Often the thought occurred to him: I do not exist. Somewhere, he remembered, there had been something very clever written about this. Montaigne? He tried to unravel the philosophy; the tight-packed ball fell through his fingers, and he closed his eyes against the weariness of the sight of it. Once he said to himself: If I do not exist, then I have only to will not to be. But the effort of willing not to be was more arduous than existing.
Food choked him. He ate practically nothing. The sight of Therese was a pain not to be endured often, for when he saw her the clarity became cold and static and real, and his thoughts became hard and sharp. When he heard her voice he heard the voice of his grief and despair; he heard the call to brave realization. He could not endure it. Once he thought: She is looking ill and tired. I am killing her. But the very thought, in its anguish, aroused anger against her, and a sort of desperate revulsion.
The servants whispered of his irritability and fury. Sometimes the sight of them infuriated him. He filled the house with his cries and recriminations and insults and rage. He crashed doors and hurled furniture. Fortunately, for Therese’s orderly household, these fits were short.
Sometimes he hated Therese for the suffering he was causing her. Sometimes he tried to approach her on the level of normal actions and words. But his heart trembled, and the nails of his fingers dug into his flesh. He heard his voice, unnaturally loud and deliberate with his efforts to appear natural for her sake. But when he saw that she was not deceived he abandoned his acting, and shut himself away from her with anger and grief, and relief.
It was only in his study that he could subdue the glitter of the world and acquire substance. Only in his madness and illusion could he feel real. Only with the symbol of his hatred in his hand could he feel organized and potent, and with a purpose. Only at these times could he feel sane.
Once, at the very beginning it had seemed fantastic to him. But that was before his deliberate inducing of confusion, before he had pulled confusion over his head like a frightened child pulling the bedclothes over him to shut out the sight of a dark room filled with specters.
When he had first taken out the doll and had looked at it he had laughed crazily. He had, half-mockingly, baptized the doll with the name of his brother. The mere act of naming the doll gave him a sudden and overwhelming sense of relief and surcease. Confusion had then come over him. He had inserted the nail into the head, just a little way. He had started numbly, then all at once with a fury and vindictiveness which had made his heart leap and strain, and had made red spots float before his eyes.
What Therese did not know was that he spied upon her. She never lifted the telephone but what he listened. He was listening for news of his brother. There was an extension in his study, and he had heard the conversation between his wife and Maria. After that, his exultation made his madness complete, and never again did he laugh at himself.
Once or twice he had a cold lucid interval in which he could actually think: I must finish my chapter. He could actually approach his desk. But when he took up his pen and spread his paper before him something strange and terrible would happen to him. He would watch his hand writing words without coherence; he felt disembodied, a ghost motivating a stiff dead hand. His thoughts blew about almost visibly, like pale spectral moths, without pattern or sensation or purpose. When he attempted to read what he had written the words were meaningless. He forgot the one before the one following, and finally everything was a frenzied confusion again. He would feel his throat tightening, his breast tightening, and a feeling of mortal illness and utter terror would seize him like murderous hands. He would spring from his chair, choking, his heart leaping and tearing, his hands trembling and cold and numb. He would glare about him, like a man hunted to his death, and looking madly for escape. At first he could think, even say aloud, with anguish: What is the matter? What is this thing that has me? But at last he could no longer think this, but could only feel.
Time stopped for him. Sometimes he would wonder, very dully, if it were five minutes ago or yesterday that he held the wooden doll in his hand and thrust the nail in deeper. Finally he was no longer conscious of being awake, of eating, or sleeping. He did not know, of course, that Therese furtively dropped a tasteless and colorless liquid in his evening coffee, and that when he was overcome she would enter his room, where he was lying across his bed, and remove his boots and clothing and lift his head to his pillow.
There was a round tower of black stone in his mind, and a blasted region about it, which he never entered. And in that tower lived Gerda and Eric. He ignored it; he stepped about it, his eyes averted. In some way he knew that in that tower awaited his salvation and his release from himself, and also agony. Once he had a dream. He dreamt that he saw the tower and the door stood open, and Eric and Gerda, standing on the threshold, smiled at him and beckoned imploringly. “I am your sister,” said Gerda. “I am your brother,” said Eric. “Come in!” they cried together. But he stood, aching to approach them, weeping because of his desire to go to them. But he kept shaking his head. “If you touch me I shall wake up, and I cannot endure it,” he answered. They looked at him sorrowfully, then closed the door. He could feel them waiting behind the door.
Whenever he thought of them, they were shadowy and unreal in his thoughts, yet potent with suffering. But there was nothing real for him but his brother Kurt, and his hatred.
There came a morning when he automatically lifted the little doll to thrust the nail deeper into its head. He stared at it, holding it in his hand, and a faint wonder came over him, as though he had never seen it before. He examined it with the minute attention of the dazed and mind-sick, trying to fix its features in his thoughts. Suddenly its vague features took on a strange expression. It was Kurt’s face in miniature, and he laughed aloud, with thin ferocity. And then, all at once, it was his own, then Kurt’s, then his own again. His laughter rose with a mad sound, and Therese heard it, her heart failing.
He thrust the nail in deeper. And as he did so, a mortal driving pain assailed his own head. “Do you feel it, Kurt?” he asked aloud. Deeper he drove the nail, and deeper was his own pain. A horrible sort of glee seized him, the sadist’s and masochist’s glee, the joy which is the joy of self-destruction and torment.
And then, strangely, it was not himself or Kurt he was torturing and killing. It was all the world, which had rolled over him, which had destroyed his innocence. He began to sob; tears rolled down his cheek. His hand twisted and thrust at the doll, and his whole being was pervaded with a mortal suffering and intolerable sorrow.
He was all Germany, full of anguish and despair, and enduring no less than what she inflicted upon others.
8
Therese said to herself: I know what I must do. I must discover what I am fighting, and for what I am fighting. But how can I discover this? I do not know where to start! I do not know for what I must search, though I know it is most terribly pertinent that I search, and find.
She had the orderliness of the German mind, in which all things were precisely fitted, and in which there was a place for everything. One began at such a point, with such a piece, and other pieces automatically fell into place. She had always firmly believed that in an orderly universe men must maintain order in their own lives and affairs; otherwise, everything was disorder and futility. And now she was confronted by disorder and futility, and a most hideous sense of her own impotence invaded her.
All at once, with a sense of profound shock, she realized that she must first start with herself. This was brutal to her native German egotism, so integrated and so managed with precision. With a sense of outrage, yet with humility, she knew that unless she reached awareness of herself she could do nothing for Karl, nothing for Germany. She must understand everything, before she could help Karl understand.
Her personality was compact and self-sufficient. But now it was shaken and dispersed, like imitation snow-particles in a glass paper-weight. Her personality seemed to flow out from her like a broken st
ream, and she knew, with sickening clarity, that the world was full of realists like herself, whose realism had become uncertainty and bewilderment. We have nowhere to start! she thought. We have no rock on which to stand. We watch the whole world bursting through the dams of reason. We watch men become the frenzied animals in a zoo. We see them whirl like dervishes to an incantation we can barely hear. We know we must do something, say something, but we do not know what. And how many of us, at the end, must subside into exhaustion and begin to whirl also?
The old half-humorous and cynical phrases were useless now. Civilization, in whose name the realist-intelligentsia could always appeal, and be heard, had become as tenuous and brittle as glass. Civilization was no magic word any longer. It was a puerile phase. It was something to make one smile drearily. Man must have a newer and more invincible magic word to still his whirling and shrieking. There must be another incantation. And it must not be based on man’s egotism. It must not be anthropomorphic. It was beyond himself.
Could it be religion? Only a few weeks ago, Therese would have smiled at herself at this thought. Her father had been a bishop. He had also been a realist, and it had been his realism which had made her smile automatically when religion was mentioned. Religion, she had learned, was necessary for the masses. It was harness and reins in the hands of the intelligent and those who controlled a nation. It was the whip which kept the animal which was man in the paths in which he must tread, in order that the masters might have security and peace of mind. The masters had created religion, and had appointed the priests. Otherwise there could be no civilization, no arts, no comforts, no banks, no servants, no progress, no trade or commerce, no cities. There could be nothing which made life endurable and safe for the intelligent, for the masters. There would only be a jungle, and life was chaotic in a jungle. It was all very clever.
Therese had a sudden vision of her father’s huge church, so orderly and clean, so dim and infused with many painted lights, so sonorous with organ and song. Then all at once she knew that this church was only a prison-house where ghosts walked, and where men could be frightened into behaving themselves, and making life pleasant for those who feared and used them. There was no vitality here, no love or strength, no courage or kindness, no fortitude or faith. The Church had betrayed mankind, had betrayed God. It had given security and wealth to a few; it had given, in return, no faith, no rock, for the many. It had given the many only fear.
And now a time had come when its vague fear was no longer potent. The curtain that concealed the Holy of Holies had been rudely torn apart by a violent haired hand, and the primitive seeker-after-God had found there only polished empty vessels and a great stupid silence. He had seen only printed words, and the words were dead. The living Word he had come to find, in his terror, was only the stilted ink of the pompous and the stupid, the exploiters and the fat.
Yet, somewhere, the Word surely lived. Somewhere it could be found. And when it was found, it would be discovered not to be the whip of the greedy and the crafty, not the drug which kept the beast in subjection. It would be found to be the only hope of the world.
But where was it? Was its name God or Love? Was it called Reason? Therese only knew that in the chaotic animal-house lived the magic word of order and peace, the golden key, the “Alif” of which Omar Khayyam had spoken.
Who could find it and, give it to the world? Or must each man find it for himself? But was there time for this finding now? But on its swift finding, its sleepless search, depended the existence of a world now spinning like a glittering ball on the finger-tip of a madman.
As she thought these things, Therese lay on her back staring at the ceiling of her bedroom. She heard the clock in the hall below strike four. The night was deathly still. She might have been alone in the universe. Her forehead was damp with anguish and despair. She lifted her head and listened. She heard again the disordered pacing of her husband in his room. “O God!” she cried aloud.
She was seized with unutterable terror.
She was back in her father’s church. He was standing before her, in his pulpit, huge and fat and pompous. He was uttering his usual dead words, so bored, so without meaning. She heard them clearly, and now her heart began to leap and strain. Each word was like fire:
“For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.”
The organ boomed, and now all the church was filled with the sound and the light of a multitude of wings:
“And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer.”
9
Old Doctor Felix Traub and his wife, Helene, were not rich. They were not even well-off. Helene had only one small servant girl who could not cook. Old Helene did the cooking, and it was excellent, even when so many things were so scarce these days. Doctor Traub was not a “specialist,” and so was disdained. He was very old-fashioned. He had only common sense, and common sense was no longer valued. His patients came to him because, like him, they were old or faithful, though even these consulted specialists when they were frightened. He had only one degree, and degrees were so comforting, especially to the neurotic or the simply frightened. He talked brutally and roughly to the pretenders, to the runners-away, and so he was not in the least popular.
He lived with his wife in a little old stonehouse set in a garden at the end of a street no longer fashionable, or even respectable. His study was lined with old disintegrating books, whose rotting leather filled the room with a pungent yet nostalgic smell. Three huge small-paned windows looked out on the garden, which was tangled and profuse and full of color. At the end of the garden stood three ancient trees, crowned with misty sunlight. Here there was silence, though beyond the house the street was not silent. Here one could hear birds, and the muted whispering of leaves, and watch squirrels darting through the high grass.
Therese was admitted by the little servant, who peeped at her under white lashes. The Herr Doctor was in his study; no, he was not busy. She would call the frau doctor, who was busy in the kitchen. The little girl smirked, then scurried away. It was evident that she had a low opinion of frau doctors who basted roasts and got flour on their hands.
The quiet of the old small house settled about Therese, and for the first time in weeks she was able to breathe without pain. The ancient tall clock in the hall boomed. A shaft of pale sunlight lay across worn carpets and polished floors. The black-walnut furniture was hideous, and twisted into fantastic shapes. In a wall cabinet, tiny dainty Dresden figures postured, and stars of sunlight twinkled on the corners of the brass fender and on the faded gold of picture rims. The street outside was hot and glaring, but here everything was dim and still, a little musty, but smelling of spiced dried roses and timelessness.
Therese sat quietly. She became conscious that she had been afflicted with a chronic trembling; now her legs and arms relaxed, and an exhausted pain began to pervade them. She laid her head on the back of the old plush chair in which she sat; she felt the scratch of the starched lace against her tired, quivering cheek. She closed her eyes. She had not been here for a long time. She loved old Doctor Traub, but Helene had always bored her. She was not intelligent, Helene, and she read nothing. She was only kind and good. Therese opened her eyes as though she had received a shock. “Only kind and good.” But, dear God, what else was there, after all? She was filled with self-reproach and disgust. What a cool, egotistic, superior fool I have been! she thought.
There was a long, gilt-framed old mirror at the end of the room. She saw her gray haggard face in it. Her small hat was tilted helplessly over her forehead. She automatically straightened it. Exhaustion crept over her like heavy water, and again she closed her eyes as if to shut out not only her pain, but her awareness of herself.
So
meone entered the room. It was the old doctor. He smiled at her. He was paunchy and short, and had a little gray beard and small twinkling eyes behind his thick lenses. His dress was untidy, he was given to furious smoking of cigarettes, and the shelf of his paunch was always sprinkled with ashes. His trousers bagged; across his middle was strung an old-fashioned gold watch-chain. When Therese saw him and his wise, pursy, fond smile, she tried to speak, then felt tears crowding into her eyes. She gave him her hand, and he kissed it as a father might kiss the hand of his daughter, without gallantry, but only with affection.
“Ah, my dear, it is good to see you,” he said. She saw how his clothing had been deftly darned, and also saw the glazed evidence of an iron on his frayed tie. He smelled of tobacco and soap and earth. He had been in the garden; his short square nails were rimmed with soil. He was good; he was kind; he was sane. He was her friend and her comforter. She cried out in a voice of agony:
“I do not know where to start!”
Insane words, not to be comprehended! But he comprehended. His eyes darkened, became grave. He was no longer smiling. Now his face was old and tired, and ineffably sad. He stood, looking down at her, not speaking. His slow heavy breath caused his golden watch-chain to swing a little, so that it caught fugitive gleams of light. He saw Therese’s distracted tears, saw how she wrung her hands. Therese, the calm, the coolly smiling, the superior, the realist. “She has her feet on the ground,” he had said once to his wife, but not with admiration, and only with a sort of regret.
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