“Johann,” he wanted to cry, “child of my hopes, what has become of you? Where did you go? Pity, a little pity, in God’s name.” But there was no pity in that child. His soul was sicker than any flesh could be. Herr Graf trembled to think of its fate before God’s judgment.
“Can’t you see there is no room to pass?” asked Johann, stubbornly lingering. “Let me alone a minute, can’t you?”
“Turn back, then, Johann,” said Herr Graf, calmly, “turn back.”
The chair was whirled about so sharply he was thrown to one side. “Don’t try to kill me, Johann,” he said in an ominous voice. “My God has promised me that I shall see Germany again. Defy Him if you dare!”
“Keeping me penniless as a beggar,” Johann burst out in a fury. “Where is the allowance you promised me? Why must I ask you for money even to go to the barber?”
“What would you do with money on this ship, Johann? It would be only another temptation set in your way. I will provide the necessaries, nephew, but I will not nourish your lusts and appetites. Your soul is too precious to risk in such a way, Johann. I know too well what use you would make of money here.” He drew a long, rattling sigh, the bloody phlegm came up in his throat and he spat into his paper box.
“That’s what you get for gabbing all the time,” said Johann, “you miserly old Jew.”
Herr Graf looked at his hands, emaciated, the knuckles mere knobs, the fingers so weak and limp they lay flat or curved as they fell, and thought how not so long ago they would have had the strength to thrash this boy as he deserved. For such as he there was only one remedy—to mortify the flesh until the hard knot of the will was reached and dissolved—ah, a task he might have done so well, and would have so delighted in, the saving of this now ungovernable soul. But God, who was taking away his life little by little, meant for him to suffer all affliction, all possible abasement of mind and flesh to balance the great gift he had conferred upon his spirit. From the very moment he had learned that his body was beginning in earnest to die, like a stream of pure light the divine knowledge had descended upon him that, as recompense for his death, God had given him the power of healing others. In this power his soul had been eased of its fears. To his shame now he remembered that he once feared death, he had cringed abjectly as a condemned criminal at the sight of the ax, he had prayed endlessly and incoherently, begging God to reverse his inalterable law in his, Wilibald Graf’s favor; to send a miracle; to punish him for his sins in any other way, no matter how cruel, but only to let him live, even as he was, in pain, in decay, in despair—to let him live.
He, a philosopher and teacher of philosophy, lecturer in universities and before learned societies, had done this terrible thing. When? In his other world, his other life. All his false wisdom had dropped away from him like soiled, outworn rags, he had stood naked as the newly born in the steady stream of cleansing light, and the softest most loving voice he had ever heard, he had not dreamed of such love in a voice, spoke within his ear. “Heal the sick,” the voice had said, with the simplicity and directness which is the language of true revelation. And from that day he had gone about his work, knowing the truth; so long as he was able to keep upon his feet, he was to go among the sick and touch them and counsel them and heal them in God’s name.
It had not been easy, for the perverse human wills of his family and friends had put every obstacle in his way. It seemed almost—and this was so dreadful a thought he hardly dared give it room in his brain—as if they bore some malice or evil intention toward the dying, as if they did not wish the sick to be healed and well again, like themselves. A friend of his sister’s, a willful woman, would not allow him to touch her little grandson who was suffering from bowel complaint. “He needs his rest, he must not be disturbed,” she said angrily, and the child had died. But he had saved his sister’s servant, an Indian woman who had been in labor for three days, until her eyes were mere pits in her face, and her lips were blackened and dry. “It is not decent for an Indian woman to let a man see her having a baby,” they told him. “A modest woman would rather die!” At last he had gone in boldly, pushing them aside, asserting a man’s authority over them, and they gave way before him as God meant them to. He had laid his hands upon the distorted suffering belly where the child kicked and heaved in his struggles to be bom, called upon God to admit this new soul to life and to His heaven at last, and the child was born safely with three tremendous tearing pains in a very few minutes. He had breathed secretly into the mouth of an infant drowning with pneumonia, and from his own ruined lungs had poured life into the child’s.
Oh, there were many: after he had been sent to the hospital, he had been forced to do good by stealth, for the doctors were bitterly jealous of his power, and hindered him by rules, forbidding him under pain to visit the dying in order to touch them and give them life again. But God guided him. He knew from God in what place and at what hour he might find the one who needed him most, and no one was afraid of him because he always said at once, “God bless you, and make you well,” and then he touched them lightly, just barely with the tips of his fingers, and was away before some prowling nurse or interne should discover him and put an end to his work. Rarely in the hospital did he have the joy of seeing his dear resurrected ones in health and strength—he was watched too closely, he could not risk a second visit. But there was one: the girl with the red hair in two braids lying behind the death screen with eyes fixed upward, her face livid and mouth half-open, burning to his touch like living fire.
“God will make you well, do you believe?” he asked her, and from the scorched mouth scarcely moving he heard the words, “I believe.” Oh blessed child of faith. He had seen that girl, recognizable by her two long red braids flying and shining in the sun, leaving the hospital with her happy family not a week later. “The doctors will think they did it, but we shall know the truth,” he had told her.
These were his memories, and this his recompense, and what were his own sufferings but a divine grace since they had been made useful to others? What was death? Why had he been afraid? There remained the greatest reward of all: immortality for the suffering bewildered soul. Immortality. It is not a matter of belief, what is there to believe? How can anyone form even an idle wish around anything so infinitely formless? It is a matter of faith—no, a hope, a fixed changeless longing for a continued existence in another place, under another appearance, in a different element; continued existence at least until all questions are answered, and all unfinished things are done. Is it not fairly a certainty that this is a divine impulse sent from God to guide us to Him?… And yet, this longing may prove to be merely a motive power of man’s present existence, an intellectual concept related to his animal instinct of self-preservation; man loves himself so dearly he cannot relinquish willingly one atom of himself to oblivion. Perhaps the whole idea then originates in the will, that source of self-love, and is simply one more of its various and deluded activities. And what about the four-footed beasts, the feathered, the finny? Perhaps they have a corresponding source of vitality in them; or better, they do not even suspect they shall not live forever precisely as they are. Ah, there’s happiness for you, there is the lucky state of being.
Herr Graf opened his eyes with a leap of the nerves, thrilling with pain all through: he must have dozed and dreamed, there was some terrible nightmare at the edge of his memory. Weakness and despair almost overwhelmed him. “Johann, Johann,” he muttered, his tongue thick, “water, water,” and then, “My God, my God,” but the prayer, whatever it was, stopped on his lips. He did not dare to pray, he did not know what to pray for. The soul after death may discover, may wake in morning radiance, to a bliss it is now unable to imagine, and no matter how mysterious its longings now, it will understand everything then. Ah, maybe heaven itself is only this: that Wilibald Graf may never once remember he was Wilibald Graf, miserable lost pilgrim in this terrible world. Is that what is meant, perhaps, by the blessed words “forgiveness of sins”?
“Water, water, Johann, my sweet child,” he said again, but there was no answer. He felt the slight swaying motion of the chair being wheeled again smoothly after a long pause. As they turned the corner the dark shadow of his nephew’s head and shoulders fell across his own, lay upon his knees and stretched before them upon the deck. The silence stretched too until it broke with the strain of its own hatred.
“You want water?” asked Johann, with false solicitude, mimicking the tone of kindness with elaborate cruelty. Gathering himself, he spat out his poison: “Well, wait until you get it, you stinking old corpse.”
“Shame on you, Johann,” said his uncle calmly. “I leave you to God.”
Without warning, in silence, Johann spun the chair around violently, guided it swiftly through the main salon, down the stairs and through the long passageway into their cabin with its bitter smells. At the door he simply gave the chair a shove through; it rolled to the opposite wall and fetched up with a bump. Herr Graf had not protested, nor even turned his head. The chair slithered a little sideways, and in a flash of fearful hope Johann saw his closed eyes and dropped jaw like a newly dead man’s. Slamming the door behind him, he raced back to the deck, his stomach so sunken and tight between fury and terror, his heart pounding so heavily he could hardly hear, his eyes dancing so that he was nearly blinded. Yet he could see Concha, not clearly, but enough. He halted then and moved to the rail and stared at her; she stared back in perfect stillness, meaning with her look to motion him to her. He did not move, and with his hot, fixed eyes he resembled uncommonly a famished tiger regarding its prey, lips drawn back, teeth bared. Concha had seen this look often and had never been dismayed by it. On the contrary, it exhilarated her, lightened for her often her rather dull occupation, to find a young one full of fire and awkward eagerness. She was young too, the youngest of her company, not yet hardened altogether, and she was not at all deceived by this unhappy boy, standing there gazing at her like something lurking behind a bush, slouched over a little, hands in pockets, trying to carry it off, longing to be a man.
Concha walked towards him smiling, and without hesitation held out her arms to him while she was not yet within reaching distance. Johann took one bound towards her, seized her waist accurately at arm’s length, and strode away with her in the dance, still with the look of one caught between flood and fire. Concha put her nose to his chest inside his open shirt front and took a deep luxurious breath. He smelled like a clean baby, with rich undersmells of a real male. She took a good hold of him then; her breast rose high under her thin shabby black dress, her neck arched; she preened and strutted and murmured like a pigeon. Head back, eyes raised and shining, she smiled at him deeply, gave him a long heart-shaking look, then dropped softly against him the full length of her body, and rested her pale cheek on his chest as if she slept. Meanwhile, asleep or not, her neatly rolling little hips kept tireless rhythm, she stepped and swayed and spun in the perfection of her delicate art. Little by little Johann’s desperate face smoothed and softened, he rested his cheek on her sleek black hair and danced too with closed eyes.
A rather routine performance perhaps, Freytag was thinking. Considering all the uproar it can cause, the instrument is strangely limited; a mere reed flute with a few monotonous notes—but this girl does have style. She may teach him something he’ll never be sorry for knowing. He could see that Concha was not just running through her repertory like a wound-up doll, as she had done at the rehearsal with the company, but was putting her heart, or whatever stood for her heart, into the matter, with perfect effectiveness. It was easy to see that she had reduced that glittering-haired boy, who had struck him as no great specimen of wit at best, to a state of bliss bordering on idiocy, in this sudden half-relief from the hopeless ferocities of his desire which was, if only he could have known, so simple, so usual, and at his age and in his prime condition, so easily satisfied. Why could he not put on a cheerful grin, and jingle a few coins in his pocket? However, in his situation, obviously under the thumb of his dying old uncle, the lack of money was no doubt the main reason why he could not put on the cheerful grin. That too was a commonplace. Freytag, having somehow recovered his own self-approval, left them dancing and walked on.
Jenny, who had borne all she was able of David’s silence and sulkiness, and tight, white-ringed mouth at dinner, after a day of sitting or strolling about with him, the air between them twanging painfully at every passing breeze, disappeared into her cabin to write letters to several members of her family. Though David never believed it, no matter what she told him, Jenny had, in a mid-Southern state, a small but pertinacious family of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, even a small niece and nephew, the quite most conventional assortment, really; and she was fond of them all, in a baffled, detached sort of way. As she began “Dear …” she thought again that it did not matter which of the lot she addressed the letter to, for they presented to her the impermeable front of what she called “the family attitude”—suspicion of the worst based on insufficient knowledge of her life, and moral disapproval based firmly on their general knowledge of the weakness of human nature. Jenny couldn’t possibly be up to any good, or she would have stayed at home, where she belonged. That is the sum of it, thought Jenny, and wouldn’t their blood run cold if they could only know the facts? Ah well, the family can get under your skin with little needles and scalpels if you venture too near them: they attach suckers to you and draw your blood from every pore if you don’t watch out. But that didn’t keep you from loving them, nor them from loving you, with that strange longing, demanding, hopeless tenderness and bitterness, wound into each other in a net of living nerves.
It was no question at all whether they were the kin you would have chosen, would have preferred, at any rate; they were the family you belonged to, and there you were, stuck for good, for life and for eternity itself, no doubt. At this point in her half-conscious meditations with her pen hesitating above the paper, Jenny dropped the “you” form, and stopped thinking in words, only knowing in her bones that she could not live near her family because she was afraid of their weaknesses and faults—they were also her own; and most of their virtues repelled her even more than their faults. She had spent years of strategic warfare trying to beat those people out of her life; then more years trying to ignore them; to forget them; to hate them; and in the end she loved them as she knew well she was meant in simple nature to do, and acknowledged it; it brought her no peace, and yet it put a certain solid ground under her feet. She did not turn to them at last for help, or consolation, or praise, or understanding, or even love; but merely at last because she was incapable of turning away. They were the family and she was the stray sheep; they never let her forget it, they were full of malice and resentment they could not hide, and they invented little slanders about her among themselves to justify their view of what they called her “desertion.”
And moreover, they couldn’t be fooled for a moment with all that nonsense about wanting to paint, to be an “artist.” A young woman of good family leaves her home and place for only one reason: she means to lead a shameless abandoned life where her relatives and her society cannot restrain or punish her. Artist indeed! What was to stop her painting at home in the back garden?
With all this and a good deal more running not exactly in her mind but in her bloodstream, Jenny was writing, “Dearest Cousin or Brother or sweet Nephew or Aunt … weather is beautiful, getting cooler … I am in wonderful health … looking forward to Paris … let me hear from you … yours, yours and yours with my love …” yours indeed, with my love, my devilish dear family! She was folding up the last when Elsa came in from the moving pictures, with traces of tears in her eyes, yet cheerful and ready to talk.
She sat on the side of her bed and began letting down her hair. “Mama doesn’t like it this way,” she told Jenny, shyly.
“I don’t either, really,” said Jenny, “the other is prettier.”
There had been moving pictures for the first
time, and when Jenny had suggested to David that they see them, David had said he couldn’t imagine a reason for passing an evening in such a stupid way, and Jenny had retorted at once that she couldn’t imagine anything more stupid than the way they were passing it now. That had settled the question and ended the talk, and they spent the evening apart, Jenny writing letters.
Elsa, it came out, had a lovely time. The pictures were just the kind she liked best, the kind one saw so seldom in Mexico, where they were always about bandits fighting on horseback in the mountains, and burning ranches; and low women always after men; and all sorts of ugly people playing bad tricks on each other. No, these two pictures were very different. They were German, and so sweet. As she sat getting ready for bed, she remembered the plots utterly. There was one about the miller’s beautiful daughter who was loved by two rich gentlemen, real lords—father and son. She will not have the father, who forbids her to have the son, whom she loves. By a vile plot, she is seized by two villainous servants of the old lord, while she is picking flowers by the millstream, and taken to the lodge of the gamekeeper, and there she is heartlessly married off to that low person, who is a widower with a daughter her own age, the old lord standing by giving the orders for everything in the most cruel way!
“Where was the son?” asked Jenny, stamping envelopes.
“He had just happened to go on a journey,” said Elsa. “But the gamekeeper’s daughter thought of a way to help her. She pretended to go with the bride to her room to help her undress, but instead she tied sheets together and let her down out of the window and the new bride ran home through the woods—oh it was beautiful with the moonlight shining in the treetops—and the wicked gamekeeper sets out after her; but his foot slips on the bridge of the millstream—it is an act of God, you understand—and he is drowned. And just at that moment the young lord comes home and learns everything; and the girl is restored to him a virgin widow!”