Operating almost by instinct now, she feverishly pulled the nail from the head of the first doll. She flung the doll in the box and covered it with the other objects. Then, in the head of the second doll she forced the sharp tip of the prong. She did not quite know why she did this, but something impelled her.
She heard a sound at the door. She turned and saw Karl entering. She tried to smile, then stopped with a sickening leap of her heart. He was regarding her with a face she could not recognize. The red light of madness was in his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded in a loud but curiously muffled voice.
She put the doll down hastily.
“Karl,” she said, with an attempt at indignation. “Why do you talk to me like that? Are you insane? I am your wife, or have you forgotten that, in your selfish preoccupation and disregard for me?”
But he picked up the doll and examined it with the intense concentration of the feeble-minded. Then he put it down carefully. A change came over his face. It lost its inhuman look; it softened. He turned to her, and even smiled faintly, like a dying man momentarily gaining consciousness.
“I am sorry, Therese,” he said with almost his old gentleness. “But you know I do not like my things disturbed.”
She moistened her pale lips. “You never seemed to mind my ‘disturbing’ your things before this,” she replied with dignity. “Besides, what is all this rubbish? Just poor Eric’s silly souvenirs of Africa. They smell. Shall I have Amelia come in and cart them out and throw them away?”
Her tone was casual, if dignified, but she watched him with narrow fearfulness.
He did not answer. He looked down at the doll, and the little savage brown head with its matted hair. He stood there, seeming to have sunken into a dark pit of preoccupation, in which she had no part. The hand which rested on the table had an unfamiliar slackness and distortion about it, to her alert eyes. It was the hand of a man who had suffered unbearable pain, and had collapsed under that pain. With alarm, she saw how emaciated Karl had become, and how dishevelled. His expression, as he stood there, was dazed and unaware, like that of one caught in some delirium from which he could not escape. He raised his other hand, passed it over his head. It was trembling, the nails bluish. His slightly parted lips were the color of lead.
“Karl,” she said softly, as though fearing to wake a sleepwalker too suddenly, “come into the breakfast room and have some coffee with me.” She did not touch him, but waited, her knees shaking.
All at once he sighed brokenly. He lifted his head and seemed to see clearly and sharply. He looked about him, helplessly. His eyes came to focus on his wife’s face, and a burning flush ran over his cheeks, as though he were suddenly and hideously ashamed.
“Yes, I’ll have some coffee with you, Therese,” he said, in a voice like an echo. He went to the breakfast room with her. He drank coffee. He listened, faintly smiling, to her firm and casual remarks about the weather and the poor quality of the breakfast rolls, and the bad butter.
“It is as bad as the wartime,” he said. All at once he seemed vaguely concerned. “Therese, you seem tired and pale. Why do you not go out and walk in the fresh air? It seems a nice day.” He lifted his head and looked at the sunshine with the incredulity of a man who has slept, unconscious, for, days.
Her heart leapt with hope. “Will you come with me, Karl?”
He hesitated, then shook his head. “I am exhausted,” he answered simply.
“Then, will you lie down again, and rest?”
To her joy, he said, after another hesitation: “Yes, I will.”
She saw him safely to his room. She helped him undress. When she went out, on tiptoe, he was already asleep. Before he slept however, he had touched his cold lips to the back of her ministering hands.
She felt enormously relieved. And now, to get rid of that frightful box! She went to the study. She tried the door. She could not remember Karl’s having locked it, but it was locked.
But she would not let herself be frightened again. She went to her own room to get a book. Then she heard the telephone ringing and went to answer it.
It was Maria, Kurt’s wife. Her voice sounded impatient but somewhat concerned. “Therese? Kurt asked me to inquire about his brother today. No, he did not go to the University this morning. He is in bed.”
In spite of all her efforts, Therese felt faint and giddy. She clutched the telephone with desperate firmness.
“What is the matter with him, Maria? I am so sorry!”
She could almost see her sister-in-law shrug her massive shoulders.
“You know these men! They scream at a pin-prick. I have no doubt there is really nothing much the matter. He has been complaining for a week or two of an intense pain in his head. But things have been so tragic—It is nerves, or eyestrain, but he is too stubborn to admit he needs spectacles. A confession of age! But there it is: this morning, he said the pain was unbearable, and I have sent for the doctor.”
Therese replaced the receiver silently, slowly.
She was trembling violently, as she sat in the chair. A curious prickling ran over her head, seemed to raise her hair. Her whole body was covered with a deathly coldness and dampness.
She clenched her hands convulsively together in her lap; nails entered flesh. She said aloud, staring blindly, savagely, before her:
“I must control myself. I must not be a fool. I must remember that such things do not exist. It is only coincidence! To think for a moment that it is anything else is to confess madness, too.”
5
When Therese, in later years, remembered those weeks following her degrading discovery in Karl’s study, she knew that life could never be the same for her. Her calm sensation of personality-integrity was forever shattered. She had thought, being disingenuous, that she could endure anything. She came so often, in these weeks, to the thin end of her endurance, that her natural egotism was profoundly shaken. Another step, she thought, and I would go howling over the abyss, too.
Ruin, illness, loss of position and money, loss of health, even death, were all terrors that appalled her, but which she instinctively knew she could eventually control, surmount, adjust herself to, or forget. Her personality would remain intact, for it would never have been assaulted.
But it was the obscure, the dark, the secret and the hidden things, the things that were concealed by an invisible ambush, the things that were only shadows, the intangible horrors in which she did not believe but which affrighted her just the same, that so made her reel on the firm pedestal of her calmness and inner strength. She could sit quietly, and reason them away like a strong wind blowing aside the murky fog. She made herself see the brutal and objective universe, with its blazing light and iron mechanics and inexorable and immutable laws of cause and effect. In the roar and rhythm of this universe fogs and ghosts and miasmas and tenuous horrors were ridiculous, and made one laugh deliciously. The occult things lived in men’s grotesque and evil and ignorant minds. They lived in darkness, like all obscenities. But never could they penetrate the clashing machine-rhythm of the universe.
So she told herself, firmly. She continued to tell herself this, firmly, and then, finally, with incredulous despair. And yet, it was mercilessly borne in upon her, while she fought against it with anger and ridicule, that behind the mechanics of the universe was something awful and mysterious and evil and silent, but eternally alert and waiting.
She felt this appalling Something in Karl. And, finally, to her stupefaction, she found that not only was Karl wandering in this dark boundless eternity, full of abysses and shadows of frenzy, but the whole of Germany was so wandering. That shook her to the very heart. There was no escape from the frenzy and imbecility of her husband. She went out into the streets, to shop; she even tentatively called on her old friends. She went alone, to the cinema. And everywhere she discerned this evil madness, this distortion, this murderous fantasy, this flight into unreality, this tragic imbecility.
At firs
t she thought it all the projection of her own mind, which was in too close contact with Karl’s. But at last she saw it was not her mind that was at fault, but the fault of the soul of Germany.
Like Karl’s innocence, the innocence of Germany (and she had always been the most innocent of peoples!) was wounded and infected. Only the disingenuous, and they were few in this nation, could withstand the assault on vital forces. Like the chronically sick and feeble, they had been vulnerable from birth, and had acquired a twisted immunity.
Karl’s disintegration was the disintegration of Germany. His reason, like hers, was gone. Now that the angel with the sword, who had been guarding the citadel of the mind, had been thrown out, the citadel was easily invaded by all the monstrous dwarfs and gnomes and specters and deformities who eternally waited for entry. Man had accepted reason reluctantly; it was a teacher that insisted on his standing always on his hind legs. When that reason was attacked, he fought only feebly, and not with desire, to retain it. He dropped back on all fours, and for a time, at least he felt more free, much more comfortable and less exhausted.
No, there was no escape for Therese, who felt herself the only sane person in her home and in her country. She could no longer stand the streets of Berlin, but would order her car to be driven beyond the city, which was full of such faces and such eyes as Karl’s. Everywhere she saw the marks of the same pestilence. But in the quiet summer hills and valleys, in the silent motionless forests torn with sunlight, she could feel her sanity and reason returning. She would sit on the grass and look at the sky, and feel the warmth and peace flowing over her spirit as water flowed over one’s body. She could feel strong and poised and even serene again. When she returned to the city she had the feeling she was re-entering a pest-house, or a prison for madmen, and that infection hung in the air like a fog.
Berlin, the most orderly of cities, was still orderly. On the surface. But below the surface were corruption and confusion, wild runnings to and fro, meaningless cries, savage yells, the motions and gestures and voices of insanity. At times, she could almost see this ghastly subterranean life. She could actually smell its pollution. She could see the pale red shadows of it flung upward on the faces of the people, as Faust’s face had reflected the shadows of hell.
There was no peace in the newspapers, either. Nothing but the gibberings of violent idiots, nothing but shameful cartoons. (How intrinsically vulgar we Germans are! she thought with disgust.) Nothing but news of enormous new taxes, of rearming, of violence and hatred, of fiendish attacks on the helpless Jews, of concentration camps, of revolting deeds and murders, of blood and agony and death and frenzy. She could hardly believe in what her senses revealed to her. What does the world think of us? she would ask herself in consternation. She told herself with hope, that the world would not believe it. Hitler and his cohorts were too fantastic, too grotesque, for a sane world’s credulity.
The most appalling thing, of course, was the disintegration and dissolution of Germany’s noblest and most innocent minds under the effect of the virus. There were so many heroic and well-loved minds in Germany, famous minds that all men of all nations adored and worshipped. Yet, Therese, appalled, disbelieving, listened to their voices on the radio, their raving voices thin with hysteria and madness and hatred. She listened to their attacks on the Communists, the imputing of all vileness and disease and crimes and treacheries to the helpless and wretched Jews. She listened to their screaming denunciations of all the rest of the world, the foaming threats, the incoherent dithyrambs. “It cannot be!” she exclaimed aloud, dragged to her feet by this tragic horror, these self-induced and erotic hysterics. She felt no anger, only sorrowful amazement. This pestilence was no less dreadful and killing than the bodily pestilences of the Middle Ages. The bubonic plague of the mind, the suppurating abscesses of the soul, which attacked the noblest and the gentlest and the wisest, as well as the fools.
One night it was announced that one of Germany’s greatest scientists who had only recently received the Nobel Prize for his brilliant work in biochemistry, would read a paper to a gathering of eminent scientists and to the German public. Ah, thought Therese gratefully, in the world of science there are no phobias. I shall hear reason again.
But when the scientist spoke, he did not speak in his famous and familiar voice. This voice was higher pitched, thrilling with suppressed hysteria, tremulous, throbbing, keening thinly with hatred and fantasy. His researches, he said (while those like Therese listened appalled), had convinced him beyond the slightest possibility of any doubt, that there is an irreconcilable difference in the bodily chemistry of “Aryans” and Jews. He went on to “explain” the difference, using scientific words and phrases which could only be comprehended by the few. But the German people did not need comprehension; it was enough for them that this man had made this statement. One drop of Jewish blood, he declared, violated and radically changed the other blood into its own “alien” and “unhuman” substance. This proved definitely the profound truth of the “Aryan” theory, and the inferiority of the Jews, who could not, therefore, be counted as men at all.
Therese, listening, suddenly gasped, suddenly burst into convulsive laughter. Her laughter, a little wild, mingled with the vehement voice of the great scientist. All at once she stopped abruptly. Karl, who had been locked, as usual, in his study, had suddenly appeared. He had rushed to the radio, and had turned it so fiercely that the voice seemed to choke on a scream.
“The beast!” he cried. He stood there, his chest heaving, his head bent, his hands clenching and unclenching. Therese, watching, said bitterly in her heart: “But you, Karl, are cut from the same loaf.”
Nevertheless, she was passionately relieved that he had come out of his hiding for the first time in days. She asked him quietly, as though she had seen him only an hour ago, if he would join her in some hot chocolate and sponge cake. She waited, quietly enough for his answer, showing no sign of her inner fear and anxiety. When he consented, after hesitation, she almost wept in her relief.
She maintained a normal atmosphere when the servant brought in the hot chocolate pot and cups and cake. She talked casually and indifferently, in her serene voice. Karl did not answer. But she saw that her voice and manner soothed him, relieved his torment. He would sit and listen to her, with his reddened and agonized eyes fixed on her face. He even managed a smile now and then. She spoke only of ordinary things.
Then he said abruptly, which proved to her that he had been listening only to her voice and not her words: “That beast who had been speaking once had a Jewish wife. He was a pervert; she divorced him. He must have loved her, for he has hated Jews ever since.” He added with somber contempt: “Perhaps if she had been a German woman, she would not have divorced him.”
Therese gazed at him with mortal affront, forgetting everything but what he had said. The blood rushed to her cheeks; her eyes flashed at this unbearable insult. Her voice shook as she asked: “What have I done to you, Karl, that you can say these things to me?”
He did not answer for so long that she began to believe he had not heard her. His chin had fallen on his chest. Then he slowly lifted his head and looked at her. Despite his ghastliness and tormented eyes, he seemed to have recovered reason and humanness again.
“I’m sorry, Therese,” he said gently. And then, before she could speak again, he had gotten up and gone from the room, walking feebly, like a man just up from a prolonged sick-bed.
She sat for a long time after he had left her, unable to move. Her whole body slowly turned cold. Her heart seemed a lump of ice. She gave herself up to desolation and grief.
6
Therese had one enormous encouragement and relief: Kurt was reported, by Maria, to have recovered from his severe head pains and to have returned to his university. He had finally been induced to procure spectacles, not without a violent scene, and these had apparently relieved his disorder. Each day, at his bidding, he had his wife call Therese for news of Karl. Therese had given out that
Karl was so profoundly shocked at the deaths of Gerda and Eric that he had had a “nervous” breakdown, and his physician had advised quiet and solitude.
Therese did not like Maria, though she did not underestimate her uncanny shrewdness. But she had never considered her a lady, though her own attitude towards Maria had always been studiously serene, kind and thoughtful. There was a deep antagonism between the two women, for all their apparently familiar and family associations and friendliness. In a way, they respected each other. They were both disingenuous. More than once they had exchanged amused and careful glances at the innocence of their husbands. They had often sat, calm and adult women, with folded hands, and had mused slyly at each other, and had experienced the ageless mutual sympathy of realists in the presence of fantastic children, whose raptures they secretly envied.
For some reason the old sympathy between the two women was growing stronger these days. There was something unspoken but understood between them. Therese, who found all hatreds tedious and boring, when they were not annoyingly dangerous, even called upon Maria in the afternoons when there was no chance of Kurt being there. It was not that Therese hated her brother-in-law; it was simply that she was afraid that her compassion would be called upon for new floods if she saw him, and these days she felt that more draining from herself would exhaust her completely.
When Maria had told her that Kurt had apparently recovered from his indisposition, and she had experienced that enormous encouragement and relief, she had been amazed at her reaction. Then she had burst into wild laughter at herself, laughter in which there was a rare hysteria. Was it possible that she had for one moment become infected by this idiocy? If so, then she was no better than the other fools who infested her country. For days a sense of personal degradation hung in her mind, and personal shame, as though she were guilty of something indecent.