Jakob Wassermann

“ And this question he addressed to Christian, as though Christian were guilty of the demands of those who had once been willing slaves, of the empty halls, the extinguished furnaces, the silent hammers—guilty, somehow, because of his presence in those rooms amid harlots and murderers, mad and sick men, and in all those haunts of human vermin. Rage quivered up in him, one of those rare attacks that all but robbed him of consciousness. His eyes seemed filled with blood; he sought a sacrifice and a creature to make atonement, and observed the dog gnawing at a rug. ”

“ Johanna interrupted him drily. “I am no support for any one’s opinions.”
“Never mind,” said Voss, somewhat depressed. “It is a vision, a vision born of the sufferings of religious souls. That poverty, that sacred poverty is unthinkable except upon a Christian foundation. Whoever would dare to attempt it, and to turn backward the overwhelming stream of life in a distorted world, amid distorted conditions, where poverty means dirt and crime and degradation—such an one would only create evil and challenge humanity itself.” ”

“ Horror had reached its supreme point. The fate of the immemorial race of man was sealed. And yet—the fact that this man had come hither, had had the impulse to reveal himself, that he sat there in the darkness and writhed and spoke of monstrous things and plunged into the great deeps that he had opened—in this very fact Christian perceived a shimmer of most mysterious hope, and a first faint ray of dawn upon a hitherto unknown, uncertain path.
Niels Heinrich continued. Slowly the Jewess had understood and looked at him with her great child’s eyes. ”

“ Every step has been a step toward guilt, every yearning has been guilt, and every stirring of gratitude. Every hour of delight has been guilt, every enjoyment an impoverishment, and every rise a fall.”
“Blasphemer,” Susan murmured. “Pride and satiety cause you to sin against yourself and your fate.”
“How you torment me,” Eva answered. “How all of you torment me—men and women. How sterile I become through you. How your voices torture me, and your eyes and words and thoughts. You lie so frivolously; you would not listen, and truth is hateful to you. Who are you? Who are you, Susan? ”

“ Ruth had heard of this. She had been in Heinzen’s flat. She was filled by what she had seen, and gave Christian a vivid account of her impressions.
Christian looked at her wonderingly. “Ruth,” he said, “little Ruth, those are such difficult matters. If you once begin to be absorbed by them, life itself is too short. I always thought that if one succeeded in quite exhausting but a single human soul, one would know a great deal and could well be content. But life is like the sea. Don’t you have to think of it every minute? And how is it that you are always so full of brightness? ”

“ In its lacerated body there streams a darkness into which one would like to plunge in order to be born again. A primitive breath is there, and chaos; there the elements thunder and the most terrible dream becomes reality, an epic reality of immemorial ages. Of such life I once had no perception, except in some great marble in which a nameless woe had become rigid and eternal. I feel as though I were looking back on this scene from the height of centuries to come or from a star, and as though everything were vision. ”

“ And in this vain deception you think you will find what is deepest in the world—the Saviour, your vision of the Saviour? Isn’t it as though you had delivered yourself into the power of falseness itself?”
“No,” Weikhardt answered, “it is not. You don’t see far enough. Things cohere together far more closely than you think. One body, one element, one stream—each is more interwoven with all things than you realize. The soulless emptiness in Sybil Scharnitzer’s breast is the reflection of some light, and to me personally it is a concrete thing. ”

“ The neck of Niels Heinrich was like an emptied tube, slack and quivering.
Their eyes met. Words died. The air roared.
Suddenly Christian blew out the lamp. The sudden darkness was like the thud of an explosion. “You were right,” he said. “The light would betray us to any passerby. Now we are quite secure, from any outside thing, at all events. What happens here now concerns no one but ourselves. You can do as you choose. You can draw your revolver as you did the other day and fire. ”

“ Once more he heard Christian’s clear and gentle voice. “You wanted to fetter me through my inheritance; you sought to buy me with it. I came to see that one must escape that snare. One must break even with the love of those who proclaim: ‘You are ours, our property, and must continue what we have begun.’ I could not be your heir; I could not continue what you had begun, so I was in a snare. All whom I knew lived in delight and all lived in guilt; yet though there was so much guilt, no one was guilty. There was, in fact, a fundamental mistake in the whole structure of life. ”

“ Johanna read this letter innumerable times, and each time [17] with a pang of intolerable shame, each time on the verge of tears. It made her feel so exposed and affronted. And then she would burrow again and again into the artifice of those stilted sentences. Frightened and desperate, and yet with a stabbing curiosity, she asked: What could have happened to make Christian, him whom she trusted immeasurably, whom she knew to be the soul of delicacy and reserve—what could have happened to make him callously expose the most intimate things in life to the treachery and hypocrisy of this man? ”

“ She loaned it to Rehmer, who was poor as a church mouse and needed new clothes. The confusion grew and grew.
But it did not touch her. Her mood was exalted and festive, her gait a little careless, her head charmingly bent a little to one side. Her soft, deer-like eyes were full of expectation and delight and just a shade of cunning.
Crammon could not possibly approve this state of affairs. It was a topsyturvy world, in which all rules were trodden under foot. A very dainty, very pretty foot, no doubt, but the result was enough to frighten any one. ”

“ She had so deep a longing for some human touch, some friendly, [235] handsome, kindly word, that she would not admit even to herself how far it might lead her. She only had a dim vision of herself sitting in that rear room in Stolpische Street, waiting for Christian many hours, whole nights, it mattered not how long, but just to wait and to be there at his coming, to smile with her lips though her heart were weeping—she knew that condition so well—without explanation or confessions or complaints, as is the custom among well-bred people who settle their inner difficulties in silence and alone. ”

“ Overhearing her question Eva continued: “Fear grows from guilt. Look you, I wander about here, and am guilty. I open my garment because it binds me, and feel my guilt. I stretch out my hand after one of those blue blossoms, and know my guilt. I think and think, and brood and brood, and cannot fathom the reason. The innermost, ultimate reason—I cannot find it.”
“Guilt?” Susan stammered in her consternation. “Guilty? You? Child, what are you saying? You are ill! Dearest, sweetest, you are ill!” She kneeled at Eva’s feet, embraced her delicate body, and looked up at her with swimming eyes. ”

“ Judith lapsed into sombre silence.
But from that hour Letitia was tormented by a secret curiosity, and this curiosity forbade forgetfulness. She had lost her way. Oh, she had lost her way long ago, and daily she stumbled farther into the pathless wild. Lost, confused, entangled,—thus did she seem to herself, and she had many minutes of a fleeting melancholy. All the things that happened in her life became too much for her, and yet all the trivialities of the day disappeared as water does in sand, leaving no form, no echo, no purpose. ”

“ At that the joy of the king’s daughter grew so great that her own face became comely and delightful, and every trace of ugliness and coarseness vanished. But when at last the Victorious and Perfect showed her the golden radiance of His majestic body, the devout ecstasy felt by the king’s daughter caused her own body to be changed to a perfection so divine that nothing comparable to it could be found in all the world. In all His splendour the Victorious and Perfect appeared before her; her joyous faith reached its utmost height, and her innermost being became like to the soul of an angel. ”

“ Amadeus Voss said to Christian: “I’ll tell you exactly how you feel. You are like a man who wants to harden himself to bear cold, and suddenly strips off his garments; or like one who [42] has never drunk whiskey nor even smelt it, and suddenly pours down a bottle of the vilest sort. But you are freezing in the cold, and reeling from the liquor. And that is not the worst. The worst is that you feel a secret horror. And how could it be otherwise? The elements of which you are made are in bitter conflict with your will. You are full of horror and will not confess it to yourself. ”

“ He was obviously seeking Christian Wahnschaffe; but in the act of gazing he forgot to look, and his glance became a stare. He grasped the back of a chair. Exhaustion seemed to overtake him. When he was about to sit down, he reeled and half-whirled about, and would have fallen but for the support of the back of the chair. Now Johanna saw clearly that he was neither mad nor drunk. He was a human being who had been robbed of strength and speech and almost vision and consciousness by an experience of the supremest horror. ”