As he drove through the village he saw from the church clock that he was still in ample time for the train; indeed he had known that before. The church door chancing to be open, he ordered the coachman to stop. He had an offence to wipe off, an offence against the church which had been merely a pleasantly cool place to him, against the pastor to whose well-meaning words he had not listened, against Helmuth whose burial he had dishonoured with profane thoughts; in a word, an offence against God. He entered and tried to recapture the feelings which as a child had been his when every Sunday he had stood here as before the face of God. At that time he had known a great number of hymns, and had sung them with ardour. But it would hardly do for him to begin singing now quite by himself, in the church. He must confine himself to assembling his thoughts and concentrating them on God and his own sinfulness, his littleness and wretchedness before God. But his thoughts refused to seek God. The only thing that came into his mind was a sentence from Isaiah which he had once heard in this place: “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.” Yes, Bertrand was right, they had lost their faith; and now he tried to say the Lord’s Prayer with closed eyes, being careful not to utter a single word emptily, but to grasp the meaning of each; and when he came to the words, “as we forgive our debtors,” the tender, apprehensive and yet trustful feelings of his childhood rose in him again; he remembered that he had always applied this passage to his father and from it had drawn the confidence that he would be able to forgive his father, yes, to feel all the love towards him which it was the duty of a child to feel; and now he remembered again that the old man had spoken of his loneliness, of which he was visibly afraid, and which one must make lighter for him. As Joachim left the church the words “uplifted and strengthened” came into his mind, and they did not seem empty to him, but full of new and encouraging meaning. He resolved to visit Elisabeth.
In the carriage the phrase arose in his mind again, again he thought “uplifted and strengthened,” but now it was associated with the image of a starched1 shirt-front and the joyful expectation of seeing Ruzena again.
1 In German the same word serves for “strengthened” and “starched.”
II
A pedestrian was coming from the direction of Königstrasse. He was corpulent and square-built, indeed actually squat, and everything about him was so extraordinarily soft that one might have fancied that he was poured into his clothes every morning. He was a serious pedestrian, he wore a grey-lustre coat over his trousers of black cloth, and his chest was covered with a brown beard. He was obviously in a hurry, yet his walk was not rapid and undeviating, but a sort of purposive waddle such as suited a soft-bodied purposive man who was in a hurry. But it was not only the beard that concealed his face; he wore eyeglasses as well, through which he shot severe glances at the passers-by; and it was literally impossible to picture to oneself that a man like this, waddling with such haste in pursuit of some urgent business and shooting out such sharp and severe glances in spite of his soft appearance, was probably a kind and affectionate fellow in some other sphere of his existence, and that there must be women to whom he unbent in love, women and children to whom the beard uncovered a kindly smile, women who might dare to seek in a kiss the rosy lips in their dark-bearded cave.
When Joachim caught sight of this man he had mechanically followed him. It did not matter to him in any case where he went. Since he had learned that Bertrand had a Berlin agent for his firm, and that the office was in one of the streets between the Alexanderplatz and the Stock Exchange, he had sometimes felt drawn to this neighbourhood as formerly he had felt drawn to the working-class suburb—and the fact that he no longer had any need to look for Ruzena out there was almost like a promotion for her. But he did not come here, all the same, on the chance of meeting Bertrand: on the contrary he avoided the place whenever he knew Bertrand was in Berlin, nor indeed had he any interest in Bertrand’s agent. It was simply so strange to him that these should be the surroundings in which one had to picture Bertrand’s real life; and when he walked through those streets it sometimes happened that he not only scrutinized the fronts of the houses, as if to discover what offices were concealed behind them, but even peeped under the hats of the civilians as if they were women. Sometimes he wondered at this himself, for he was unaware that he searched these faces to discover whether their existence was so totally different from his own, and whether they could give him a clue to any qualities that Bertrand might have adopted from them, but still kept concealed. Yes, the secrecy of this life of theirs was so complete that they did not even need beards to hide themselves behind. Indeed they would have looked a little more confidential and less hypocritical to him if they had worn beards, and this may have been one of the reasons why he sauntered in the wake of the fat, hurrying man. Suddenly it seemed to him that the man in front of him fitted very strangely the picture he had always had of Bertrand’s agent. It was silly, perhaps, but when several passers-by greeted the man Joachim was quite delighted that Bertrand’s agent should enjoy so much respect. He would not have been excessively surprised if Bertrand himself, melodramatically transformed, small and corpulent and full-bearded, had waddled up to him: for why should Bertrand have preserved his former external appearance, seeing that he had slipped into a different world? And even though Joachim knew that what he thought was without sense or sequence, yet it was as though the apparently confused skein concealed a sequence: one had only to disentangle the threads which bound Ruzena to these people and find this deeper and very secret knot—and perhaps an end of one thread had lain in his hand that time when he had divined Bertrand as Ruzena’s real lover; but now his hand was empty, and all that he had to go on was that Bertrand had once excused himself on the plea that he had to spend the evening with a business friend, and Joachim could not rid himself of the idea that this man had been the business friend. Probably they had both gone to the Jäger Casino, and the man had stuck a fifty-mark note into Ruzena’s hand.
When a man follows another in the street, even if it is only mechanically and with ostensible indifference, he will soon find himself attaching all sorts of wishes, benevolent and malevolent, to the man he is following. Probably he will want at least to see the man’s face and wish that he should turn round, even though since his brother’s death he has thought himself invulnerable against the temptation to seek in every half-feared face the face of his mistress. In any case there is nothing to explain why the sudden thought should have come to Joachim that the erect bearing of all the people here in this street was quite unjustified, that it was incompatible with their better knowledge, or due merely to an abysmal unawareness that some time all their bodies would have to stretch themselves out in death. And yet the walk of the man in front was not in the least sharp, rapid or headlong, nor was there any fear that he might fall and break one of his legs, for he was far too soft for that to happen.
Now the man had stopped at the corner of Rochstrasse as if he were waiting for something; it was possible that he was waiting to get the fifty marks back from Joachim. And Joachim was really in honour bound to give them back, and suddenly he felt a hot rush of shame at the thought that, for fear lest people might think he kept a paid woman, or because if he stopped to reflect on it he might begin to doubt Ruzena’s love, he had left her in her old hateful employment; and it was as if the scales had fallen from his eyes: he, a Prussian officer, was the secret lover of a woman who accepted money from other men. An offence against honour could be wiped out only by a pistol bullet, yet before he could think this out, with all its dreadful consequences, the knowledge swam up, swam up like an image of Bertrand, that the man was crossing Rochstrasse and that Joachim must not let him out of sight until he … yes, until he … that was not so easy to get right. Bertrand had it easy; he belonged to this world and the other as well, and Ruzena too had a foot in each world. Was that the reason why they by rights belonged to each other? But now his thoughts jostled ea
ch other like the people in the crowd round about him, and even though he saw a goal in front of him which he wanted them to reach, it swam and wavered and was lost to view like the back of the fat man before him. If he had stolen Ruzena from her legitimate possessor, then it was perhaps fitting that he should keep her hidden now as his stolen property. He tried to maintain a stiff and erect bearing, and no longer to look at the civilians. The dense crowd around him, the hubbub, as the Baroness called it, all this commercial turmoil full of faces and backs, seemed to him a soft, gliding, dissolving mass which one could not lay hold on. What did it all lead to? And with a jerk regaining his prescribed military bearing, he suddenly thought with relief that one could love only someone who belonged to an alien world. That was why he would never dare to love Elisabeth, and also why Ruzena had to be a Bohemian. Love meant to take refuge from one’s own world in another’s, and so in spite of his jealousy and shame he had left Ruzena in her world, so that her flight to him should be ever sweet and new. The garrison band was playing a little in front of him, and he held himself still more stiffly, as stiffly as when he attended church parade on Sundays. At the corner of Spandauerstrasse the man slowed down and hesitated at the edge of the thoroughfare; evidently a business man like this was afraid of the horses in the roadway. It was of course silly, the idea that he must refund money to this man; but Ruzena must be taken out of the casino, that was definite. In any case she would always remain a Bohemian, a being out of another world. But where did he fit in himself? Whither was he sliding? And Bertrand? Again Bertrand rose before him, astonishingly soft and small, glancing severely through his eyeglasses, strange to Joachim, strange to Ruzena who was a Bohemian, strange to Elisabeth who walked in a still park, strange to them all, and yet familiar when he turned round and the beard parted in a friendly smile, inciting women to kiss the dark cave where his mouth was concealed. His hand on his sword-hilt, Joachim remained standing as if the nearness of the garrison band provided him with protection and new strength against the Evil One. Bertrand’s image arose, iridescent, uncanny. It emerged and vanished again: “vanished in the labyrinth of the city,” the words came back to Joachim, and “labyrinth” had a diabolically underworld ring. Bertrand was concealed in all those shapes, and he had betrayed everybody: Joachim, his fellow-officers, the women, everybody. But now he noticed that Bertrand’s representative had crossed Spandauerstrasse in good style at a sharp trot. Joachim thought with relief that henceforth he would keep Ruzena out of reach of them both. No, he could not be accused of stealing Ruzena; on the contrary it was his duty to protect Elisabeth as well from Bertrand. Oh, he knew, the Devil was full of wiles. But a soldier must never fly. If he fled he would deliver Elisabeth defencelessly to that man, he would himself be one of those who hid in the labyrinth of the city and were afraid of the horses’ hoofs; and it would be not only an avowal of his guilt as a thief, it would mean also the renunciation for ever of his attempt to tear from that man the secret of his treachery. He must follow him farther, yet not surreptitiously like a spy, but openly as was fitting; and he would not keep Ruzena concealed either. So in the middle of the Stock Exchange quarter, though admittedly in the vicinity of the garrison band too, everything suddenly grew quiet round Joachim von Pasenow, as quiet and transparent as the clear blue sky which looked down between the two rows of buildings.
He had now a somewhat vague, yet urgent, wish to catch up the man and tell him that he was going to take Ruzena out of the casino and from now on make no secret about her; but he had taken only a few steps when he saw the other waddling hastily into the Stock Exchange. For a moment Joachim remained staring at the entrance: was this the place of metamorphosis? Would Bertrand himself come out now? He considered whether he should take Bertrand at once to meet Ruzena, and decided no: for Bertrand belonged to the world of the night clubs, and it was from that very world that he must now rescue Ruzena. But that would come all right; and how lovely it would be to forget all about it and wander with Ruzena in a still park beside a still lake. He stood still in front of the Stock Exchange. He longed for the country. The traffic roared round him; above him thundered the trains. He no longer stared at the passers-by, even though he felt that they were foreign and strange. He would avoid this neighbourhood in future. In the midst of the hubbub round the Stock Exchange Joachim von Pasenow held himself stiff and erect. He would be very good to Ruzena.
Bertrand paid him a visit of condolence, and Joachim was again not quite clear whether to regard this as considerate or presumptuous: one could take it as the one or the other. Bertrand remembered Helmuth, who had visited Culm occasionally, though seldom enough, and his memory was extraordinarily exact: “Yes, a fair, quiet youth, very reserved … I fancy he envied us … he couldn’t have changed much later either … and he resembled you.” That, now, was just a little too familiar again, almost as if Bertrand wished to exploit Helmuth’s death for his own advantage; however, it was no wonder if Bertrand remembered all that had to do with his former military career with such astonishing exactitude: one liked to recall happy times that one had lost. Yet Bertrand did not speak at all in a sentimental way, but quietly and soberly, so that Helmuth’s death assumed a more human and natural aspect, and in some way, under Bertrand’s touch, became objective, timeless and endurable. To his brother’s duel Joachim had not really devoted much thought; all the opinions that had been pronounced on it and the comments recurring again and again in the letters of condolence pointed in the same direction: that Helmuth had been tragically caught by the unalterable fatality of his sense of honour, from which there was no escape. Bertrand however began:
“The most extraordinary thing is that we live in a world of machinery and railways, and that at the same time as the railways are running and the factories working two people can stand opposite each other and shoot at each other.”
Bertrand had no sense of honour left, Joachim told himself, and yet his remarks seemed natural and illuminating. But Bertrand went on:
“That may be, of course, because it’s a question of sentiment.”
“The sentiment of honour,” said Joachim.
“Yes, honour and so forth.”
Joachim looked up—was Bertrand laughing at him again? He would have liked to reply that one must not judge such things merely from the standpoint of the city man; out there in the country people’s feelings were less artificial and meant more. Really Bertrand did not know anything about it. But of course one could not say such things to one’s guest, and Joachim silently held out his cigar-case. But Bertrand drew his English pipe and leather tobacco-pouch from his pocket:
“It’s extraordinary that it should be the most superficial and perishable things that are actually the most persistent. Physically a human being can adapt himself with incredible quickness to new conditions of life. But even his skin and the colour of his hair are more persistent than his bony structure.”
Joachim regarded Bertrand’s fair skin and far too wavy hair and waited to see where all this was going to lead.
Bertrand noticed at once that he had not made himself clear enough:
“Well, the most persistent things in us are, let us say, our so-called feelings. We carry an indestructible fund of conservatism about with us. I mean our feelings, or rather conventions of feeling, for actually they aren’t living feelings, but atavisms.”
“So you consider that conservative principles are atavistic?”
“Oh, sometimes, but not always. However, I wasn’t really thinking of them. What I meant was that our feelings always lag half-a-century or a full century behind our actual lives. One’s feelings are always less human than the society one lives in. Just consider that a Lessing or a Voltaire accepted without question the fact that in their time men were still broken on the wheel—a thing that to us with our feelings is unimaginable. And do you imagine that we are in a different case?”
Well, Joachim had never bothered his head over such things. Perhaps Bertrand was right. But why was he saying all th
is to him? He was talking like a writer for the newspapers.
Bertrand went on:
“We take it quite as a matter of course that two men, both of them honourable—for your brother would not have fought with a man who was not honourable—should of a morning stand and shoot at each other. And the fact that we put up with such a thing, and that they do it, shows how completely imprisoned we all are in conventional feeling. But feelings are inert, and that’s why they’re so cruel. The world is ruled by the inertia of feeling.”
The inertia of feeling! Joachim was struck by the phrase: was he not himself full of inertia, was it not a criminal inertia that had prevented him from summoning enough imagination to provide Ruzena with money in spite of her objections, and to take her out of the casino? He asked in alarm:
“Do you actually describe honour as inertia of feeling?”
“Oh, Pasenow, you ask too embarrassing questions.” Bertrand had assumed again the winning smile with which he always bridged over differences of opinion. “It seems to me that honour is a very living feeling, but none the less all obsolete forms are full of inertia, and one has to be very tired oneself to give oneself over to a dead and romantic convention of feeling. One has to be in despair and see no way out before one can do that.…”
Yes, Helmuth had been tired. But what did Bertrand want? How was one to rid oneself of convention? With dismay Joachim saw the danger that like Bertrand one might begin to let everything slide if one began to transgress convention. Certainly in his connection with Ruzena he had already slipped through convention in the strict sense, but now he must not go any further, and honour itself demanded that he should be true to Ruzena! Perhaps Helmuth had vaguely surmised this when he warned him against returning to the estate. For then Ruzena would be lost. So he asked abruptly: “What do you think of the state of German agriculture?” almost hoping that Bertrand, who always had practical reasons for what he said, would also warn him against taking over the estate.
The Sleepwalkers Page 6