In the darkness, holding Karl’s hand, she let her tired thoughts wind in and out. Karl was a great artist; he would remain a great artist only if his innocence were kept intact. Disingenuousness never produced heroic music nor magnificent literature, nor painted a divine picture, nor carved a noble statue. Disingenuousness, having become acquainted with reality, could produce, smilingly, only things that were the stature of men. The stature of the gods was beyond its power or desire. A man must believe in the gods to make them manifest in creative art. Disingenuousness, not believing in them, produced mortality, monotony and littleness, and finally expired out of sheer ennui. In innocence, only, was there immortality and beauty.
This year, there was more than a possibility that Karl would receive the Nobel Prize for literature. If he lost his innocence, that prize would be a dying wreath on his grave. Therese said aloud, quickly, from the moving clouds of her musings: “Karl, my dear, no matter what happens, you must not let it hurt you! You are too precious for anything to be allowed to hurt you.”
Even she was amazed at his subtlety when he said sadly: “Do you think, Therese, that spiritual integrity, anything, means much if—that telegram does not come?”
Before she could speak in answer, there came the quick sharp ringing of the bell. Therese sprang to her feet, her heart pounding in her throat. Karl stood up, also. They reached the door simultaneously. “Oh, I hope this has not disturbed Gerda!” cried Therese. “Even good news must not break her rest!”
Karl put her aside quickly and gently, and was out in the reception hall before her. Neither saw Gerda, in her nightdress at the head of the stairs, unable to descend, but listening, her flaxen braids over her shoulders and childish breasts, her face white and staring.
The servant was already at the door. She had turned on the lights. But when the door was open it was not a messenger who stood there, but Kurt Erlich.
“You!” cried Karl, out of his hatred and sick disappointment.
Kurt did not speak. He came into the hall, and let the servant shut the door after him. He was as gray and lined as a stricken old man. His dry lips twitched and jerked. His eyes were bright and sunken. He appeared to have suffered some recent and disintegrating shock. He removed his hat, and then held it in his hands, futilely. He seemed to see only his brother.
They regarded each other in an appalling silence. No one moved, except that Therese put her hand to her lips and stared at Kurt, and then at Karl.
After a prolonged moment or two, Karl took a step towards the other man. He had turned as gray as his brother. Two identical faces confronted each other.
“What have you to tell me?” asked Karl in so quiet and steady a voice that Therese shuddered. She caught at his arm; he wrenched it from her.
Kurt made an effort to speak; his whole body was rigidly convulsed in that effort. Finally, he flung out his arms like a despairing man offering himself to the plunge of a sword.
The gesture seemed to release his frozen tongue. “I tell you, Karl!” he cried. “I would give my life to bring him back. He was shot, this morning, when he attempted to escape!”
Karl’s nostrils fluttered, distended. Now, he did not feel Therese’s hands on his arms. He did not hear her shrill faint cry. Kurt did not hear it either. The two men saw only each other. And no one saw Gerda.
“You mean,” said Karl softly, almost consideringly, “that he was deliberately murdered?”
“No. No! You must not even think such things, Karl! My God, Karl, do not look like that! Therese, you must not let him look like that!” Kurt flashed his sister-in-law a frantic and brokenhearted glance, imploringly. “You see, he ran out of the police station, even before they could question him—”
Karl shook his head gently. “No, that cannot be. Eric was not a man like that. He did nothing hastily, though he appeared impatient to the superficial. He did not run away. They—you—murdered him in cold blood.”
Kurt, who was not subtle in the least, cried out in a loud voice: “Karl, how can you say that of me? That I—I murdered Eric!” But Karl’s apparent composure deceived him, as it had always deceived his uncomplex nature. “Karl, my brother, you cannot wrong me like that. Perhaps I have been hasty. But what else could I do? You left me no alternative. But I had nothing to do with Eric’s—. Karl! You must believe that! He ran away—”
Karl’s head dropped a little. He began to shake it slowly from side to side, dumbly, blindly, as if in denial of something too unendurable, too monstrous. Kurt looked at him. All at once, as he looked at Karl, tears spurted from his eyes. Therese, stricken as she was, weeping, herself, as she was, felt a pang at the sight of Kurt’s tears. But none of them had seen Gerda, and now none of them saw her steal away, disappear into the well of darkness beyond the lighted stairs. The servant had already crept away.
And again, there was silence. The tears still ran down Karl’s face, and Karl still kept up that dreadful dumb shaking of his head. Therese could not bear the sight of these two men. In spite of everything, it was for Kurt that she felt the greatest pity. For Karl, she felt the greatest fear.
Kurt, with heart-breaking simplicity, pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and eyes. The signet ring on his trembling hand caught the light and shattered it momentarily. Then he took a step towards his brother. “Karl,” he said brokenly, “I tell you, I would give my own life—”
Karl stopped shaking his bent head. He lifted his eyes to his brother’s face, and appeared to see him for the first time. “Go away,” he said.
Kurt regarded him with grief and despair, but did not move.
“Go away,” said Karl again, louder this time, and in a strange voice. Under his broad smooth brows his eyes were like glittering points. He began to tremble violently, though his expression was still composed.
Kurt, with sudden terror, backed away from him, and took the handle of the door in his hand. Then, as if his own anguish were too overpowering to be controlled any longer, he uttered a deep groan.
But Therese did not hear that groan. She had lifted her head with a jerk. She appeared to be waiting for something frightful. When she heard a dull crash on the street outside, near the door, she knew instantly what it was. Even before the catastrophic short silence was shattered by the terror-stricken cries and shouts of passers-by, and the scream of car-brakes, she knew what they would find, broken and motionless, when they opened the door.
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 ai
r 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 ridi
culous 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.