim a truthful account of what had happened; the tale of an accident caused by Ruzena’s clumsiness sounded plausible enough. He ended up: “Since then she’s vanished completely. That might mean nothing at all, but a girl in such an excited state might easily do something foolish.” Joachim thought: what has he been doing to her? But he was suddenly horrified to remember that often enough, sometimes in jest, but sometimes in deadly earnest, Ruzena had threatened to throw herself into the water. He saw the grey willows on the banks of the Havel, the tree under which they had once sheltered; yes, she must be lying there in the river. For the space of a heart-beat he felt flattered by this romantic situation. But then the horror of it flooded over him again. Inevitable fate, inescapable discipline of God! And if he had prayed in the church, while still full of hope before his visit to Stolpin, that his father’s illness might not be a penance laid upon him, the son, but merely one of the chances of life, the finger of God now showed him that even that prayer had been sinful. One dared not question God’s discipline; there was no such thing as chance; for Bertrand, although he had parted in apparent enmity from Herr von Pasenow and was now depreciating the revolver incident as a stupid accident, was only trying to disguise the fact that he was an emissary of evil, deliberately chosen by God and by Herr von Pasenow to discipline the penitent, to lure him into temptation, to lead him into snares, so that in his extremity he might learn that the tempted is as much to blame as the tempter, and with the same fatality, now and always, brings ruin on those nearest him, and that no effort of his can avail to cheat the Tempter of his victims. When a man has come to such knowledge, is it not better for him to destroy himself? How much better it would have been if the bullet had killed him instead of Helmuth! But now it was too late, now Ruzena was lying at the bottom of the river, staring with glazed eyes at the fishes darting over her in the grey water. Quite unexpectedly her drowned image blended again with that of the Italian at the opera; but that too vanished when Joachim discovered that the man under the water was really himself. Yes, in his own blue eyes was the unlucky evil glance that the Italians believed in, and it would serve those eyes right if the fishes were darting over them. Bertrand said: “Have you any idea where she might be? Let’s hope that she has simply gone back to her home. I suppose she would have enough money for that?” Joachim felt annoyed by this question; it had a touch of the inquisitorial detachment of a doctor. What was Bertrand hinting at? Of course she had money on her. Bertrand did not remark his annoyance. “All the same, we’d better inform the police; it’s not impossible that she may be wandering about.” Of course they must inform the police; Bertrand was right, yet Joachim shrank from doing so; he would be questioned about his connection with Ruzena, and even though he told himself that it was unimportant, yet he feared that vague and mysterious consequences might follow. His connection with Ruzena had been all too long sinfully concealed; perhaps God had planned to have it brought to His notice by means of the police; perhaps this was another of the penances he must do, made still harder by the fact that the police office was situated in the Alexanderplatz, which he shrank more than ever from entering. Yet he rose to his feet. “I shall drive round to the police.” “No, Pasenow, I’ll arrange that for you; you’re still too upset, and anyhow they’ll suspect melodrama.” Joachim was sincerely grateful. “Yes, but your arm …” “Oh, that doesn’t matter; they’re just going to discharge me here.” “But I’ll come with you.” “All right, then, and I hope I’ll still find you in the cab when I get into it again.” Bertrand was once more gay, and Joachim felt secure. In the cab he begged Bertrand to tell the police to search the banks of the Havel. “Very well, Pasenow, but in my opinion Ruzena’s long since back in Bohemia; a pity you don’t know the name of her village, but we’ll soon unearth it.” Joachim himself was now surprised that he did not know the name of Ruzena’s native village, scarcely, indeed, her family name. She had often in fun tried to make him pronounce these names, but he could never get his tongue round the foreign words and could not remember them. It occurred to him now that he had never really wanted to know them or to keep them in his memory; yes, almost as if he had been a little afraid of those harmless names.

He accompanied Bertrand through the corridors of the police building; he had to wait outside the door of an office. Bertrand soon came back. “They know it all right,” and on a piece of paper he showed the name of a Czech village. “Did you direct them to the banks of the Havel?” Of course Bertrand had done so. “But, my dear Pasenow, there’s something unpleasant for you to do this evening, for I can’t do it because of my arm. You must get into mufti and hunt through all the cafés and cabarets. I didn’t want to suggest that to the police; we can always do that later. They might pounce on poor Ruzena and arrest her in the middle of some dancing-floor.” Joachim had not thought of such a vulgar and repulsive possibility. Bertrand was indeed a disgusting cynic. He looked at Bertrand. Did the man know more? Mephisto alone understood what Margaret had to do penance for. But Bertrand’s face betrayed nothing. There was nothing for it but to submit and accept the task Bertrand had laid upon him as a further discipline.

He had entered upon his degrading pilgrimage, asking questions of waiters and barmaids, and was relieved to be told in the Jäger Casino that nothing had been seen of Ruzena. But on the staircase he met one of the plump dancing partners. “Looking for your sweetheart, I suppose, dearie; has she given you the slip? Well, come along, you can easily get another.” What did the woman know of his connection with Ruzena? It was possible, of course, that she had met Ruzena somewhere, but the thought of asking her sickened him, and he hurried past her and into the next café. Yes, Ruzena had been there, said the woman at the buffet, yesterday or the day before, that was all she could tell him; perhaps the attendant in the ladies’ toilet could give him more information. He had to continue his sorrowful quest, again and again overwhelmed with shame as he interrogated barmaids and lavatory attendants, and learned that she had been seen or had not been seen, that she had had a wash, that she had gone away once with a gentleman, that she had looked quite down-at-heels. “We all tried to persuade her to go home, for a girl in a state like that is no credit to any café, but she just sat and said nothing.” Many of these people simply addressed him at once as “Herr Lieutenant,” so that the suspicion awoke in him that Ruzena had taken them all into her confidence, and had betrayed his love to all these people. It was the lavatory attendants to whom he was always referred.

And it was in a toilet-room that he found her. She sat sleeping in the corner under a burning gas-jet; her hand, with the ring that he had given her, lay limp on the wet marble of the washstand. She had undone her boots, and over one foot, which showed beneath her skirt, the shapeless, unbuttoned top of the boot hung down, showing its grey lining. Her hat had slipped to the back of her head, dragging her hair with it by the hatpins. Joachim would have preferred to turn and go; she looked like a drunk woman. He touched her hand; Ruzena wearily opened her eyes; when she recognized him she shut them again. “Ruzena, we must go.” She shook her head, keeping her eyes shut. He stood helplessly before her. “Give her a good kiss,” the attendant encouraged him. “No!” shrieked Ruzena in terror, springing up and making for the door. She stumbled over her unbuttoned boots and Joachim caught hold of her. “But you can’t go into the street with your boots and your hair like that,” said the attendant; “the Herr Lieutenant isn’t going to do you any harm.” “Let go; let me go out, I say,” panted Ruzena, and into Joachim’s face: “All over, you know it, all over.” Her breath smelt foul and stale. But Joachim still barred her way, so Ruzena turned round, tore open a lavatory door and locked herself in. “All over!” she screamed from behind the door. “Tell him must go away, all over.” Joachim had sunk on to a chair beside the wash-basin; his mind could grasp nothing, he knew only that this too was one of the trials sent by God, and he stared at the half-open brown drawer of the toilet-table, in which the attendant’s few possessions—handkerchiefs, a corkscrew, a clothes-brush—were bestowed higgledy-piggledy. “Is he gone?” he heard Ruzena’s voice. “Ruzena, come out,” he begged. “Fräulein, dearie, come out,” begged the attendant, “this is the ladies’ toilet and the Herr Lieutenant can’t stay here.” “He must go away,” was Ruzena’s answer. “Ruzena, please, do come out,” implored Joachim once more, but behind her bolted door Ruzena was mute. The attendant drew him by the sleeve into the passage and whispered: “She’ll come out when she thinks the Herr Lieutenant has gone. The Herr Lieutenant can wait for her downstairs.” Joachim accepted her suggestion, and in the shadow of a neighbouring house he waited for a full hour. Then Ruzena appeared; beside her waddled a fat, bearded, soft-fleshed man. She peered cautiously round with a curiously fixed, malicious smile, and then the man hailed a cab and they drove away. Joachim had to fight against an inclination to vomit; he dragged himself home, scarcely knowing how he got there, and perhaps his worst torture was his inability to rid himself of the thought that the fat man should really be pitied, because Ruzena was unwashed and had a stale smell. The revolver was still lying on the chest of drawers; he examined it, two shots were missing. With the weapon in his clasped hands he began to pray: “God, take me to Thee like my brother; to him Thou wert merciful, be merciful also to me.” But then he bethought himself that he still had to make his will; and he dared not leave Ruzena unprovided for, or else she would be justified in all she had done to him, incomprehensible as it was. He looked for pen and ink. Dawn found him fast asleep over an almost blank sheet of paper.

He concealed his misadventure with Ruzena, being ashamed before Bertrand and unwilling to grant him the satisfaction of having been right, and although the lie disgusted him he reported that he had found her in her own room. “That’s all right,” said Bertrand; “have you notified the police? If not, she might get into trouble with them.” Of course Joachim had not thought of that, and Bertrand sent a messenger with the requisite information to the police. “Where has she been, then, for these three days?” “She won’t say.” “That’s all right.” Bertrand’s dry indifference irritated him; he had nearly put a bullet through himself and the fellow merely said: “That’s all right.” But he had refrained from suicide because he had to provide for Ruzena, and for that he needed Bertrand’s advice: “Listen, Bertrand, I expect I’ll have to take over the estate now; but Ruzena needs some means of livelihood and an occupation, and I thought first of buying her a shop or something of that kind …” (“Aha,” said Bertrand) “but she won’t hear of it. So I’d like to settle some money on her. How does one do that?” “You must make it over to her. It would be better, though, to allow her an income for a certain time; otherwise she would go through all the money at once.” “Yes, but how does one do that?” “Well, of course I’d be glad to arrange it for you, but it would be better to put my lawyer on to it. I’ll fix up an appointment with him for to-morrow or next day. But, my dear chap, you’re looking wretched.” That didn’t matter, remarked Joachim. “Well, what is it that’s pulling you down? You really don’t need to take this affair so much to heart,” said Bertrand with light good-humour. His ironical indiscretion and that flicker of irony about his mouth are hateful, thought Joachim, and from afar the suspicion again began to steal upon him that behind Ruzena’s inexplicable behaviour and her instability were hidden Bertrand’s intrigues, and that Ruzena had been driven into this folly by her connection with Bertrand. It was a minor satisfaction that, in a sense, she had betrayed Bertrand too with the fat man. The sick disgust that had overwhelmed him on the previous evening began to rise again. Into what a morass had he fallen. Outside the autumn rain was pouring down the window-panes. Borsig’s factory buildings must now be black with running soot and water, the paving-stones must be black, and the courtyard, that one could see through the gateway, a sea of black, gleaming slime. He could smell the smoke driven down by the rain from the blackened top of the long red chimney-stack: it smelt foul, stale, sulphurous. That was the morass; that was the natural setting for Ruzena and the fat man and Bertrand; it was akin to the night haunts with their gas-jets and their lavatories. The day had turned into night, as the night into day. The word night-spirit occurred to him, a word, indeed, that conveyed no clear meaning. Were there also light-spirits? He could hear the phrase, “virginal shape of light.” Ah, that was the opposite of night-spirit. And he had a vision of Elisabeth, who was different from all the others, hovering on a silver cloud high above the morass. Perhaps he had already divined this when he first saw the white clouds of lace in Elisabeth’s room and had longed to watch over her slumbers. She would soon be coming now with her mother, moving into the new house. Extraordinary that there must be lavatories there too; he felt it was blasphemy to think of this. But not less blasphemous was the fact that Bertrand was lying here with his golden hair waved, lying in a white room like a young girl. Thus darkness obscures its real nature and keeps its mystery intact. Bertrand, however, went on to say with friendly concern: “You are looking so wretched, Pasenow, that you ought to be sent on holiday, and a little travel would do you good, too. It would put other thoughts into your mind.” He wants to get rid of me, thought Joachim; he has had his way with Ruzena and now he wants to ruin Elisabeth too. “No,” he said, “I can’t go just now.…” Bertrand was silent for a while, and then it was as though he had divined Joachim’s thoughts and was himself forced to betray his evil designs on Elisabeth, for he asked: “Are the Baddensens in Berlin yet?” Bertrand was still smiling sympathetically, almost frankly, but Joachim, with a gruffness unusual to him, answered curtly: “They’ll probably remain at Lestow for some time to come.” And now he knew that he must go on living, that chivalry demanded it of him, lest another destiny should be ruined by his fault and fall a prey to Bertrand; but Bertrand only gave him a gay good-bye, saying: “Well, I’ll arrange things with my lawyer … and when Ruzena’s affairs are settled you should take a holiday. You really need it.” Joachim said nothing more; his decision was made, and he went off full of heavy thoughts. It was always Bertrand who aroused such thoughts in him. And with the slight straightening of the shoulders, almost as if at the word of command, by which Joachim von Pasenow sought to shake off his thoughts, suddenly it was as if Helmuth had taken his hand, as if Helmuth wanted to show him the way again, to lead him back into convention and order, to open his eyes again. That Bertrand, whose expedition the previous day to the police headquarters had certainly done him no good, was again fevered, Joachim von Pasenow did not observe in the least.

The news from his father’s sick-bed remained persistently bad. The old man no longer recognized anyone: he was sinking into a lethargy. Joachim caught himself entertaining the hateful-pleasant thought that now one could, in all security, send any letter to Stolpin, and pictured the messenger with the post-bag entering the bedroom and the old man incomprehendingly dropping letter after letter, incomprehendingly letting them fall, though there might be a betrothal announcement among them. And that was a kind of relief, and a vague hope for the future.

The possibility of seeing Ruzena again filled him with dread, although many a time when he came off duty it seemed inconceivable that he should not find her in his rooms. In any case he was daily expecting to hear from her, for he had settled the matter of her income with Bertrand’s lawyer, and could not but presume that she had been informed. Instead of a message from her, he got a letter from the lawyer to say that the money had been refused. This would never do; he set out for Ruzena’s flat; the building, the staircase and the flat filled him with profound uneasiness, indeed with an almost anguished yearning. He feared that he would have to stand again before a locked door, perhaps even be turned away by some charwoman or other, and much as he shrank from forcing his way into a lady’s room, he merely asked if she were at home, knocked at her door and walked in. The room and Ruzena were alike in a state of dirt and disorder, neglected and barbaric. She was lying on the sofa and made a defensive, weary gesture, as if she had known that he would come. Haltingly she said: “Not take nothing from you. The ring I keep, souvenir.” Joachim could feel no sympathy rising within him; if on the very staircase he had still intended to point out that he literally did not understand what she had against him, he was now merely embittered; he could see nothing in her attitude but obstinacy. Yet he said: “Ruzena, I don’t know what has really happened …” She laughed contemptuously, and his resentment of her obstinacy and instability, which had injured him and done him injustice, reasserted itself. No, there was no sense in trying to persuade her, and so he merely said that he could not bear the thought that she was not even half provided for, and that he would have done it long ago whether they had stuck to each other or not, only he could do it more easily now because—and he added this deliberately—he had to take over the estate and so had more money at his disposal. “You are good man,” said Ruzena, “only you have bad friend.” That was ultimately what Joachim believed at the bottom of his heart, but since he did not want to admit it he only said: “Why do you think that Bertrand is a bad friend?” “Wicked words,” replied Ruzena. It was tempting to think of making common cause with Ruzena against Bertrand, but was it not just another temptation of the Devil’s, another intrigue of Bertrand’s? Obviously Ruzena felt so too, for she said: “Must beware him.” Joachim answered: “I know his faults.” She had raised herself up on the sofa, and they now sat side by side. “You are poor, good soul, can’t know how bad peoples are.” Joachim assured her that he knew it very well, and that he was not so easily deceived. And so they spoke for a while about Bertrand without mentioning his name, and since they did not want to stop speaking, they pursued the theme until the brackish melancholy that flowed behind their words rose higher and higher, and the words were drowned in it and blended with Ruzena’s tears into a stream that broadened and slackened more and more. Joachim, too, had tears in his eyes. Both were helplessly delivered to the senselessness of Fate, now they were aware that they could no longer find comfort in each other. They did not dare to look at each other, and finally Joachim’s woebegone voice said: “Please, Ruzena, please take the money at least.” She made no reply, but she had grasped his hand. When he bent over her to kiss her she bowed her head, so that the kiss landed among her hairpins. “Go now,” she said, “quick go,” and Joachim silently left the room, in which it was already dusk.

He informed the lawyer, so that the deed of settlement could be drawn up again; this time Ruzena would surely accept it. But the kindness with which Ruzena and he had taken leave of each other depressed him more than the helpless resentment he had previously felt at her incomprehensible behaviour. It was indeed still as incomprehensible and dreadful as ever. His thoughts of Ruzena were full of sad yearning, full of that reluctant homesickness with which, in his cadet days, his mind had turned to his father’s house and his mother. Was the fat man by her side now? He had to think of the jesting insult his father had put upon Ruzena, and here too he recognized the curse of his father, who, himself sick and helpless, had sent a deputy in his stead. Yes, God was fulfilling his father’s curse, and all he could do was to submit.

Sometimes he made a feeble attempt to find Ruzena again; but whenever he was a few streets away from her flat he always turned back or took a side-street, landing in the slum quarter or in the turmoil of the Alexanderplatz, and once even going as far as the Küstriner Station. He was entangled all over again in the toils, and had lost hold of all the threads. His one firm certainty was that at least Ruzena’s income should be assured, and Joachim now spent much time in the office of Bertrand’s lawyer, much more time than was actually needful. But the hours he wasted there were a kind of consolation, and although these dull and somewhat pointless visits could not have been very agreeable to the lawyer, and although Joachim learned nothing of what he hoped to learn from Bertrand’s representative, yet the lawyer did not spare himself in going into the semi-relevant and almost private questions raised by his aristocratic client, applying himself to them with a professional interest which somewhat resembled a doctor’s, but none the less did Joachim good. The lawyer, a spare man and quite beardless although he was Bertrand’s legal representative, looked like an Englishman. When, after ample delay, Ruzena’s acceptance finally came, the lawyer said: “Well, now we’ve got it. But if you’ll take my advice, Herr von Pasenow, you’ll allow the lady in question the option of taking the capital sum instead of the interest on it.” “Yes,” interposed Joachim, “but I arranged it so with Herr von Bertrand simply because …” “I appreciate your motive, Herr von Pasenow, and I know too—if you’ll excuse me—that you are not much inclined to take any bull by the horns; but what I advise is in the best interests of both parties: for the lady it’s a pretty sum of money, which in certain circumstances might set her up better for life than an allowance, and for you, on the other hand, it’s a definite quittance.” Joachim felt a little helpless; was it really a definite quittance he wanted? The lawyer remarked his helplessness: “If I may touch on the private aspect of the matter, my experience has taught me that the best kind of settlement is one which enables one to regard a past obligation as non-existent.” Joachim looked up. “Yes, as non-existent, Herr von Pasenow. Convention, after all, is the safest guide.” The word “non-existent” stuck to Joachim. Only it was strange that through the mouth of his representative Bertrand should signify such a change in his opinions and even acknowledge a convention of feeling. Why did he do it? The lawyer went on to say: “So think it over from that point of view as well, Herr von Pasenow; and, of course, for a man in your position the loss of the capital is of no importance.” Yes, a man in his position; Joachim’s sentiment for his home welled up again, warm and comforting. He left the lawyer’s office this time in an exceptionally good mood, one might almost say uplifted and strengthened. True, he did not yet see his way clear before him, for he still felt bewildered in the invisible tangle that seemed to net the whole city, a tangle of invisible forces that could not be grasped and that made his dull, persistent yearning for Ruzena insignificant, although bringing new elements of anguish into it, yet that bound him in such a novel and unreal relation to Ruzena and to all the world of the city that the net of false brightness became a net of horror winding around him, within whose tangled confusion lurked the threat that Elisabeth too, on returning to the city, which was not her world, might be caught in it; that she, the innocent and untouched, might be caught and entangled in these devilish and impalpable coils, entangled by his fault, entrapped because of him, because he could not free himself from the invisible embrace of the Devil, so persistently did darkness threaten to cloud what was clear, darkness invisible, perhaps, and still far off, floating, perhaps, and uncertain, but as besmirching as what his father had done to the maids in his mother’s house. In spite of that, however, Joachim felt as he left the lawyer’s office that he had come to a turning-point, for it was as if Bertrand had denounced his lies through the mouth of his own representative; Bertrand it had been, Bertrand, who had tried to draw him into the invisible, impalpable net, and now his own representative had had to acknowledge that the position of a Pasenow was something other, something outside this city and its swarming creatures, provided only that one was willing to regard the whole mirage as non-existent. Yes, that was Bertrand’s message by his representative, and so the Devil at last was loosening his grip of his own accord; even the Devil was still subject to the will of God, Who, in the person of a father, demands the annihilation and the non-existence of whatever lies under a father’s curse. The Evil One had acknowledged defeat, and even though he had not expressly renounced his claims on Elisabeth yet, he had himself advised Joachim to obey his father’s wishes. And without consulting Bertrand in person Joachim resolved to empower the lawyer to pay out the capital sum.

It surprised Joachim himself that he was not more passionately impatient for Elisabeth’s consent and did not feel impelled to shorten the time of waiting, and often it amazed him that he could not imagine their future life together. He could see himself, indeed, leaning on a stick with a white ivory crook-handle, standing beside Elisabeth in the middle of the stableyard, but when he tried to visualize the scene more closely the image of Bertrand always intruded. It would not be easy to tell him of their betrothal; after all it was Bertrand against whom it was directed and Bertrand from whom Elisabeth had to be shielded, and, strictly regarded, it had a look of treachery about it, since in a manner of speaking he had once surrendered Elisabeth to him. And although Bertrand deserved nothing better, yet he shrank from inflicting such a hurt upon him. Of course that was no reason for postponing the betrothal; but suddenly it began to look as if the betrothal could not take place at all unless Bertrand were previously informed of it. He was still in duty bound to keep an eye on Bertrand, and could not comprehend how he had so completely forgotten him for days together, as if he were already exempt from all obligations. Besides, Bertrand was probably still an invalid. He drove to the hospital. Bertrand was, in fact, still lying there; they had had to operate on him; Joachim was genuinely upset to discover how he had neglected the patient, and now that he set himself to inform him of the approaching event he made it at the same time a kind of excuse for such remissness. “But, my dear Bertrand, I can’t always be plaguing you with my private affairs.” Bertrand smiled, and there was a hint of a consultant’s or a woman’s solicitude in his smile. “Go ahead, Pasenow, it’s not so bad as all that; I enjoy listening to you.” And Joachim related how he had proposed for Elisabeth. “I don’t know whether she will, I dread still more that she won’t, for then I should feel that I was irretrievably floundering again in all the awful complications of the past months which you have shared with me to a great extent, while with her by my side I hope to find a way into the open.” Bertrand smiled again. “Do you know, Pasenow, all that sounds very fine, yet I wouldn’t care to marry you on the strength of it; but you don’t need to worry. I’m convinced that you’ll soon be accepting congratulations.” What repulsive cynicism; the man was literally a bad friend, he was no true friend at all, even though one had to admit in extenuation that he was both jealous and disappointed. Joachim therefore ignored the cynical remark and fell back on his own train of thought, asking: “What shall I do if she says no?” And Bertrand gave him the answer he desired: “She won’t say no,” averring it with such conviction and certainty that Joachim once more experienced that feeling of security which Bertrand so often evoked in him. It now seemed to him almost unfair that Elisabeth should attach her preference to him, the unsure one, and renounce the sure and steady leader. And as if to justify himself a voice within him said: “Comrades in the King’s uniform.” And suddenly he had a vision of Bertrand as a major. But from what source did Bertrand draw his confidence? How could he be certain that Elisabeth would not refuse? Why did he smile so ironically as he said so? What did this man know? And he regretted having confided in him.—

As a matter of fact Bertrand could have found many justifications for an ironical smile, or more precisely a knowing smile; yet his smile was one of simple friendliness.

On the previous day Elisabeth had abruptly descended upon him. She had driven to the hospital and asked for him in the reception-room. In spite of his aches and pains he had gone down immediately. It was an extraordinary visit, and certainly outraged convention, but Elisabeth did not take any pains to conceal its irregularity; she was obviously in distress and went straight to the point:

“Joachim has made an offer for my hand.”

“If you love him, there isn’t any problem.”

“I don’t love him.”

“Then there isn’t any problem either, for I suppose you’ll refuse him.”

“So you won’t help me?”

“I’m afraid, Elisabeth, there’s nobody who can do that.”

“And I thought that you could.”

“I didn’t want to see you again.”

“Have you no friendship for me?”

“I don’t know, Elisabeth.”

“Joachim loves me.”

“Love needs some degree of cleverness, not to say wisdom. You must allow me to be somewhat dubious of his love for you. I warned you once already.”

“You are a bad friend.”

“No, but there are moments when one must be absolutely honest.”

“Can one be too stupid to love?”

“I have just said so.”

“Perhaps, then, I too am too stupid.”

“Listen to me, Elisabeth, we won’t touch on questions of that kind, for these are not the motives that decide our lives.”

“Perhaps I do love him … there was a time when I wasn’t unwilling to think of marrying him.”

Elisabeth sat in the large invalid-chair in the small reception-room and looked at the floor.

“Why have you come here, Elisabeth? Surely not to ask for advice that nobody can give you?”

“You don’t want to help me?”

“You have come because you can’t bear to have anyone run away from you.”

“I am serious in this … you mustn’t make a joke of it … too serious to endure your saying more of your abominable things to me. I thought I should find some understanding.…”

“But I must tell you the truth. That’s just why I must tell you the truth. You have come because you feel that I stand posted at some point outside your world, because you think that from my outpost there might be descried a third possibility beside the banal alternatives: I love him, I don’t love him.”

“Perhaps that is so; I don’t know any longer.”

“And you have come because you know that I love you—I told you that plainly enough—and because you want to show me what my somewhat absurd conception of love leads to,” he gave her a side-glance, “perhaps to discover how quickly estrangement can turn into intimacy.…”

“That’s not true!”

“Let us be honest, Elisabeth; the question between you and me now is whether you would marry me. Or, to be more exact, whether you love me.”

“Herr von Bertrand, how dare you take advantage of the situation in such a way!”

“Ah, you shouldn’t have said that, for you know perfectly well that it’s not true. You have a decision for life in front of you, and you can’t simply take refuge in convention. Of course the only question is whether a woman can think of her man as a lover, and not whether she is willing to set up house with him. If there is one thing I can’t forgive Joachim for, it’s that he didn’t frankly discuss this essential point with you, but went with his so-called wooing to your parents, literally degrading you. Mark my words, he’ll be on his knees next.”

“You’re trying to torment me again. I shouldn’t have come here.”

“No, you shouldn’t have come, because I didn’t want to see you again, but, my dear, you had to come, because you l—”

She stopped her ears.

“Well, more precisely, you are on the verge of believing that you might be able to love me.”

“Oh, don’t torment me; have I not been tormented enough already?” With her hands pressed to her temples she lay in the easy-chair, her head thrown back, her eyes shut; that was just how she used to sit in Lestow, and this relapse into old habit made him smile and feel almost tender. He was standing behind her. The arm in the sling pained him and made him awkward. But he succeeded in bending down and touching her lips with his. She started up: “This is madness!”

“No, it’s merely a farewell.”

With a voice as drained of life as her face she said: “You shouldn’t, you, of all people …”

“Who should kiss you, Elisabeth?”

“You don’t love me.…”

Bertrand was now walking up and down the room. His arm ached and he felt feverish. She was right, it was sheer madness. Suddenly he turned round and stopped close in front of her: without his intending it his voice sounded menacing: “I don’t love you?”

She stood motionless with her arms hanging, and let him bend back her head. In her very face he repeated his threatening words: “I don’t love you?” And she felt that he was going to bite her lips, but it turned into a kiss. And while most incomprehensibly the rigidity of her mouth relaxed into a smile, her hands, which had been hanging limp, now came to life and raised themselves, with the outflow of her feeling, towards his shoulders to clutch them, never more to let them go. At that he said: “Take care, Elisabeth, that’s where I’m wounded.”

Horrified, she loosened her grasp. But then her strength forsook her: she collapsed into the easy-chair. He sat on the arm of it, drew out the pins of her hat, and caressed her blond hair. “How lovely you are, and how much I love you.” She was silent; she suffered him to take her hand; she felt the fevered heat of his, felt the heat of his face as he bent close to her again. When he hoarsely repeated “I love you” she shook her head, but yielded him her lips. Then at last the tears came.

Bertrand sat on the arm of the chair stroking her hair gently. He said: “I have such a longing for you.”

She answered weakly: “It isn’t true.”

“I have such a longing for you.”

She made no reply, staring into vacancy. He did not touch her again; he had risen to his feet and said once more: “I have an unspeakable longing for you.”

Now she smiled.

“And you are going away?”

“Yes.”

She looked up, questioning and incredulous; he repeated: “No, we shall never see each other again.”

She was still unconvinced. Bertrand smiled: “Can you imagine me suing for you to your father? Giving the lie to everything I have said? That would make it all the most sordid comedy; the most barefaced imposition.”

She grasped somehow what he meant, but yet could not understand:

“But why, then? Why …?”

“I can’t possibly ask you to be my mistress, to come with me … of course I could and you would end up by doing it too … perhaps out of romanticism … perhaps because you really care for me now … of course you do now … oh, my dear …” they lost themselves in a kiss … “but after all, I can’t put you in a false position, even though it might perhaps mean more to you than … to put it frankly, than your marriage to Joachim.”

She stared at him in amazement.

“You can still think of such a marriage?”

“Of course; it’s only”—and to escape from the unbearable tension into raillery he looked at his watch—“twenty minutes since we were both thinking of it. Either the thought must have been unendurable twenty minutes ago, or it’s still endurable.”

“You shouldn’t make a joke of it now …” then in fear, “or are you in earnest?”

“I don’t know … that’s something no man knows about himself.”

“You’re putting me off, or else you take a delight in tormenting me. You’re a cynic.”

Bertrand said seriously: “Am I to deceive you?”

“Perhaps you’re deceiving yourself … perhaps because … I don’t know why … but something doesn’t ring true … no, you don’t love me.”

“I’m an egoist.”

“You don’t love me.”

“I do love you.”

She looked at him directly and seriously: “Am I to marry Joachim, then?”

“I can’t, in spite of everything, tell you not to.”

She freed her hands from his and sat for a long time in silence. Then she stood up, picked up her hat and put in the hatpins firmly.

“Good-bye, I’m going to get married … perhaps that’s cynical, but you can’t be surprised at that … perhaps we are both committing the worst crime against ourselves … good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Elisabeth; don’t forget this hour; it’s my sole revenge on Joachim.… I shall never be able to forget you.”

She passed her hand over his cheek. “You’re feverish,” she said, and went quickly out of the room.

That was what had happened, and Bertrand had paid for it with a severe bout of fever. But that seemed to him right and fitting, for it relegated yesterday to a greater distance. And made it possible for him to regard Joachim, who now sat before him in the same building—could it be the same?—with his usual kindness. No, it would have been too grotesque. So he said: “Don’t you worry, Pasenow; you’ll come to anchor all right in the harbour of matrimony. And the best of luck to it.” An unchivalrous and cynical fellow, Joachim could not help thinking again, and yet he felt grateful and reassured. It might have been the memory of his father, or only the sight of Bertrand, but the thought of matrimony was mingled queerly with the vision of a quiet sick-chamber through which white-clad nuns flitted. Tender and nunlike was Elisabeth, white on her silver cloud, and he recalled a picture of the Madonna, an Assumption, which he believed he had seen in Dresden. He took his cap from the hook. He felt hustled by Bertrand into this marriage, and was struck now by the bizarre idea that Bertrand only wanted to drag him back into civilian life, to strip him of his uniform and his standing in the regiment, in order to be promoted as Major in his stead; and as Bertrand gave him his hand in farewell he did not observe how hot and feverish it was. Yet he thanked Bertrand for his friendly words and took his leave, stiff and angular in his long regimental coat. Bertrand could hear the faint jingle of his spurs as he went downstairs, and could not help thinking that Joachim was now passing the door of the reception-room.

His suit was accepted. To be sure, wrote the Baron, Elisabeth did not yet want an official betrothal. She had a kind of shrinking from the final step; but Joachim was expected to supper next evening.

Even if it was not counted a definite betrothal, even if neither Elisabeth nor his future parents-in-law addressed Joachim with the familiar “Du,” yes, even if the tone at the supper-table was almost formal, there was yet an unmistakable hint of festivity in the atmosphere, especially when the Baron tapped on his glass and with many fine phrases elaborated the idea that a family was an organic whole and could not easily admit a newcomer into its circle; but when by the dispensation of Providence a newcomer was admitted, then he should be admitted wholeheartedly, and the love that united the family should embrace him also. The Baroness had tears in her eyes, and took her husband’s hand in her own while he was speaking of love, and Joachim had the warm feeling that he would be happy here; in the bosom of the family, he said to himself, and the Holy Family occurred to him. Bertrand would probably have smiled and made fun of the Baron’s speech, but how cheap was that kind of mockery! The obscure witticisms that Bertrand used to fling about at table—how far away that was—were certainly more offensive than the deep feeling that informed the Baron’s words. Then they all clinked their glasses until they rang, and the Baron cried: “To the future!”

After supper the young people were left alone to open their hearts to each other. They sat in the newly done-up music-room with its black-silk chairs on which were sewed covers of lace made by the Baroness and Elisabeth, and while Joachim was still trying to find the right words he heard Elisabeth say almost gaily: “So you want to marry me, Joachim; have you thought it over carefully?” How unladylike, he thought; it might almost have been Bertrand speaking. What was he to do? Should he get down on one knee to follow up his suit? Fortune was kind to him, for the tabouret on which he had set himself was so low that when he bent towards Elisabeth his knees were in any case almost on the floor, and his attitude, if one liked, could have been construed as kneeling. So he remained in this somewhat constrained posture and said: “May I venture to hope?” Elisabeth made no answer; she had thrown her head back, and her eyes were half shut. As he now gazed at her face he was disquieted to find that a section of landscape could be transferred within four walls; it was the very memory he had feared, it was that noonday under the autumn trees, it was that blending of contours, and he almost wished that the Baron’s consent had been longer postponed. For more dreadful than a brother’s apparition in a woman’s face is the landscape that luxuriates over it, landscape that takes possession of it and absorbs the dehumanized features, so that not even Helmuth could avail to arrest their undulating flow. She said: “Have you taken your friend Bertrand’s advice on this marriage?” That he could deny without violating the truth. “But he knew about it?” Yes, returned Joachim, he had mentioned the proposal to Bertrand. “And what did he say?” He had only wished him luck. “Are you very attached to him, Joachim?” Joachim was comforted by her voice and her words; they brought him back to the consciousness that it was a human being and not a landscape that he was regarding. Yet they were disquieting. What was in her mind about Bertrand? Where was this leading to? It was somehow unseemly to spend this hour talking about Bertrand, although it was a relief to find any topic of conversation at all. And since he could not abandon the topic, and since also he felt it his duty to be absolutely honest with his future wife, he said hesitatingly: “I don’t know; I always have the feeling that he is the active element in our friendship, but very often it is I who seek him out. I don’t know whether that could be called attachment.” “Does he unsettle you?” “Yes, that’s the right word … I am always being unsettled by him.” “He is unsettled himself, and so unsettles others,” said Elisabeth. Yes, that he was, replied Joachim, and feeling Elisabeth’s look upon him could not help wondering anew that those transparent, rounded stars, set one on each side of a nose, could emit such a thing as a look. What is a look? He touched his own eyes, and at once Ruzena was there and Ruzena’s eyes which he had felt with delight through her eyelids. It was unimaginable that he would ever be able to stroke Elisabeth’s eyelids; perhaps it was true, as they said in the schools, that there was a cold so intense that it seared; the cold of outer space occurred to him, the cold of the stars. That was where Elisabeth hovered on a silver cloud, intangible her effluent, dissolving face, and he felt it as an agonizing impropriety that her father and mother had kissed her when the meal was ended. But from what sphere did Bertrand spring, whose slave and victim she had almost become? If Bertrand was a tempter sent to both of them by God, it was part of the discipline laid upon him that he should save Elisabeth from such earthly aggression. God was enthroned in absolute coldness, and His commands were ruthless, fitting into each other like the teeth on Borsig’s cog-wheels; it was all so inevitable that Joachim felt it almost a comfort to know that there was even a single road to salvation, the straight path of duty, although he might be consumed in following it. “He’s going to India soon,” he said. “Oh yes, India,” she replied. “I hesitated for a long time,” he said, “for I can offer you only a simple country life.” “We are different from him,” she returned. Joachim was touched by that “we.” “Perhaps his roots have been torn up, and he is longing to be restored.” Elisabeth said: “Every man decides for himself.” “But haven’t we chosen the better part?” asked Joachim. “We can’t tell,” said Elisabeth. “Oh, surely,” Joachim was indignant, “for he lives for his business, and he has to be cold and unfeeling. Think of your parents, think of what your father has just said. But he calls that convention; he hasn’t got real inwardness, real Christian feeling.” He fell silent: he hadn’t expressed what he wanted to say, for what he expected from God and from Elisabeth was not a mere equivalent for Christian family life as he had been trained to understand it; yet just because he expected more from Elisabeth, he desired to confine his words to the neighbourhood of that celestial sphere in which she was to manifest herself as the tenderest of silvery, hovering Madonnas. Perhaps she would have to die before she could speak to him in the right way, for as she sat there leaning back, she looked like Snow-white in the glass casket and was so irradiated by that higher beauty and heavenly essence that her face had but little resemblance to the one he had known in life before it blended so dreadfully and irrevocably with the landscape. The wish that Elisabeth were dead and her voice imparting angelic comfort to him from the other side grew and grew, and the extraordinary tension it engendered, or out of which itself had sprung, attained such force that Elisabeth too must have been affected by the onrush of terrifying coldness, for she said: “He doesn’t need the comforting warmth of companionship as we do.” Yet she disappointed Joachim by these earthly words, and even though the need for protection that echoed in them moved his heart and awakened in him the vision of Mary wandering on earth before her assumption into heaven, yet he realized that his strength was hardly equal to affording such protection, and in his twofold disappointment he wished with twofold earnestness a kind and pleasant death for both of them. And since the mask falls from the face that is confronted by death, defenceless against the breath of the Eternal, Joachim said: “He would always have been remote from you,” and this seemed to both of them a great and significant truth, although they had almost forgotten that it was Bertrand of whom they were speaking. Like yellow butterflies with black spots upon their serrated yellow wings, the ring of gas-jets blazed in the wreath of the chandelier over the black-silk catafalque on which Joachim still sat motionless with his body stiffly inclined and his knees bent, and the white-lace covers on the black silk were like copies of deaths’ heads. Into that frozen stillness dropped Elisabeth’s words: “He is more solitary than other people,” and Joachim replied: “His demon drives him out.” But Elisabeth almost imperceptibly shook her head: “He hopes to find fulfilment,” and then she added, as if from a fixed recollection, “fulfilment and knowledge in solitude and remoteness.” Joachim was silent; it was with reluctance that he took up this thought that hung cold and bewildering between them: “He is remote … he thrusts us all away, for God wills us to be solitary.” “He does, indeed,” said Elisabeth, and it was not to be determined whether she had referred to God or to Bertrand; but that ceased to matter, since the solitude prescribed for her and Joachim now began to encompass them, and froze the room, in spite of its intimate elegance, into a more complete and dreadful immobility; as they sat motionless, both of them, it seemed as if the room widened around them; as the walls receded the air seemed to grow colder and thinner, so thin that it could barely carry a voice. And although everything was tranced in immobility, yet the chairs, the piano, on whose black-lacquered surface the wreath of gas-jets was still reflected, seemed no longer in their usual places, but infinitely remote, and even the golden dragons and butterflies on the black Chinese screen in the corner had flitted away as if drawn after the receding walls, which now looked as if hung with black curtains. The gas-lights hissed with a faint, malicious susurration, and except for their infinitesimal mechanical vivacity, that jetted fleeringly from obscenely open small slits, all life was extinguished. She will die soon now, thought Joachim, and it was almost a confirmation of it that he heard her voice saying in the emptiness: “His death will be a lonely one”; it sounded like a doom and a pledge, a pledge that he fortified: “He is sick, and may die soon; perhaps this very moment.” “Yes,” said Elisabeth from the other side of beyond, and the word was like a drop that turned to ice as it fell, “yes, this very moment,” and in the frozen featurelessness of that second in which Death stood beside them, Joachim did not know whether it was the two of them that Death touched, or whether it was his father, or Bertrand; he could not tell whether his mother was not sitting there to watch over his death, punctual and calm, as she watched in the milking-byre or by his father’s bed, and he had a sudden near intuition, strangely clear, that his father was freezing and longed for the dark warmth of the cowshed. Was it not better to die now beside Elisabeth, and to be led by her into the glassy brightness that hovered above the dark? He said: “There will be frightful darkness around him, and no one will come to help him.” But Elisabeth said in a hard voice: “No one should come,” and with the same grey, toneless hardness she went on speaking in the emptiness, adding in the same breath, that yet was not a breath at all: “I will be your wife, Joachim,” and was herself uncertain whether she had said it, for Joachim sat in unchanged stillness with his body inclined, and made no answer. No sign was given, and although it lasted no longer than the dulling and glazing of an eye, the tension was so charged with uncertainty and nullity that Elisabeth said again: “Yes, I’ll be your wife.” But Joachim did not want to hear her words, for they compelled him to turn back from that road on which there is no returning. With a great effort he tried to bend towards her; he barely succeeded, but his half-bent knee actually did touch the ground; his brow, beaded with cold sweat, inclined itself, and his lips, dry and cold as parchment, brushed her hand, which was so icy that he did not dare to touch her finger-tips, not even when the room slowly closed in again and the chairs resumed their former places.

So they remained until they heard the Baron’s voice in the next room. “We must go in,” said Elisabeth. Then they entered the brightly lit salon, and Elisabeth said: “We are engaged.” “My child!” cried the Baroness, and with tears enfolded Elisabeth in her arms. But the Baron, whose eyes were not less wet, cried: “Let us be joyful and give thanks to God for this happy day,” and Joachim loved him for those heartening words, and felt committed to his keeping.

Out of the apathetic doze into which his weariness declined amid the rattle of the droshky wheels as he drove home, the thought emerged more clearly that his father and Bertrand had died that day, and he was almost amazed to find no announcement of their death awaiting him in his flat, for that would have fitted in with the return of punctiliousness to his life. In any case one should not conceal a betrothal from even a dead friend. The thought continued to haunt him and next morning strengthened into something like certainty, if not a certainty of their death, a certainty of their non-existence at least: his father and Bertrand had departed this life, and even although he was partly to blame for their death, he remained sunk in quiet indifference and did not even once find it necessary to decide whether it was Elisabeth or Ruzena of whom he had robbed Bertrand. The task had been laid upon him to catch Bertrand from behind, to keep an eye upon him, and the path along which he was bound to pursue him had now come to an end, the mystery was annulled; all that remained was to say farewell to his dead friend. “Both good news and bad news,” he said to himself. He had plenty of time; he stopped the droshky to order bouquets for his fiancée and the Baroness, and without haste proceeded to the hospital. But when he entered the hospital no one made any reference to the catastrophe; he was conducted in the usual manner to Bertrand’s room as if nothing had happened: it was only when he met the Sister in the corridor that he learned that Bertrand had indeed had a bad night, but was now feeling better. Joachim repeated mechanically: “He’s feeling better … yes, that’s gratifying, very gratifying.” It was as if Bertrand had betrayed and deceived him yet again, and this became a firm conviction when he was greeted by the gay words: “I take it you can be congratulated to-day.” How does he know that? Joachim asked himself, and in spite of his annoyance was almost proud that his suspicions were, in a way, justified by his new character as prospective bridegroom: yes, he said, he was happy to be able to announce his engagement. Bertrand seemed, however, in a softened mood. “You know that I like you, Pasenow,” he said—Joachim felt this as importunity—“and so it’s with all my heart that I wish luck to you and your bride.” Once more his words sounded warm and sincere, yet mocking: he—the man who always knew everything beforehand, he who had actually willed it and brought it about, although merely as the instrument of a higher power—was evading the issue, now that he saw his work accomplished, with a smooth and cordial congratulation. Joachim felt somehow exhausted; he sat down by the table in the middle of the room, looked at Bertrand, who was lying blond and almost girlish in his bed, and said gravely: “I hope that everything will turn out well,” and Bertrand replied lightly with that offhand certainty which always laid its soothing and yet disquieting spell on Joachim: “Let me assure you, Pasenow, that everything will turn out for the very best … at least for you.” Joachim repeated: “Yes, for the best …” but then he looked perplexed: “Why for me only?” Bertrand smiled and waved the question away with a faintly contemptuous gesture: “Oh, we … we’re a lost generation,” yet he explained himself no further, only adding abruptly: “And when’s the wedding to be?” so that Joachim forgot to ask more, and at once said: well, there was still some way to go; his father’s illness, above all, had to be considered. Bertrand eyed Joachim, who sat facing him with stiff propriety. “But getting married surely doesn’t involve settling down on the estate at once?” he said. Joachim was shocked: apparently all his trouble had been wasted. After harping on the necessity for taking over the estate, after plunging Ruzena into despair, here was Bertrand now saying that he did not need to settle down on the estate, as if wishing to cheat him of his pride in its possession and even to deprive him of his home! With what devious cunning had Bertrand lured him on, and now he was shaking off all responsibility and actually disdaining the triumph he had scored in pulling him down to his own civilian level, repudiating him even there! It must have been sheer evil for evil’s sake that Bertrand had wrought, and Joachim looked at him with indignant amazement. But Bertrand observed only the question in his eyes: “Well,” he said, “you mentioned not long ago that you were just on the point of getting your captaincy, and you should stay on until you’re promoted. Retired Captain sounds much better than retired Lieutenant”—now he’s ashamed of himself, the Second Lieutenant, thought Joachim and straightened himself with a little jerk, as if on parade—“and during these few months your father’s illness will have taken a decisive turn of some kind.” Joachim would have liked to point out that married officers seemed to him an anomaly, and that he was longing for his native soil, but he did not venture to say so, remarking merely that Bertrand’s suggested solution fitted in with the heartfelt desire of his future parents to see Elisabeth settled in the new west-end house. “Well, there you are, my dear Pasenow; everything turns out for the best,” said Bertrand, and that was another gratuitous and abominable piece of presumption, “besides, you could certainly speed up your promotion if you were to tell your colonel that you mean to retire from the service as soon as you get your step.” He was right in that, too, but it was annoying to have Bertrand interfering with even military arrangements. Joachim thoughtfully picked up Bertrand’s stick from the table, scrutinized the handle, and ran his finger over the resilient black-rubber bulb at the point of it: a convalescent’s stick. That the man was urging him into a headlong marriage filled him with new suspicion. What was behind it all? Yesterday evening he and Elisabeth had explained to her parents that they did not want to hurry on the marriage, and had enumerated all the obstacles; and now this Bertrand wanted simply to blow the obstacles away. “All the same, we can’t precipitate the marriage,” said Joachim obstinately. “Well,” remarked Bertrand, “I’m only sorry that in that case I must be content with sending you a wire on the happy day, from India or somewhere. For as soon as I’m half set up again I’m going abroad.… This affair has pulled me down a bit.” What affair? The slight wound to his arm? It was true that Bertrand looked ill, and convalescents always needed sticks, but what else had been happening? He shouldn’t really let Bertrand go away until that was all cleared up, and Joachim wondered whether Helmuth, who had faced his enemy openly, hadn’t been much more honourable than himself; was not the issue here the same: explanation or death? But Joachim wanted both of them, and yet neither. His father was right: he was dishonourable, as dishonourable as Bertrand, this friend of his, who could hardly be called his friend still. Yet that was almost gratifying, for it must have been in his father’s mind that Bertrand should not be invited to the wedding.

None the less he listened quietly as Bertrand went on: “One thing more, Pasenow; I have the impression that the estate, except where your mother looks after it and where it runs itself, is in a fairly neglected condition. In his present state your father could possibly do it a great deal of additional harm. Excuse me for suggesting, as I feel bound to do, that you might have him declared incapable of managing it. And you should engage a good steward; he would anyhow earn his wages. I think you should discuss it with your father-in-law; after all, he’s a landowner too.” Yes, Bertrand was talking like the vilest agent provocateur, and yet Joachim had to thank him for the advice, which he could see was just and well meant, and even had to express the hope that they would still see much of each other before Bertrand’s full recovery. “Delighted,” said Bertrand; “and give my humblest respects to your bride.” Then he sank back exhausted on his pillow.

Two days later Joachim received a letter in which Bertrand announced that his health was much improved and that he had shifted into a hospital in Hamburg, so as to be nearer to his business. But they would certainly meet again before he started for the East. Bertrand’s cool assumption that as a matter of course they would have another encounter made Joachim decide to avoid it at all costs. But he suffered from the knowledge that from now on he would have to do without his friend’s sureness and lightness of touch, and his competence in the affairs of life.

Behind the Leipzigerplatz there is a shop which externally can hardly be distinguished from its neighbours, unless it should attract attention because there are no goods displayed in its windows and the eye is prevented from seeing what is inside by opaque-glass screens, beautifully etched with Pompeian and Renaissance designs. But this peculiarity is one which the shop shares with many banking houses and brokers’ offices, and even the posters affixed to the screens, although they are an unpleasant interruption of the designs, have nothing unusual about them. On these posters the word “India” occurs, and a glance at the sign above the door informs one that inside the shop the Kaiser Panorama is on view.

On entering, one advances first into a light and cosily heated room in which an elderly and obviously good-natured lady acts as a kind of cashier behind a small table, selling tickets of admission to the establishment. Most of the visitors, however, pause at the table only to have their books of subscription tickets stamped and to exchange a few friendly words with the old lady. When the aged attendant appears from behind the black curtains that cut off one end of the room, and with a deprecating little gesture begs one to wait a minute or two, the visitor subsides with a faint sigh into one of the cane chairs and continues his conversation, mistrustfully watching the glass door that leads into the street, and if a fresh client appears regarding him with jealous and ashamed hostility. Then there is heard the faint scraping of chairs behind the curtains, and the man who emerges blinks a little in the light, and departs with a brief salutation to the old lady, going hurriedly, nervously, and without looking at anybody, as if he too were ashamed. The waiting client, however, springs quickly to his feet lest someone should push in ahead of him, breaks off his conversation without more ado, and vanishes behind the protecting curtains. It happens but seldom that clients speak to each other, although many must get to know each other by sight in the course of years, and only one or two shameless old men bring themselves to address the other waiting clients as well as the cashier, and to praise the programme; yet even then they are answered mostly in monosyllables.

Within, however, all is darkness, and one could suppose it an ancient, oppressive darkness that has been accumulating here for years. The attendant takes you gently by the hand and leads you carefully to a seat, a round seat without arms, that is waiting for you. In front of you are two bright eyes that look at you somewhat uncannily from a black screen, and under these eyes is a mouth, a hard rectangle softened by the dull light that fills it. Gradually you realize that you are set before a polygonal construction resembling a temple, and that the screen in front of which you are sitting is a part of it; you observe, too, that to right and left of you sits a worshipper who has applied his eyes to the eyes in the screen before him, and you do the same, after taking a look at the rectangle of light and noting that it says, “Government House in Calcutta.” But as soon as you peer into the open eye, Government House vanishes to the tinkle of a sweet bell and with a mechanical rattle; you can still see it sliding away while another view comes sliding after it, so that you feel almost cheated; but another bell tinkles, the view gives itself a little shake, as if to set itself off to the best advantage, and comes to rest. You see palm-trees and a well-kept path: in the background, where it is shaded, a man in a light suit is sitting on a seat; a fountain throws a congealed, whiplike jet of spray into the air, but you are not content until a glance at the softly lit rectangle informs you: “View in the Royal Park, Calcutta.” Then comes another tinkle, a sliding past of palms, seats, buildings, masts, a quiver into place, a tinkle of the bell, and in bright sunlight: “View of the Harbour, Bombay.” The man who has just been sitting on the seat in Calcutta Park is now standing in a sun-helmet on the hewn stones of the mole in the foreground. He is propped on a walking-stick and does not move, because he is spellbound by the taut rigging of the ships, by their funnels and cranes, spellbound by the bundles of cotton bales on the quay, and gazes at them spellbound, and his face is in shadow and cannot be recognized. Yet perhaps he will advance into the magic space, enclosed in polished brown, that lies between you and the picture, a space that is but an abstract cube and yet a long journey; perhaps he will step out freely and magically upon the wooden floor, and you will recognize that it is Bertrand, airily and yet terribly warning you that he can never more be crossed out of your life, however far away he may be. But that may be only your imagination, for God has already rung the bell for him, and without a greeting, stiff and motionless, without taking even one step, he slides away again. You peep at your left-hand neighbour to see if that is where Bertrand has gone, but his lit rectangle reports: “Government House in Calcutta,” and you can almost nurse the hope that Bertrand has appeared to you alone, to greet you only. But you have no time to reflect upon it, for when you turn quickly again to your own eyepieces a delightful surprise awaits you: the “Native Mother in Ceylon” is not only lit up by soft golden sunlight but represented in her natural colours; she smiles with white teeth between red lips and may be waiting for the white Sahib who has quitted the West because he despises European women. The “Temple Buildings in Delhi” also glow in all the colours of the Orient at the far end of the brown box: there the bad Christian may learn that even subject races know how to serve God. But did he not once say himself that it would devolve upon the black races to set up the Kingdom of Christ again? You look with horror at the swarm of brown figures, and are not ill-pleased to hear the signal with which they are dismissed, to give place to the “Elephant-hunting Expedition.” Here stand the colossal quadrupeds, one of them gently lifting a forefoot. The square is full of fine white sand, and when you turn your dazzled eyes away for a moment you see above the rectangular title-plate a small button, which you twirl experimentally. At once, to your delight, the picture is suffused by soft moonlight, so that you can expedite the hunters at your pleasure by day or by night. Well, since the sun-glare no longer blinds you, you seize the opportunity of examining the hunters’ faces, and if your eye does not deceive you it is Bertrand, after all, who is sitting in the howdah behind the dusky mahout, his rifle at the ready in his right hand, promising death. You change the light, and once more it is an utter stranger who smiles at you, and the mahout lays his goad behind the elephant’s ear to give the signal for the prescribed start of the expedition; they slide away into the jungle, yet you hear nothing of the trampling of the herds and the trumpeting of the bulls, but with a faint tinkle and a mechanical rattle landscape after landscape advances of its own accord and vanishes, and if the passing traveller seems to be really the man you are bound to seek for ever, the man you hunger for, the man who vanishes while you are still holding his hand, then the bell tinkles, and before you know where you are you are peering anxiously at your neighbour’s title-plate on the right, and discovering the inscription: “Government House in Calcutta,” so that you know your hour will be over soon. Then you give a cursory look to make sure that the palms of the Royal Park are due to follow, and since they follow on ruthlessly you scrape your chair, the attendant hurries up, and blinking a little, your collar turned up, a poor creature found indulging a pleasure he has never realized, you leave with a brief salutation the room in which others are already waiting, and in which the old lady is selling books of tickets.

Into this establishment Joachim and Elisabeth strayed, accompanied by Elisabeth’s companion, when they were making purchases in the city for their house and the trousseau. For although they knew that Bertrand was still in Hamburg, and although they never mentioned his name again, the word India had a magic sound for them.

The wedding at Lestow was a quiet one. The condition of Joachim’s father had become stationary; he lay in a coma, no longer recognizing the outer world, and one had to be reconciled to this lasting for years. True, the Baroness said that a quiet, intimate ceremony would be far more to the taste of herself and her husband than noisy display, but Joachim already knew the importance which his parents-in-law attached to their family festivals, and he felt to blame for his father, who robbed the occasion of its splendour. And he himself would perhaps have preferred a great and brilliant social setting to emphasise the social character of this marriage, into which mere love entered so little; yet on the other hand it seemed to him more in accordance with the gravity and Christian nature of the union that Elisabeth and he should approach the altar without any thought of the world. And so it was decided not to celebrate the marriage in Berlin, even although Lestow presented various difficulties not easy to overcome, more especially as Bertrand’s advice was no longer to be had. Joachim rejected the idea of leading his bride home for the wedding night: the idea of passing that night in the house of sickness filled him with repugnance, but still more impossible to him was the thought that Elisabeth should retire to rest under the eyes of the domestic staff who knew him so well; so he suggested that Elisabeth should spend the night at Lestow, and he would fetch her next day. Strangely enough this proposal encountered the opposition of the Baroness, who found such a solution unseemly: “Even if we closed our eyes to it, what would the servants think?” Finally it was decided to hold the ceremony at such an early hour that the young couple could catch the midday train. “Then you’ll be able to go straight to your own comfortable house in Berlin,” said the Baroness, but Joachim would not hear of that either. No, it was too far out, for they would be leaving Berlin again early in the morning, and probably they might even be able to take the night train to Munich without stopping. Yes, night travel was almost the simplest solution of the marriage problem, a safeguard against the fear that someone might smile understandingly when he and Elisabeth had to retire for the night. Yet presently he doubted whether they really could set out for Munich straight off; after the excitement of the day could one really expect Elisabeth to undertake a night journey? And how could their day in Munich, in perpetual expectation of what was to come, be put in? It was clear that one could not have discussed such matters even with Bertrand, one had to come to a decision oneself; all the same, several things would have been appreciably simpler if Bertrand had been at hand. He considered what Bertrand would have done in such circumstances, and came to the conclusion that there was no harm in his booking rooms in the Hotel Royal in Berlin; if Elisabeth should wish it, they could still take the night train. And he was honestly proud of having found this adroit solution by himself.

It had now become quite wintry, and the closed carriages in which they drove to the church advanced only by slow stages through the snow. Joachim was in the same carriage as his mother; she sat there, broad and complacent, and Joachim felt irritated when she reiterated: “Father would have been delighted; well, it’s a great pity.” Yes, that was all that was needed to fill his cup; Joachim was exasperated—nobody would leave him in peace to gain that calm which was imperative at this solemn hour, doubly imperative for him to whom this marriage signified more than a Christian marriage, to whom it meant redemption from the pit and the mire and a heavenly assurance that he was entering the way of grace. In her wedding-robe Elisabeth looked more like a Madonna than ever, looked like Snow-white, and he could not help thinking of the legend of the bride who had fallen down dead before the altar because she suddenly recognized in her bridegroom an incarnation of the Devil. The thought would not leave him and took such complete possession of him that he heard neither the chant of the choir nor the pastor’s sermon: indeed he actually closed his ears to them out of a fear that he might be compelled to interrupt them and tell those people that a man unworthy, an outcast, stood before the altar, a man who desecrated the holy state of matrimony; and he started in terror when he had to pronounce the “Yes,” in terror too at the thought that the ceremony, which should have been for him the revelation of a new life, had come to an end so quickly and almost without his being aware of it. He found it actually comforting that Elisabeth should now be called, without really being, his wife, but the thought that this state would not last was appalling. During the drive back from the church he took her hand and said: “My wife,” and Elisabeth responded to his pressure. But then everything was drowned in the tumult of good wishes, the hurry of changing and setting out, so that only when they reached the station did they realize what had happened.

He turned away while Elisabeth climbed into the compartment, so as not again to fall a prey to impure thoughts. Now they were alone. Elisabeth leant back wearily in her corner and smiled faintly at him. “You’re tired, Elisabeth,” he said hopefully, glad that it was his privilege and his duty to protect her. “Yes, I’m tired, Joachim.” He did not dare, however, to suggest that they should stop at Berlin, fearing that she might interpret it as concupiscence. Her profile stood out sharply against the window, beyond which stretched the grey winter afternoon, and Joachim felt relieved that that oppressive and affrighting vision in which her face changed into a landscape remained absent. But while he was still regarding her he saw that the trunk, which had been placed on the seat opposite, was outlined no less sharply against the grey sky, and he was overcome by the senselessly sharp fear that she might be a mere thing, a dead object, and not even a landscape. He got up hastily as though to do something to the trunk, but he merely opened it and took out the lunch-basket; it was a wedding present and a miniature miracle of elegance, suitable equally for train journeys and hunting expeditions: the ivory handles of the knives and forks were ornamented with decorative hunting scenes which were continued on the incised blades, and even the spirit-stove was not free from them; amid the ornamentation on each piece, however, one could recognize the intertwined arms of Elisabeth and Joachim. The centre space of the basket served as a receptacle for food and had been solicitously filled by the Baroness. Joachim pressed Elisabeth to eat, and as they had not been able to wait for the wedding lunch she gladly acceded. “Our first married meal,” said Joachim, and he poured the wine into the silver collapsible cups, and Elisabeth drank to him. In this way they passed the journey and Joachim was once more of the opinion that the train provided the best form of wedded life. He even began to understand Bertrand, who was at liberty to pass such a great part of his time in trains. “Shouldn’t we go straight through to Munich this evening?” he asked; but Elisabeth replied that she felt really fatigued and would rather break the journey. So he could not but divulge to her that he had already provided for her wish and booked rooms.

He was grateful to Elisabeth for the fact that she had not lost her composure, even if it was probably only an assumed composure; for she lingered out the hour for retiring and asked for supper, and they sat for a very long time in the dining-hall; the band which played for the diners’ entertainment had already put away their instruments, only a few guests were still left in the room, and grateful as any postponement of the hour was to Joachim, yet he felt again that cold, rarefied atmosphere diffusing itself through the room, that chill which on the evening of their betrothal had been like a dreadful foreboding of death. Perhaps even Elisabeth felt it, for she said that it was time now to retire.

So the moment had come. Elisabeth had parted from him with a friendly “Good-night, Joachim,” and now he walked up and down his room. Should he simply go to bed? He regarded the bed, on which the sheets were folded down. Yet he had taken an oath to watch before her door, to guard her heavenly dreams, that for ever on her silvery cloud she might dream on; and now it had suddenly lost all sense and meaning, for everything seemed to point to the one conclusion, that he should make himself comfortable here. He glanced down at his clothes, and felt the long military coat as a protection; it was indecent for people to appear at weddings in frock-coats. All the same he must have a wash, and softly, as though he were committing an act of sacrilege, he pulled off his coat and poured water into the basin on the brown varnished washstand. How painful all this was, how senseless, unless it should be a link in the chain of trials laid on his shoulders; it would all have been easier if Elisabeth had locked the communicating door behind her, but out of consideration for him she had certainly not done that. Joachim vaguely remembered having been in the same position before, and now with crushing force came the memory of a locked door and a brown washstand under a gas-jet: dreadful because it was a memory of Ruzena, no less dreadful as raising the problem how, living with an angel, the thought of such a thing as a lavatory, no matter how discreetly it obtruded itself, was practically conceivable at all: in both cases a degradation of Elisabeth and a new trial. He had cleansed his face and hands gently and cautiously, so as to prevent the porcelain basin from making any sound against the marble top of the table, but now he was confronted with something quite inconceivable: for who could think of gargling in the immediate vicinity of Elisabeth? And yet he must immerse himself still more deeply in the purifying crystalline medium, must drown there, to walk forth from that utter purification as from baptism in Jordan. But how could even a bath help him here? Ruzena had recognized him for what he was and drawn the consequences. He slipped back hastily into his coat again, buttoned it up scrupulously, and walked up and down the room. There was no sound from the other room, and he felt that his presence must be an oppression to her. Why did she not scream at him to go away, as Ruzena had done behind the locked door? That time he had had the lavatory attendant at least to stand by him, but now he was alone and without support. All too prematurely he had rejected Bertrand and his easy assurance, and the fact that he had been capable of thinking it his duty to protect Elisabeth from Bertrand struck him now as hypocrisy. A terrible feeling of remorse came over him: it was not Elisabeth whom he had really wished to protect and save; he had merely hoped to save his own soul through her sacrifice. Was she kneeling on her knees in there praying that God might free her again from the fetters which she had assumed out of pity? Was it not his duty to say to her that he gave her her freedom, this very night, that if she commanded him he would drive her at once to her house in the west end, to her beautiful new house which was waiting for her? In great agitation he knocked at the communicating door and wished immediately that he had not done so. She said softly: “Joachim,” and he turned the handle. She was lying in bed, a candle was burning on the commode. He remained at the door, almost as if he were standing at attention, and said hoarsely: “Elisabeth, I only wanted to tell you that I give you your freedom: I can’t think of your sacrificing yourself for me.” Elisabeth was astonished, but she felt relief that he did not accost her as a loving husband. “Do you think, Joachim, that I’ve sacrificed myself?” She smiled faintly. “Really you’ve thought of that a little too late.” “It isn’t too late yet; I thank God it isn’t too late.… I didn’t realize it until now.… Shall I drive you out to the west end?” Then Elisabeth could not help laughing: now, in the middle of the night! What would the people in the hotel think? “Why not just go to bed, Joachim. We can discuss all that in peace and quietness to-morrow. You must be tired too.” Joachim said like an obstinate child: “I’m not tired.” The flickering flame of the candle lighted up her pale face, which lay between her loosened hair on the snowy pillows. A peak of the bolster rose in the air like a nose, and its shadow on the wall was exactly the same shape as the shadow of Elisabeth’s nose. “Please, Elisabeth, smooth down the corner of that pillow, to the left of your head there,” he said from the door. “Why?” asked Elisabeth in surprise, putting up her hand towards it. “It casts such a horrible shadow,” said Joachim; meanwhile another peak of the bolster had risen, showing another nose on the wall. Joachim was irritated, he wanted to set this matter right himself and took a step into the room. “But, Joachim, what’s wrong with the shadows that they annoy you? Is it right now?” Joachim replied: “The shadow of your face on the wall is like a mountain range.” “But that’s nothing.” “I can’t stand it.” Elisabeth was a little afraid lest this should be the prelude to putting out the candle, but to her pleasant surprise Joachim said: “We must have two candles for you, then there won’t be any shadows and you’ll look like Snow-white.” And he actually went into his room and came back with the second lighted candle. “Oh, you’re joking, Joachim,” Elisabeth could not help saying, “where are you to put the second candle? There’s no place for it on the wall. And besides, I would look like a corpse between two candles.” Joachim studied the position. Elisabeth was right, so he said: “May I set it on the commode?” “Of course you may …” she paused for a moment, and said hesitatingly and yet with a slight feeling of reassurance, “you’re my husband now.” He held his hand in front of the flame and carried the candle over to the commode, reflectively contemplated the two lights, and the quietness and semi-darkness of this wedding night striking him he said: “Three would be more cheerful,” as though with those words he were trying to excuse himself to Elisabeth and her parents for the quietness of the ceremony. She too gazed at the two candles; she had drawn the coverlet over her shoulders, and only her hand, caught at the wrist by a lace frill, hung languidly over the edge. Joachim was still thinking of the lack of display at their marriage; but he had held this hand in his in the carriage. He had become more composed, and had almost forgotten why he had come in here; now he remembered again and felt it his duty to repeat his offer: “So you don’t want to go to your house, Elisabeth?” “But you’re silly, Joachim; fancy my getting up now! I feel very comfortable here and you want to rout me out.” Joachim stood irresolutely beside the commode; suddenly he could not comprehend the way in which things changed their nature and vocation; a bed was a pleasant article of furniture for sleeping on, with Ruzena it was a coign of desire and inexpressible sweetness, and now it was a thing unapproachable, a something whose edge he scarcely dared to touch. Wood was wood and nothing more, but still one shrank from touching the wood of a coffin. “It’s so difficult, Elisabeth,” he said suddenly, “forgive me.” Yet he begged her forgiveness not merely, as she probably imagined, for expecting her to get up at that late hour, but because yet once more he had compared her with Ruzena, and—he admitted it to himself with horror—because he could almost have wished that Ruzena, and not she, were lying there. And he saw how deeply he was still stuck in the mire. “Forgive me,” he said again, and he knelt down so as to kiss a good-night on the white, blue-veined hand on the edge of the bed. She could not tell whether this might not mean the dreaded approach of intimacy, and remained silent. His mouth was pressed to her hand, and he became aware of his teeth, which were crushed against the inner side of his lips, as the frontier of the hard bony skull which was hidden beneath his own skull and was continued in the skeleton. He felt too the warm breath in the cavity of his mouth, and the tongue embedded in the trough between his lower teeth, and he knew that now he must quickly remove all these, so that Elisabeth might not become inwardly aware of them. Yet he would not concede Ruzena this quick triumph, and so in silence he remained stubbornly on his knees beside the bed, until Elisabeth, as though to indicate that he should go, very gently pressed his hand. Perhaps he intentionally misunderstood this hint, for it gave him a remote memory of Ruzena’s caressing hands; so he did not free Elisabeth’s hand, although he was actually very impatient to leave the room. He waited for the miracle, the token of grace which God must grant him, and it was as though fear stood between the gates of grace. “Elisabeth, say something,” he begged, and Elisabeth replied very slowly, as though the words were not her own: “We aren’t strange enough, and we aren’t intimate enough.” Joachim said: “Elisabeth, do you want to leave me?” Elisabeth answered gently: “No, Joachim, I think we’ll go the same road together now. Don’t be unhappy, Joachim, it will all turn out for the best yet.” Yes, Joachim would have liked to answer, and that’s what Bertrand said too; but he was silent, not merely because it would have been unseemly to suggest such a thing, but because in her mouth Bertrand’s words were like a Mephistophelian sign from the demon and the Evil One, instead of the sign from God that he had expected and hoped for and prayed for. For a moment Bertrand’s image was faintly visible as at the bottom of a brown box, visible and yet hidden, and it was the Devil incarnate whose face and form threw the shadow of a mountain range upon the wall. And immovable and frozen as it was when it appeared, and swiftly, as at the tinkling of a bell, as it vanished again, yet it was a warning that the Evil One was not yet overcome, and that Elisabeth herself was still in his power, seeing that with her own words she had called him up, and seeing that she had not succeeded in scaring away those phantoms and sick fancies with words from God. But even if this was disappointing, yet it was also good, filling him with a sense of the pathos of the earthly and the human and of human weakness. Elisabeth was his heavenly goal, but the way on earth to such a goal he had himself, in spite of his great weakness, to find out and prepare for both of them: and meanwhile where in this loneliness was a guide to be found to that knowledge? Where could he find help? Clausewitz’s aphorism came into his mind, that men act only from a divination and instinctive feeling of truth, and his heart was prescient with the knowledge that in a Christian household their lives would be determined by the saving help of grace, guarding them so that they might not wander on the earth unenlightened, helpless and without meaning to their lives, and lose themselves in the void. No, that could not be called a mere convention of feeling. He straightened himself and ran his hand softly over the silk coverlet under which her body lay; he felt a little like a sick-room attendant, and distantly it was as though he were stroking his sick father, or his father’s deputy. “Poor little Elisabeth,” he said; it was the first endearment that he had ventured to utter. She had freed her hand, and now passed it over his hair: Ruzena had done that too, he thought. Nevertheless she said softly: “Joachim, we’re not intimate enough yet.” He had raised himself a little, and sat now on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. Then with his head on his hand he contemplated her face, which still lay, pale and strange, not the face of a wife, not the face of his wife, on the pillow, and it so happened that gradually and without himself noticing it he found himself in a recumbent position beside her. She had moved a little to the side, and her hand, which with its befrilled wrist was all that emerged from the bedclothes, rested in his. Through his position his military coat had become disordered, the lapels falling apart left his black trousers visible, and when Joachim noticed this he hastily set things right again and covered the place. He had now drawn up his legs, and so as not to touch the sheets with his patent-leather shoes, he rested his feet in a rather constrained posture on the chair standing beside the bed. The candles flickered; first one went out, then the other. Now and then they heard muffled footsteps in the carpeted corridor, a door banged, and in the distance they could hear the sounds of the great city, whose gigantic traffic did not fully cease even at night. They lay motionless and gazed at the ceiling of the room, on which yellow strips of light from the slits of the window-blinds were pencilled, and they resembled a little the ribs of a skeleton. Then Joachim had fallen asleep, and when Elisabeth noticed it she could not help smiling. And then she too actually went to sleep.