4

Therese stopped, as usual, to listen anxiously to the steady and yet somehow frenzied walking of her husband, who was locked in his study. She no longer knocked; she knew she would not be answered. And so, she went away, to do her daily duties in the barren silence of the small house. There was no gay sprightly little Gerda to expect in the late afternoons, no animated visitors or telephone calls, no small parties festive and full of song and laughter. A horror lay over this house, and it knew it. The very furniture seemed brooding in a private dark horror of its own. The rooms echoed; the muffled floors murmured and sighed under tread. The light that came in the windows lost its golden vivacity, and became bleak and hard. Therese mournfully decided that she and Karl must leave this house, which was repudiating them, and presenting to them only flat black surfaces, and filling their nostrils with a smell of dust, like the odor of dissolution.

The servant, an old woman, obstinately went about her work, assisted by her daughter. Her manner expressed her low opinion of a house which could manifest such ingratitude to those who had once filled it with brightness. She muttered about leaving, also, but this was only because of her distress.

But Therese knew that it was not the house which was at fault. It merely reflected the emanations of its occupants; it revealed their grief and despair and abandonment, and their pale transfixed inertia.

There was no doing anything with Karl. He kept a white and stony silence, even with his wife. He scarcely ate. Therese believed he never slept. He seemed absorbed in some dreadful dream of his own; there was an air of concentration about him, as if he were being confronted with a problem greater than life or death. Therese knew that this problem was hatred and the weapon of hatred, vengeance. He was plotting against his brother.

Therese felt no fear for Kurt. All her fear was for Karl, and what Karl was doing to himself. Yet, when she tried to speak to him, she found only aphorisms on her tongue, and she knew how he detested aphorisms, even though they were true. All his work was distinguished by an originality and clarity of phrase which had nothing to do with smart sophistication, and the new hard manner of American writers. His originality had a rich patina and majestic outlines, and thus was immortal. It was at once subtle and heroic, like the best of Wagner’s music. Even his delicacy was strong and ageless, like an arch of fine steel. The work of Thomas Mann, he once said, had a slow, almost imperceptible unfolding; one rose steadily up a wide and tranquil staircase of marble, and saw the vista at the top becoming clearer and broader with each step. At the final step it was revealed in its entirety. There was no surprise, except the exhilaration at the vastness of utter perfection. But his own work had the simplicity and completeness of a Grecian temple, from the very beginning. The reader always experienced intense amazement and joy.

But Karl worked no more, now, and no one came. Some of the closer friends would have come, in their sympathy and profound shock, but Therese would not let them come. She had only one thought, one preoccupation now: her husband. She was like one who waited at the door of a prison, whose key the prisoner himself held. She heard the prisoner’s moving-about; she heard his slow frenzied footsteps. She heard his halts, his faint hoarse cries. She felt his distraction and despair and hatred and rage. But until he opened his door, she could do nothing for him.

His last novel was over half completed. She knew it lay in his desk like a partially-carved ivory statuette. But there it lay, forgotten, for its carver had forgotten it in his most terrible preoccupation with more real, and yet, less valuable things.

Therese was a serene woman, not given to much idle speech. She hated talk for talk’s sake. In many ways, she was much wiser and more mature than Karl, for reality, though it frequently revolted her and stunned her, had long ago lost its power to injure her permanently; At times, she gave an illusion of innocence, but she was not innocent.

Though Karl had written realistically of violence and passion and reality, he did not comprehend them objectively, nor discern them operating in his own life and the living life about him. They sprang from a deep sub consciousness which was both in him and without him; he was like a sea-shell immersed in an ocean, an intact identity, yet filled with the waters of the ocean. Now, his innocent objectiveness had been violated; the innocent objectiveness of the universe had been rent open, and, through the rent, violence and passion and reality had burst on his realization for the first time. And so, he was frenzied, despairing, incredulous, frantic, and made to suffer. This was the real cause of his suffering and his hatred. He had written of the frightfulness of all things, but had not truly believed in this frightfulness. He was a prophet overcome with terror at the coming-about of his own prophecies, and frenzied with his need and desire to disbelieve in their actuality.

Therese, lonely and sad, had nothing to do in these awful days but sew and embroider and read. She read all the newspapers. She listened to the radio. She saw and knew all that was happening in a world that contemptuously repudiated honor and kindness and civilization and intelligence and love, and concentrated only on reality. But I can bear this better than Karl, she would think sadly. I never did believe in humanity.

To her calm and passionless eye Hitler, the monstrous Austrian madman, was an innocent of the same breed as Karl. He, too, believed in heroism and destiny and beauty. She could not find him evil. The evil men were the realists behind him, who used his innocence for incredible ends, and to subjugate and entrance all the other innocents. And yet, perhaps after all these realists were not the truly dangerous men. Perhaps the ominous men were the innocents, like Karl, whose self-enchantment made them unable to recognize the enemies when they appeared and made them therefore, impotent to defend the world from the enemies.

If the realists are deadly, thought Therese, how much more deadly is innocence, which insists on its fantasy though the universe perish. Innocence creates the gods, but bewilderedly watches their destruction by a force which it still refuses to believe in, and of whose existence it is obstinately unaware.

One day Karl emerged from his isolation long enough to dine with her and to speak to her with haggard kindness. She imprudently believed that his old enchantment was beginning to weave its web about him again. She spoke hesitantly about Gerda and Eric, and he replied quietly. She even mentioned Kurt, who called Therese each day to inquire after his brother. Karl said nothing. He lifted his cup to his lips with a hand that did not tremble even slightly. Over the edge of it, his fixed eyes were a little vague, but otherwise expressionless.

Then she said: “Karl, my darling, Kurt, too, is as much a victim of what has happened, and what is happening, as Gerda and Eric—”

He put down the cup. Without a word, he rose and left the room. He locked himself in his study. She stood at the door and pleaded with him, but he did not answer. “You are killing yourself!” she cried. But he did not answer.

“Kurt is not the only one who lives in the shadow of the Schloss!” she cried in a louder voice, hoping piteously to goad him. But still he did not answer. And so, she went away.

One night, exhausted, he slept well into the morning. Therese, passing his study, tried the door. It was unlocked. She went in. The desk was bare, waiting. She drew back the curtains, and let the wan sunlight in. Then on a table near the windows she saw Eric’s African box.

She had never seen the contents. She went to the table and examined some objects which had been taken from the box and now lay on the polished surface. One was something she thought was a horrid little wooden head with glaring eyes and matted hair. There was something savage and primeval about the face, the grinning stretched lips, the mad fixed eyes. But she was not revolted. In fact, she felt a sympathy for it. It was a face that had looked at reality and had understood it. In the innocent, such a face would inspire madness, and flight. In the disingenuous, it inspired wry amusement and comprehension.

The other object was a crudely carved little doll-like figure without any specific individuality. It’s wooden limbs were only partly formed. Therese picked it up and examined it with curiosity. The sharp end of a long brass prong or nail had been inserted in the side of its head. It was not very deeply inserted; just the tip.

Baffled, Therese continued to examine it. An ugly little doll, without beauty, as though carved by a stupid child. She wiggled the brass nail; it was firmly imbedded. What on earth was Karl doing with this nonsense? He hated incompleteness and ugliness, yet in some mysterious way Therese knew that all his absorption these days was centered in this figure.

She held it idly in her hand and stared vaguely into space. She frowned. There was a clue faintly floating about in the darkness of her mind. She grasped at it; it eluded her. But there it was, persistently floating, challenging her to identify it and seize it. She grasped at it again and again, only to have it sink below the surface of her mind. Exasperated, she waited, still staring into space. She tried to relax. The clue bobbed up again, elusively. All at once she knew that the most important thing in the world, now, was to seize it and identify it.

She seemed to see herself as a child, reading something that both fascinated and horrified her. She could feel the book in her hands, and the weight of the flaxen braids on her shoulders. She could even see her long legs in white stockings, hanging over the edge of the crimson leather chair in her father’s study. What was that she was reading? Something dark and occult, she dimly remembered. Something strange and ferocious about Africa. Africa!

The clue approached her hand, and she looked at it with fierce attention. And then she saw that it was a ridiculous word: Voodoo.

Voodoo! Her lips parted in a gasp; her eyes, in the bleak light of day, seemed to glare. Voodoo. Black magic, the magic of hatred and obscene murder, and devil-worship. The invoking of evil in behalf of vengeance.

At this, she gasped again, loudly, incredulously. She was filled with a fire of terror for her husband. She could hear the leaping of her heart. She was at once outraged, disbelieving and frantic. She had been a fool! While she had waited, stupidly, supinely, for the prisoner to come out of his prison by his own will, that prisoner had been deliberately driving himself into madness.

For a moment she was revolted; she experienced a disgusted turning-away from her husband. Then she was overcome with pity and renewed terror. She forgot the idiot obscenity that had so outraged her adult intelligence. She forgot her shame and anger for Karl. She forgot the dying innocence that could produce, in its pangs of dissolution, nothing more lofty than this imbecility.

She knew only that her husband was a mortally sick man.

With the haste of repugnance she dropped the little figure on the table, where it lay with the prong in the side of its head. Her mouth was acrid with the salt of fear and helplessness and compassion. What could she do to restore him to sanity, to manhood, to reason?

Dazed, she looked inside the box, and in the welter of disgusting and anonymous objects she saw another of the dolls. She picked it up; again she frowned into space. Groping painfully in her mind for forgotten things, she dimly remembered that, to be effective, an image must be baptized with the name of the enemy. This other doll, intact, without the nail in its head, was an unnamed doll.

Operating almost by instinct now, she feverishly pulled the nail from the head of the first doll. She flung the doll in the box and covered it with the other objects. Then, in the head of the second doll she forced the sharp tip of the prong. She did not quite know why she did this, but something impelled her.

She heard a sound at the door. She turned and saw Karl entering. She tried to smile, then stopped with a sickening leap of her heart. He was regarding her with a face she could not recognize. The red light of madness was in his eyes.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded in a loud but curiously muffled voice.

She put the doll down hastily.

“Karl,” she said, with an attempt at indignation. “Why do you talk to me like that? Are you insane? I am your wife, or have you forgotten that, in your selfish preoccupation and disregard for me?”

But he picked up the doll and examined it with the intense concentration of the feeble-minded. Then he put it down carefully. A change came over his face. It lost its inhuman look; it softened. He turned to her, and even smiled faintly, like a dying man momentarily gaining consciousness.

“I am sorry, Therese,” he said with almost his old gentleness. “But you know I do not like my things disturbed.”

She moistened her pale lips. “You never seemed to mind my ‘disturbing’ your things before this,” she replied with dignity. “Besides, what is all this rubbish? Just poor Eric’s silly souvenirs of Africa. They smell. Shall I have Amelia come in and cart them out and throw them away?”

Her tone was casual, if dignified, but she watched him with narrow fearfulness.

He did not answer. He looked down at the doll, and the little savage brown head with its matted hair. He stood there, seeming to have sunken into a dark pit of preoccupation, in which she had no part. The hand which rested on the table had an unfamiliar slackness and distortion about it, to her alert eyes. It was the hand of a man who had suffered unbearable pain, and had collapsed under that pain. With alarm, she saw how emaciated Karl had become, and how dishevelled. His expression, as he stood there, was dazed and unaware, like that of one caught in some delirium from which he could not escape. He raised his other hand, passed it over his head. It was trembling, the nails bluish. His slightly parted lips were the color of lead.

“Karl,” she said softly, as though fearing to wake a sleepwalker too suddenly, “come into the breakfast room and have some coffee with me.” She did not touch him, but waited, her knees shaking.

All at once he sighed brokenly. He lifted his head and seemed to see clearly and sharply. He looked about him, helplessly. His eyes came to focus on his wife’s face, and a burning flush ran over his cheeks, as though he were suddenly and hideously ashamed.

“Yes, I’ll have some coffee with you, Therese,” he said, in a voice like an echo. He went to the breakfast room with her. He drank coffee. He listened, faintly smiling, to her firm and casual remarks about the weather and the poor quality of the breakfast rolls, and the bad butter.

“It is as bad as the wartime,” he said. All at once he seemed vaguely concerned. “Therese, you seem tired and pale. Why do you not go out and walk in the fresh air? It seems a nice day.” He lifted his head and looked at the sunshine with the incredulity of a man who has slept, unconscious, for, days.

Her heart leapt with hope. “Will you come with me, Karl?”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “I am exhausted,” he answered simply.

“Then, will you lie down again, and rest?”

To her joy, he said, after another hesitation: “Yes, I will.”

She saw him safely to his room. She helped him undress. When she went out, on tiptoe, he was already asleep. Before he slept however, he had touched his cold lips to the back of her ministering hands.

She felt enormously relieved. And now, to get rid of that frightful box! She went to the study. She tried the door. She could not remember Karl’s having locked it, but it was locked.

But she would not let herself be frightened again. She went to her own room to get a book. Then she heard the telephone ringing and went to answer it.

It was Maria, Kurt’s wife. Her voice sounded impatient but somewhat concerned. “Therese? Kurt asked me to inquire about his brother today. No, he did not go to the University this morning. He is in bed.”

In spite of all her efforts, Therese felt faint and giddy. She clutched the telephone with desperate firmness.

“What is the matter with him, Maria? I am so sorry!”

She could almost see her sister-in-law shrug her massive shoulders.

“You know these men! They scream at a pin-prick. I have no doubt there is really nothing much the matter. He has been complaining for a week or two of an intense pain in his head. But things have been so tragic—It is nerves, or eyestrain, but he is too stubborn to admit he needs spectacles. A confession of age! But there it is: this morning, he said the pain was unbearable, and I have sent for the doctor.”

Therese replaced the receiver silently, slowly.

She was trembling violently, as she sat in the chair. A curious prickling ran over her head, seemed to raise her hair. Her whole body was covered with a deathly coldness and dampness.

She clenched her hands convulsively together in her lap; nails entered flesh. She said aloud, staring blindly, savagely, before her:

“I must control myself. I must not be a fool. I must remember that such things do not exist. It is only coincidence! To think for a moment that it is anything else is to confess madness, too.”