25

They climbed up the immense balustraded stairs together, the two silent and hopeless women. Therese saw, as always, that the alert old beldame, Frau Reiner, had her room door open, in order that she might miss nothing from her cynical eyrie. Therese thought this was too much; she had never liked the old woman, and had shrunk even from thinking of her since the last time she had seen her. Now she said to herself: I really cannot compose myself to see her or speak to her. There was no sound within the avid room; perhaps she could slip by the door unseen. But she had hardly approached it, to pass it, when the old woman, who must really have been able to see around corners, called out, shrilly:

“Is that you, Therese?”

Therese sighed. Even in that miserable moment, she exchanged a wryly amused glance with Maria. She approached the door with as much dignity as she could summon.

The old woman sat near the dimming window, caparisoned and jewelled and perfumed as ever, a queen on her throne. She looked at Therese cunningly.

“Ah,” she said, in her high cracked voice. “The impeccable gnädige frau!”

Therese had always had a gift for making even the most blatant irony complimentary to herself. She had always smiled serenely at the old woman’s sallies, which were never too subtly barbed. But she had no serenity, no composure, today. She said with quiet stiffness: “Good afternoon, Frau Reiner.”

The old woman was silent. She stared at Therese with her sly wanton eyes. She pursed up her lips like an old monkey. She was indeed an old female monkey in her finery, and her elaborate coiffure. “Hum,” she muttered, surlily, after her long scrutiny. “So life has become too much for you, eh?”

“Very much too much,” answered Therese, in a low still voice.

The old woman was silent again, but her eyes brightened maliciously. She seemed to be experiencing some inner and malignant mirth, without mercy but with complete understanding. Then she said: “It is about time, you impeccable lady. But I am afraid it is too late.”

“Come, Therese,” said Maria, impatiently.

But Therese said: “It is late. But not too late.”

Again there was a pause. Then Frau Reiner motioned imperiously. “Come in, Therese. I want to talk to you. Maria, your precious Kurt will wait. He will not die today.” She chuckled darkly. “He will not die until he has seen his brother. Now, I shall not be crossed. Come in, Therese. Sit down near me. I like to look at the faces of the guilty. They are very amusing.” She added: “No, Maria, go away. I do not want you here just now. Your appearance and your conversation do not stimulate me these days. Go and smooth your husband’s pillow.”

The two women were alone. Therese sat near the beldame. The pale waning light lay on her colorless face. Frau Reiner studied her closely, saw the quiet folded hands, the suffering gray eyes. Even in her anguish there was a calm and dignity about Therese, or fortitude that could not be completely shaken. Frau Reiner shook her head, as though with angry denial.

“I have told you: I have always despised you aristocrats. But I admit you do not go to pieces; you refuse to be naked. That is the best, and the worst of you. You loathe emotion. When things are bad, that is a crime. But when they are hopeless, it is a virtue. But we plebeians, we vulgar, shriek and cry out all the time, and beat our breasts. You have always loathed us for this, have you not? It is very humiliating that at the last the world must depend upon you.”

Frau Reiner regarded her with cunning reflection.

Therese said nothing.

“But there always comes a time when you realize that it must be all out, total, for either good or evil. At those times you do not hesitate, while we shrink back and hesitate, and whine. Perhaps there is something to your old belief that in the final moments it is the aristocrat who will save the day. What are you doing, Therese, to save the day?”

“I do what I can,” said Therese, smiling faintly. “I realize, as you say, that in these days it must be all out, for good or evil. There can be no half measures.”

“Hum,” said the old woman, thoughtfully. Then: “How is my Karl?”

“I think he is dying,” said Therese, quietly.

Frau Reiner stared at her incredulously. “And you can say that so calmly, with such composure?”

“It is because I see that now not even Karl must matter much. I am doing what I can for him. I am waiting for him to see me. But in the meantime, there is nothing I can do of any consequence for him. I do other things, while I am waiting.”

“And the ‘other things,’ I presume, concern yourself?”

“Quite often, yes.”

The beldame grunted. “That ought to keep you very busy.” She looked through the window. “I have lived a long time. I have seen madness before. But it has been a localized madness. Now the whole world is insane. Once I thought: ‘It is always the same story. There is never any difference.’ But now I know that there is a difference in these days. Men are universally corrupt. In an era where there has been so much said about mercy, civilization, goodness, decency and honor, there are none of these things. Never, in the history of the world, has there been such a universal absence of them. At one time, a localized pogrom against the Jews aroused worldwide indignation, oppression of the innocent in one country made other countries outraged. But today, persecution and torment of the helpless only make other countries envious. They only awaken their lust to do the same. I tell you, we shall see outrages beyond imaginations, and the world will be indifferent, or emulate them.”

Therese did not speak. The old woman played with her rings and chains with a sudden impotent frenzy.

“The souls of men are dead, or decaying. They are full of apathy. The world is a graveyard, a house of plague. Sometimes at night, I can see the streets of Berlin, the streets of all of Germany, even the large countryside. I see the specters of pestilence wandering through all of them. The pestilence will not remain here. It will spread throughout the world. For the world is ripe for it. It is full of corruption. What is to happen in the coming years will be too frightful to contemplate. But it will be because of the disease in the minds of men, the faithlessness, the cruelty, the greed and the hatred.”

“I know,” murmured Therese. The suffocating sensation seized upon her throat once more, and with it came the old impotence, the old despair.

The old woman gazed at her crucifix, illuminated by the ever-burning candle. “‘A faithless and adulterous generation,’” she muttered. “Yes, yes, these must be the days spoken of by Saint Matthew. It is a terrible thing. I hope I shall not live to see the end. After all, there must be some mercy for the old. I did not make these days. I have done some wicked things, but I never thought it did not matter. Men, now, do evil and all manner of vilenesses, and are not only not ashamed, but are cynically satisfied and triumphant. They are not even hypocritical about it. There is no refuge. There is no corner of the world where just men can be found. You can find only disease of the mind, and leprosy of the soul.”

The autumn sun had moved behind a cloud. The air was full of the smell of ashes. Desolation enveloped the streets outside, the atmosphere in the house. The desolation pervaded Therese. Her flesh felt as though it were covered with dust. In the gloom the little candle appeared to burn brighter, with a reddish glow, and the crucifix was the only vivid thing in the darkroom.

The old woman’s face was a mask of somberness, its thousand wrinkles a parchment of melancholy. She looked at the crucifix for a long silent moment.

“Burn on, burn on, little candle,” she muttered, almost inaudibly. “But soon, you too, will go out, and the Thing you light will be lost in the darkness, too.”

“No!” Therese’s voice was loud and echoing, not frightened, but resolute. “It shall not go out! Nothing can make it go out! Only a few candles left, but they shall not go out!”

The old woman burst into a sharp and bitter chuckle. Her face shrank and withered until it suddenly resembled the head of Gilu.

“You are wrong, Therese. They will go out. Do you know what the world seems to me, in these days? A tiny prison, with shut doors, and barred windows, and inside, madmen. Soon, you will hear their howling on every wind. Listen: you can hear the howling in Germany. Soon every corner of the prison will be howling, too. Where will you hide, Therese?”

“In myself,” said Therese. Her gray eyes shone with a strange light. “Just as others are biding in themselves. Nothing can touch us then. We shall keep our own candles burning, even though they kill us.”

She stood up. The old woman sat deep in her cynical and cryptic silence, the web of cunning thick over her shrivelled features.

“Even in Doomsday,” said Therese, with soft steadfastness, “we still have that one refuge: ourselves. No treachery, no faithlessness, no outrage, can penetrate there. Not even death.”

“Even death,” repeated Frau Reiner, hoarsely. She leaned forward a little, and her eyes were like searching daggers reaching to Therese’s face. “Even death?”

“Even death.”

The silence rang with pregnant meaning. The old woman’s clasped hands lay on her knee; her many jewels sparkled in the candlelight. She no longer grinned sardonically at Therese. When she spoke at last, it was with no jibe:

“Go, Therese. Karl will come back to you, now.”

She found Maria waiting for her at the end of the long wide hallway. Maria was sitting in an attitude of complete desolation in a tall, high-backed chair. Her elbow rested on an arm; her hand covered her face. Her whole large flabby body seemed collapsed together, as though her bones had softened. Above her head burned a single yellowish light, and by it, Therese saw that the other woman’s mass of hair was thickly streaked with gray.

She put her hand on Maria’s bulky shoulder. “I am ready to see Kurt now,” she said gently. Maria lifted her head. Her face was ravaged and exhausted. She rose without a word, and opened the door to her right.

The vast bedroom floated in gloom. Beside the bed one dim lamp burned. The windows were shrouded in silk and crimson velvet. The great bed, itself, was a shadowy white island in a dark sea. A nurse, stiff and starched, rose at the entrance of the ladies.

“Is he better?” whispered Maria, and her flabby face quivered.

“The Herr Professor is no worse,” answered the nurse. She smiled respectfully at Therese, who had approached the bed silently.

The nurse and Maria went into a whispered consultation, withdrawing a little. But Therese stood by the bed and looked down at its sleeping occupant. She was profoundly startled and shocked. She had been so shocked at her glimpse of Kurt in the University library. But today her shock was deeper, and more despairing. The face on the white pillow was the face of-a corpse, yellowed, emaciated, hollow and still. Like the face of the dead, it had a secret nobility and haughty peace, withdrawn and impassive. Approaching dissolution had ennobled and refined it, and for the first time Therese was aware of the great resemblance between Kurt and Karl. This might have been Karl’s own head, lying there so motionlessly, with its closed eyes sunken in webbed, empurpled shadows. The wide mouth, once so brutal, was now cold and stern and ascetic. His nose, once so blunt and thickened, was large and thin and chiselled. The hollows of the cheeks gave the whole face a contemplative and classic expression, as though behind the attenuated mask of flesh there were thoughts far removed from humanity and the world.

He hardly breathed. On his left temple there was a huge bruised spot, swollen and veined. She saw how one vein throbbed and leaped, as though with unbearable suffering. She had thought she had lost the capacity to feel horror, but horror, sharp and scalding, swamped her, made her mind reel with its impact. “No, no,” she whispered, aloud, as though to deny the ghastliness of some terrible evidence.

Her whisper seemed to arouse the dying man. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his eyelids opened. His eyes, dim yet feverish, fixed themselves upon her. She bent over him, tears on her cheeks. “Kurt?” she murmured, and touched his forehead. He continued that mournful and fixed regard, as though not recognizing her. Maria crept to the other side of the bed. She looked at nothing but her husband, and her soul, imbedded though it had been in her gross flesh for so long, stood in her eyes.

Then the dry and shrunken lips moved. A pale light, like the reflection of a dying candle, passed over his face. “Karl?” he whispered, imploringly. He tried to move. His struggle was an awful thing to behold. He tried to move upward towards her. Veins, like purple ropes, sprang out on his thin neck. “Karl?” he said again, and this time the sound was a hoarse cry. A glisten of sweat broke out on his livid face. The nurse came to him, tried to force him back on his pillows. But he ignored her. The whole summoning of his dying body for strength resisted her efforts. He was drowning, and Therese was the only one who could rescue him.

She could not endure those hopeful, those crying eyes, those imploring and sunken eyes. She put her hand on his shoulder; it was like touching bare bone.

“He is coming, Kurt. He has been ill, but now he is better, and is coming to you soon.”

She spoke aloud, quietly and strongly. He continued to gaze at her; he panted shrilly.

“Kurt!” cried Maria in an anguished voice, approaching him.

But he saw no one but Therese. The two looked at each other in a quite dreadful silence. Between his opened lips Therese could see the glisten of his teeth, as he struggled for breath. His eyes burned in their distended sockets. She could see the dilated pupil, fevered and glowing.

Then slowly, he fell back on his pillows again. He smiled. It was like the grimace of a death’s-head. But there was peace in it.

“Yes, yes,” he whispered. “You do not lie to me, Therese.”

He closed his eyes. He seemed to sleep.

Therese led the weeping Maria from the room, her arm about her. The nurse followed them into the hall, and softly closed the door.

“Does no one know what is wrong?” asked Therese. “His physicians?”

The nurse shook her head significantly. “They say it is nothing physical. They do not know. It is his mind.…”

The pathetic mind of the innocent. Karl and Kurt. A whole nation of Karls and Kurts. Perhaps a whole world. Everywhere the innocent, deceived, bereft, betrayed, were dying.

Maria and Therese went downstairs together, blindly.