22
On the way to the Bishop’s residence, Therese thought:
“There is no end to the baseness of human beings. There is no end to their horribleness, their fiendishness, their shamefulness and evil. What few feeble stirrings of conscience they possess are easily quieted by expediency, by slyness, by avarice and complete atavistic wickedness. Men delight in evil and darkness. They delight in cruelty and malice and brutality. They love to gloat over another’s suffering. If there is a God, how can He endure us? From what pit of horror have we arisen? From what foul cesspool have we crawled?”
She felt as though she were suffocating. She drew in deep gasping breaths. She gazed through the windows of the car, blindly. It was early autumn. The sky was gray and overcast; the air was ashen. The houses marched gloomily side by side, like forbidding walls. A few dark leaves drifted from the trees, like cinders. The car paused for a clearing of traffic near a concert hall. Therese could faintly hear the doleful muttering of drums, the dolorous wail of flute and trumpet. Beethoven, mourning for a world that hated him, and for which he had only sorrow and compassion. It was the mourning of all the heroes, of all the martyrs, of the Christs and the angels, of God Himself. The vast mourning of an outraged Universe for the obscenity and the fury of men.
Food and a victim. That is all that men required. Food for their belly; a victim for their lust. Hitler knew this. That is why he was successful. This man was no man. He was an arch-fiend who understood mankind. He gave men food; he gave them a victim. That is why they were no slaves following him blindly, but satisfied and exultant monsters who loved him for what he had done for them. He had, released their lusts. That was the secret of his growing power. The Christs told them they had souls. But they had no desire for souls. That is why they hated the Christs.
But there were a few. Surely, there were a few! The Traubs and the Muehlers. Only a handful of men. Would they save the city from the wrath of God? “Ten righteous men” would save the city. Were there ten to be found?
But the “ten righteous men” had deserted Germany. They had fled from her travail, from the march of the legions of hell. Were they not, as Doctor Traub said, more guilty than the monsters themselves?
Is there no hope for Germany? she asked herself with despair. Does the world not know what is happening here? Surely it must know. England, France, America—they must all know. Why did they turn their eyes aside? Did they not know, in their stubborn blindness, or their craft, or their greed, or their selfishness, or their lust, that in Germany was their own abattoir, their own Gethsemane? Did they not know that all mankind was climbing the Hill of Calvary, today in Germany? Surely they must know. But they were full of evil and malignancy, also. They refused to see that when one man was martyred all men were martyred. When a single grave was dug for an innocent, the grave was dug for all men. God would not be mocked. He was asking all men everywhere: “Where is thy brother?” And all men, in all the world, were replying with an, ancient and terrible cynicism: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
For this, the mark of Cain was set on the brows of every man. The mark of Cain was set there for a thousand generations, not only for today. It would be washed away only by the blood and the agony of multitudes. No, God would not be mocked. The day of doom had arrived. A day of doom that would last a thousand years. There would be no peace for mankind. It had betrayed itself; it had betrayed God. The rumblings of vengeance could already be heard. God would not be mocked. The heavens were already red with His wrath.
The world said, looking on the madness and the violence and darkness of Germany: “It is not my business.” But one of these days it would know it was its business, and its children would be heaped in the gutters, its blood would flow through countless streets, its dying hands would be lifted to fiery avenging heavens. And there would be no reply. England—France—America. They would pay for their smirking and cynical silence. They would pay, until every last innocent drop of blood was avenged, and every child comforted. They would pay until every last grave was at peace. This was justice. This was the law of Almighty God.
It did not matter what lofty sophistries men used to excuse their delinquencies. They could speak of “natural if violent phenomena of social change,” and “convulsions in governmental systems which must inevitably reach a certain subsiding mean,” and all the other infamous smooth falsehoods. The frightful fact remained, inexorable and simple, that one man’s agony was every man’s guilt. A guilt he must atone for by his own agony.
Therese had a sudden curious sensation as though she had burst some last brittle layer which had encased her. She was free! She saw all things. The awakening of which Doctor Traub had spoken had come. She was conscious of a strange resurgence of courage and fortitude, of sternness and resolution. For an instant she was aware of a blinding surge of ecstasy and complete understanding and ineffable peace.
The car came to a halt. She was before the Bishop’s residence. Or rather, before his palace. She knew the house well. How well she knew it! She had spent her childhood and girlhood here. Karl had rescued her. There was the window of her bedroom, in the round white-stone tower at the left. How often she had sat there, by that rounded large window, looking down at the street, unawakened, restless, sensitive, selfish. When Karl had come, he had come like Prince Charming, awakening a sleeper, absorbed in her own tiny affairs. And then she knew, with mournful prescience, that she had never really awakened until now. She had failed Karl. All those years of their married life, she had failed him. She had helped bring him to his present pass. Sometimes she had surprised a puzzled look on his quiet face. She had not understood. Oh, let it not be too late! she prayed, still sitting in her car and staring at the palace.
The great polished bronze door was opened for her by a shining and meticulous butler. She had not been here for some months, really over a year. But the smell of the place was as she remembered, musty, waxy, dim and pious. She stood on the dim reflection of herself on the polished floor of the hall, while the butler respectfully, almost cravenly, took her furs. Yes, the Bishop was at home. He was in his study. “Do not bother to announce me,” said Therese, curtly, walking across the acres of crimson carpet towards the study. She did not want to encounter the Bishop’s wife, a sly, mealy-mouthed, hypocritically self-effacing woman who disliked her.
All the enormous thin windows were covered with stained glass, like a church. The wan light of the autumn day came through them, changed and lugubrious. The ceilings were vast and high, and frescoed, gloomily. The furniture lurked along the dimly painted walls, and there were shadows on the walls, ecclesiastical portraits of bishops in canonical robes. She could see the gleaming white of their garments, though their features were indiscernible. It was a gallery of impotent ghosts, sterile and without humanity. Nothing had been changed from her girlhood. She remembered her hatred for all these echoing rooms, all this dolorous splendor and somberness. She remembered the deathly smell of polished decay, furniture wax, airlessness, bitter sanctity. The shade of Jesus surely never came here. He would have smothered. As I smothered, she thought.
She stood by the tall carved door of the study. Her body tightened. So she had stood a thousand times, her father behind the door. She could even hear his voice, unctuous and rolling with platitudes that meant nothing, for the spirit behind them had never lived. From this vantage point, she could see the spectral curving of the shadowy staircase, winding through the gloom. There was not a sound, not the breath of moving air, not a single opening and shutting of a door. Every door was muffled. Even the street sounds were lost here. She might have been in a chapel full of corpses. On a far distant table, through a vista of great adjoining rooms, she saw a tall vase of white roses. She could smell them. They had the odor of mortality.
She knocked on the door. The sound echoed and re-echoed through the ponderous silence. A grave rich voice bade her enter. She pushed the door open on its velvety hinges. There was the tremendous room she remembered, darkly polished floor, scattered oriental rugs, heavy and enormous tables covered with cloths embroidered in crimson and gold and decorously heaped with religious volumes, more gold-framed portraits of dead bishops on the crimson walls, churchlike chairs covered with crimson plush and enhanced by curving golden arms, high, pointed stained-glass windows admitting purple, blue and scarlet light, and, at the end, a muttering fire beneath a black-marble mantel flanked by black marble columns. Near the fire was the Bishop’s desk, huge, mahogany and polished, covered by a pile of neat paper, a huge Bible, a brass lamp, now burning with a far cold light. She could barely discern the Bishop in his black garments behind the desk. He might have been her father. Then all at once, she knew that he was indeed her father, just as the other had been.
She had thought his secretary might be there, and had hoped this, thinking it would give her a breathing space. But he was not there. The Bishop was alone.
She stood there, near the door, the wretched suffocating sensation gripping her throat. She was a young girl again, called to her father’s study, and hating and fearing him desperately. The lamplight threw a far glimmer on her white face and faintly gleaming fair hair.
The Bishop stared at her, then rose. “Therese, my child, my dear! How delightful to see you!” His warm voice was warmer, enriched by years of good living and excellent wine. He stood beneath the large wooden cross on the wall behind him, over the fire. He was a huge stout man. But beneath that cross he was dwindled and mean.
Therese fixed her eyes on the Cross like a sleepwalker. She came towards it, rather than towards her godfather. Her eyes were distended. The pure and simple Cross, that men had so defamed, had made so the mark of anti-Christ, and everything that was shameful! She wanted to fall beneath it, mutely crying for pardon, mutely pleading for mercy. She felt her hand taken in a big hot grasp, felt something touch her cheek. But she could not take her eyes from the Cross. She sat down near the desk. Her eyes were filling with tears.
The Bishop, who had retired behind his fortress desk again, was concerned. “Therese! What is the matter, my dear? Is Karl ill again?” He leaned towards her, assuming an expression of anxiety.
“He has never been well,” she murmured.
The Bishop made a clucking sound of commiseration, and shook his head. “You received my messages, my flowers, my books, Therese? I wished you to bring Karl to me. I might have given him a small measure of consolation, and hope. But he never liked me. So I could not intrude. You understand, Therese? It is man who must come to God. God cannot come to man.”
Her eyes dropped from the Cross. She regarded the Bishop in a profound and breathless silence. Her eyes grew large and intent in her pale face. She saw him clearly, gross, enormous, fat, sleek and compact. He had a large and ruddy face, with three chins, which rested on a broad black bosom. He apparently had no neck. She saw his tiny brown eyes, alert, opportunistic, crafty and cold. He had a big bulbous nose, faintly shining with oil, a brutal, insensitive nose with the wide flaring nostrils of the coarse man. Beneath that nose was a wide thin mouth, viselike and colorless, a thread of divided flesh. Above all this was a low wide brow and graying cropped hair. He was a Prussian. His head was square and boxlike, like a bull’s. His hands were curiously small, almost effeminate, pudgy and white. On one finger there gleamed a huge signet ring.
Her hatred swelled and rose in her like a consuming fire. Beads of moisture broke out on her upper lip. She clenched her hands fiercely, holding back the torrents of her disgust and hatred, and weary despair. She saw his sensuality, his greed, his avarice, his craftiness, and his all-encompassing coldness. He was Nero, in the livery of Christ.
“I thought,” she said in a strained voice, “that it was your duty to bring God to men, to take Him into strange places, and speak His word in the slaughterhouse, and the houses of pestilence.”
He stared at her blankly, and then with affront. He said, coldly: “Therese, your late revered father often complained of your impiety and lack of understanding, and irreverence. I did not believe it. Now you force me to believe it.”
She did not answer. She lifted her eyes to the Cross again. She smiled a little wildly.
But he was truly fond of her. He could see her plainly now, in the light of the lamp and struggling daylight. He saw that she was extremely ill. Her delicate bones were visible under her thin facial flesh. Her hands were gaunt and trembling. Her sunken temples throbbed. She was still a young woman, but there was a shadow of gray at those temples, blending into the fair hair which he had always greatly admired. He saw the violet shadows under her too-bright eyes, and the pinched blue look of her nostrils.
“My dear child!” he exclaimed, in genuine concern. “You are ill! It has all been too much for you! But surely God has sent you to me today, for comfort. I have been praying for this, and hoping very patiently. ‘Some day,’ I said to myself, ‘my goddaughter will come to me, and remember that I live only to help her.’”
He reached for a crystal decanter of wine, and poured a portion into a tiny golden goblet. He got up and brought it around the desk and held it to her lips. She made a gesture of refusal, then suddenly put her lips to the goblet and drank swiftly. The wine ran through her whole body in tendrils of flame. Courage came back to her, but a deadly hopeless courage.
“Thank you,” she murmured. He stood beside her, the empty goblet in his hand, anxiety wrinkling his fat brows. He saw that she was intolerably thin in her plain black dress. She might have been a widow. He put his fleshy hand on her shoulder and pressed comfortingly.
“My poor liebchen,” he murmured, and he was quite sincere in his anxiety and distress.
Hesitating, he went back to his desk and sat down. He put his fingers together, forming a little tent. Over it, he regarded her gravely.
“Therese, there is nothing I will not do for you,” he said in a changed voice.
He was suddenly taken aback. For she had turned to him fiercely, gripping the desk with her straining hands. He saw the knuckles spring out. He was hypnotized by the passion in her eyes, by her whiteness, which gleamed in the dusk.
“Do you know why I came here!” she cried, and her voice rose almost to a scream. “Not to see you, not for myself! Not even to help any one! Just to look at you, and tell you what you are, to your face, as you will not be told again, until you die!”
“Therese!” he exclaimed, unnerved. He glanced fearfully at the door which led to his secretary’s office. “Therese, be calm! You are hysterical. You do not know what you are saying.”
She flung up her hands with a dying gesture. “I know what I am saying. And in your heart, you know, too!”
She was trembling so violently. Her white mouth opened on a gasp. She began to weep. She pressed her handkerchief to her lips, and clenched her teeth on it. Rings of fire floated before her eyes.
The Bishop half started to his feet. He was no longer a clergyman, but only an average man confronted by an aroused woman. He was filled with terror. “I shall call Louisa,” he muttered. He rarely thought of his wife, the silly, impotent goose! But now he thought of her with relief. There was something ludicrous in his dismay, in his fallen mouth and frightened eyes.
Therese struggled to control herself.
“No, do not call Louisa,” she said, forcing her voice to quietness. “I do not want to see Louisa. I only want to see you.”
Doubtful, he regarded her intently. Then, seeing that she was becoming calmer, he slowly lowered himself into his chair again. He had to grasp the arms, and lower himself gently. Too rich living had made him a victim of the inevitable complaint of such men.
“My dear,” he said gently, “I do not understand you. I do not understand your attack. I can only believe that you are unnerved by Karl’s illness. Perhaps I should have come to you, in spite of all refusals. You must forgive my negligence. Believe me, Therese, I can only repeat there is nothing I will not do for you.”
She dropped her hands from her lips. Her flesh took on a marble-like hue. She leaned forward to regard him more clearly.
“I heard a story today,” she said, in a strangely quiet voice. “I know the woman only slightly. I dislike her. I despise her. But in despising her, I despise myself. And you. I promised her that I would appeal to you for help.…”
He was much relieved. He made another tent of his hands. He smiled benignly.
“Of course, Therese. You have only to ask. I help all who appeal to me, as you must know. And the appeal is doubly important when you ask it.”
He was affronted by her suddenly cynical and derisive smile.
“I hope you are not a liar,” she, said, the smile broadening on her face. “Forgive me, but I am quite sincere. You see, the woman is Madame Henriette Cot, one of your parishioners.”
The ominous silence which followed her words seemed to fill the great room like dark wings. The Bishop drew a long sharp breath. His benign smile faded. His face became dull and brutish, and a little fearful.
Then he said: “But—but what have you, Therese Erlich, to do with—with such a woman? A Jew? A cheap shopkeeper?” But he spoke as though preoccupied, and more than a trifle shocked. Color seeped into the folds of his flesh. His eyes shifted. “How could you know such a woman? How could she appeal to you?” His voice sharpened into outrage.
Therese’s lips twitched convulsively. “Once I should have asked myself that question, too. But now I know that one woman’s suffering is mine also. That is why I am appealing to you. She has told me the whole story. She thinks you can help her husband.”
The Bishop’s eyes dropped to his tenting fingers. His social sense was insulted. He was filled with brutal anger.
“I am amazed,” he muttered. Then on a rising note of wrath: “How dare she come to you—that person! It is not to be borne. A cheap …”
“You took her money, and her husband’s money,” said Therese, relentlessly. “Or perhaps, mein Herr Bishop, money is not cheap to you?”
His ruddy color became purple. He regarded her with little sparkling eyes like an inflamed boar’s.
“Therese! You are outrageous! I can only tell myself that you do not understand. Her husband is a Jewish criminal. He smuggled currency out of our Fatherland, in express defiance of the law, in order to aid other Jewish criminals.…”
Therese glanced at the Cross. “There was once another ‘Jewish criminal,’” she murmured.
“Do not talk like that, such blasphemy!” He shifted violently on his seat, then winced at the pain. The pain increased his rage. “I shall not argue with you! You are impossible! You have forgotten yourself, your position—everything …”
“It is not I who have forgotten,” she said, steadfastly, looking at him with her quiet shining eyes. “It is you who have forgotten. You, a Bishop, a minister of God.” Nothing could have equalled the scorn in her voice. “These people were Christians. They were among your largest contributors. You accepted their money. They were part of your flock.” Her voice changed: “Shepherd, where are your sheep?”
He was silent. He regarded her over his hands with brutal fury. A look of murder, and something else, stood nakedly in his eyes. He tried to make his voice calm and judicious over his turbulent violence.
“Therese, I need not explain to you. But I shall. In your overwrought condition, I feel impelled to talk to you, though I am afraid it will do no good. You are hysterical.
“It is no part of a minister’s place to intrude into politics. I—I am well thought of among the Nazi Party because I have prudently refrained from interference with the State. I am not like those of the Roman Catholic persuasion,” he added, with a venomous sneer. “I am no busybody priest. I render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God, the things which are God’s. That is a Christly doctrine which the Roman Catholic Church refuses to acknowledge. They interfere. They whine. They accuse, They complain. They kick against the pricks. They insist upon contradicting, if the policies of the new State touch their precious doctrines. I know of priests who have, out of sentimentality, or worse, smuggled wanted criminals and Jews out of Germany. They deserve their punishment. I, myself, know what it is bidden me to do. It is not the business of Christ’s Church to interfere in temporal affairs. Our concern is the concern of the spirit. And so, because I have observed this sacred doctrine of detachment, and concerned myself entirely with spiritual affairs, I am on good terms with every one.”
Therese interrupted. “I agree that it is a safe, and pleasant thing, to be on good terms with murderers. It is very comfortable. And perhaps, profitable.”
His nostrils flared redly. He clenched his teeth. His voice was stifled when he spoke. “I repeat, you are hysterical. I shall ignore your wild words.
“I owe a duty to the new State, to Germany. It is not in my province, nor could I hold it with my conscience, to help criminals. This man and this woman are criminals.…”
“Because they are Jews?” asked Therese, with her bitter smile.
He shifted again, violently, and winced.
“Do not be absurd! As if that mattered!”
“It apparently must matter. You, have segregated the non-Aryans in your church.”
The purple tint rose more deeply through his jowls. “It was by request of the others in my parish.”
“And you, a minister of Christ, could accede to that! That un-Christian, that depraved, that degraded request! You could so pander to degeneracy and madness, you, shepherd of Christ! You, shepherd of the Jew Jesus!” She looked at him straightly. “I do not believe your parishioners asked that. I believe you did it on your own initiative. Or, perhaps, at the demand of the Nazis.”
“You do not know what you are saying, Therese. You do not know how dangerous your words are!” His rage was lost in his fright. He glared at the door of his secretary’s room. “Do you not know that you are talking treason? But I shall not let you involve me in this.”
He stood up, quivering like a great black jelly, dismissing her.
But she did not move. She laughed at him, thinly, wildly. He stood beneath the Cross, and the more she looked at him, and the Cross, the wilder she laughed.
“You are afraid you will lose favor, mein Herr Bishop? You are afraid the Nazis will not like you, if they hear of this? They will not believe your protestations of hatred for the defenseless and the persecuted. They will not believe that you are sincere when you deliver up your people to betrayal. They will not believe you are a good Nazi.”
“Go! Go, you shameless woman!”
She stood up. She faced him across his desk. “I shall not go until I say what I came to say.
“There are many ministers and clergymen like you in Germany, and the world. Expedient, greedy, lying, hating, anti-Christ. Betrayers and mockers of God. Delivering the sheep, with unctuous fat words, to the slaughterer. Leading the world deeper and deeper into a pit of hopelessness and death. Singing the song of Christ, as you drag the people into the morass, holding up the lighted Cross over the abyss. Compromising with evil, for your self-gain and your safety. Betrayers. Murderers! Beasts!”
Her voice sank, became almost whispering, despairing.
“If the world dies, it will be your fault. Its blood is on your hands. God will not be mocked.”
She turned away from him, as though he were a loathsome sight. He remained where he was, shaking with rage and apoplexy. She went across the polished floor, dragging her feet, her head bent. She had reached the door. Her hand was on the handle. Then she heard him scream at her, mockingly, furiously:
“You can tell your Jewess friend that no one can help her husband, now! He hung himself a month ago, in Dachau Camp, a fitting end for his crimes!”
She turned to him, slowly. She looked at him in a terrible silence. He stood beneath the Cross. He was in shadow. But the light of the lamp, piercing its top, shone on the Cross, so that it seemed to illumine all the room.
She was driven away in a dream, in a nightmare, leaning back in her car, her eyes closed. She felt the motion of the car, but did not know where she was. Then she opened her eyes, tapped on the glass which separated her from Frederick.
“Take me to the house of the Chief Rabbi of Berlin,” she said, her voice hoarse and faint.
Frederick was so astounded that he brought the car to an abrupt stop. He stared at her over his shoulder, his eyes goggling like a fish’s.
“I said, take me to the house of the Chief Rabbi of Berlin,” she repeated. She fixed him with her eyes, and her face was grim.
“But, Frau Doctor, that is incredible,” said the young man.
She sat back on her seat, and waited. He spluttered. He muttered something to himself. He swung the car about with a vicious jerk. “I shall rid myself of him today,” she thought.
Life came back to her beaten body. She saw nothing, though she gazed through the windows. Then she saw the bronzed green dome of the city’s chief synagogue. Its steps were smeared with obscene yellow signs. She felt an impulse to vomit. The car stopped at the large comfortable house next door. Frederick did not get out of the car to open the door and help her alight. His neck was crimson. His shoulders were ominously set.
She got out of the car herself, and calmly walked to the house. She lifted the knocker. It sounded within, hollow and frightening. A little maid came to the door, opening it fearfully. She stared without speaking at Therese. Therese gave her her card. “I must see the Rabbi at once,” she said imperatively.
The girl took her card, leaving Therese on the doorstep. Therese pushed open the door and entered the warm dark hallway. Terror dwelt here. She could smell it. But under it, she could smell fortitude and peace.
The Rabbi, holding her card, came towards her, smiling a little nervously, bewildered, but very polite. “Frau Doctor Erlich,” he murmured. He was a little man, bent and aged with suffering. His eyes were beautiful and steadfast.
She held out her hand to him.
“Come with me,” she said gently, weeping a little. “There is some one waiting in my house, who needs your help and comfort.”