She was astonished to learn that there was a secret, invisible bond uniting all men and that, without any physical awareness of the fact, their souls recognised and spoke to one another in imperceptible vibrations and in feelings that were too faint to be registered by the physical senses. Resentful, greedy, murderous, they were like predators struggling for existence; and yet it would perhaps have only taken a tiny rent in the curtain that veiled their eyes to turn the bitterest of enemies into the most faithful of friends.
The alleys she passed through were becoming emptier and eerier, she no longer felt any doubt that the next hours would bring something terrible - she assumed it would be death at the hand of a murderer- if she did not succeed in breaking the spell that drew her ever onwards; and yet she did not even try to fight it. Unresisting, she bore the alien will that compelled her to follow the path into the darkness, calm in her confidence that whatever should happen to her, it would be one more step towards her goal.
For a brief moment, as she was crossing an iron footbridge over a canal, she saw the silhouette of St. Nicholas’ through a gap between two gables, its two towers standing out from the horizon like a dark hand raised in warning. She gave an involuntary sigh of relief at the thought that it might only be Swammerdam calling to her with his heart in his sorrow for his friend Klinkherbogk.
The animosity that she sensed all around her told herthat she was mistaken. The very earth gave off a dark malevolence which was directed against her: the icy, pitiless fury of nature towards any man who tries to cast off the bonds of his servitude.
For the first time since she had left her room, she felt afraid; she almost collapsed under the awareness of how completely defenceless she was. She tried to stop, but her feet carried her on, as if she had lost all power over them.
In her desperation she looked up to the sky and was deeply moved by the immense feeling of solace she drew from the sight of the host of stars, like a thousand eyes glittering threateningly down at the earth, the eyes of all-powerful helpers who would not suffer a hair of her head to be harmed. She remembered the greybeards in the hall into whose hands she had put her destiny and they seemed to her a gathering of immortals, who only needed to bat an eyelid for the world to crumble to dust.
And again she heard in her ear the strange, compelling guttural sounds; hoarsely, urgently, as if from very close, they urged her to hasten. Then suddenly in the darkness she recognised the crooked house in which Klinkherbogk had been murdered.
A man was sitting on the railing above the confluence of the canals. He sat motionless, leaning tensely forward as if he were listening forher approaching steps. Eva felt that it was from him that the demonic power emanated that had compelled her to make her way to the Zeedijk.
Even before she could make out his face, she knew from the mortal fear that paralysed her every limb and froze her blood, that it was the terrible Zulu that she had seen in the shoemaker’s attic.
In her terror she wanted to scream for help, but the link be tween desire and action seemed to have been cut within her, her body was under another power. As if she had died and were outside her body, she saw herself stumble towards the man and stop right in front of him.
He raised his head and seemed to look at her, but his eyeballs were turned upwards, like someone sleeping with open eyes.
Eva realised that he was as stiff as a corpse and that she only needed to give him a push in the chest to send him tumbling backwards into the water. In spite of that, she was completely under his spell and incapable of doing it. She knew she would be defenceless before him when he awoke, and she could count the minutes that separated her from her fate: from time to time his face twitched with the first signs of the gradual return of consciousness.
She had often heard and read of women, particularly blondes, who were supposed to have succumbed to negroes in spite of the violent repugnance they felt; they said the untamed African blood exerted a spell over them which it was impossible to resist. Eva had never believed these explanations, and had regarded such women as low creatures who gave way to their animal instincts; but now, with an icy shudder, she recognised from what was happening within her that a dark force of that nature did indeed exist. Disgust and sensual pleasure were only apparent opposites, in reality the partition dividing them was thin and transparent and when it gave way a woman had no defence against the bestial instincts let loose within her.
What was it that gave this half animal, half human savage such inexplicable power, as he called to her from afar, that it drew her like a sleepwalker to him through strange alleyways? There must be chords within her that responded to his lust, although she, inherpride, had imagined she was free from them.
Did every woman feel the satanic power emanating from this negro, she asked herself, trembling with fear, or was she herself so much lower than all the others, who had not even heard his magic call, much less followed it?
She saw no hope of salvation. The bliss she had craved for her beloved and herself would be destroyed along with her body. Anything she could take with her over the threshold ofdeath was formless and incapable of giving her that which she desired. She had wanted to turn her back on the earth, but the earth spirit kept an iron grip on his own: the giant figure of the negro before her was the embodiment of its omnipotence.
She saw him shake off his trance and leap down from the railing. He grabbed her by the arms and pulled her to him. She screamed, and her cry for help echoed from the walls of the houses around, but he pressed his hand over her mouth so hard that she was almost suffocated.
Like a butcher’s cur, he had round his neck a dark-red leather leash; she grasped it and held on tight so as not to be thrust to the ground. For a moment she managed to free her head. She gathered her last reserves of strength and screamed for help again.
It must have been heard, for she heard the crash of a glass door followed by a babble of voices; a broad glare of light illuminated the alleyway.
Then she felt the negro set off with wild leaps and bounds towards the shadow of St. Nicholas’, pulling her along with him. Two Chilean sailors with orange sashes round their waists were already close on his heels, she could see the bare knives gleaming in theirhands as theirbold bronze faces drew nearer. Instinctively she held on tight to the negro’s neckthong and dragged her feet behind so as to encumber him as much as possible, but he seemed scarcely to notice her weight; he jerked her up from the ground and rushed with her along the churchyard wall. Close before her she could see the fleshy lips around his bared teeth, like the jaws of some beast of prey, and the savage intensity of expression in his white eyes burned her senses, so that she froze as if hypnotised, incapable of any resistance at all.
One of the sailors had overtaken the negro and now threw himself, curled up like a cat, at his feet to trip him up, at the same time stabbing upwards at him with his knife; in a flash, the Zulu leapt up and his knee caughtthe sailoron the head, knocking him to the ground where he lay, his skull smashed.
Then Eva felt herself thrown over the wrought-iron bars of the churchyard gate and expected to crash to the ground, breaking every bone in her body; but her dress caught on the iron spikes and through the bars she watched as the Zulu fought with his second assailant. It lasted only a few seconds; the sailor was thrown like a ball against a window in the wall of the house opposite which shattered in an explosion of glass and wood.
Quivering in fear of her life, Eva had freed herself from the spikes of the gate and tried to flee, but there was nowhere to go in the narrow garden behind the church. Like a hunted animal she crawled under a bench, but she knew that she was lost all the same: her light-coloured dress shone in the darkness and would surely give her away any moment.
With trembling fingers and scarcely able to think, she felt for the pin at her neck; she wanted to plunge it into her heart, for already the negro had vaulted over the wall, and she did not intend that he should take her alive. The last thing she could recall was her mute, desperate cry t
o God that she might find something with which she could kill herself before her tormentor found her. Then, for a sudden moment, she thought she must have gone mad, for there, in the middle of the garden, with a calm smile on her face, stood her own double.
The negro must have seen it as well; he halted in astonishment and then went over to it. She thought she could hear him talking to the apparition; she could not understand what was said, but his voice suddenly changed to that of a man paralysed by horror and hardly able to stammer a few words.
It must be an illusion! Perhaps the savage had already had his way with her and it had driven her mad! Nevertheless, she could not tear her eyes away from the scene. For a moment she became convinced she herself was the double and in some mysterious way the Zulu was in her power, and in the next she was desperately searching for the pin once more.
She made a supreme effort. She was determined to establish whether she had gone mad or not. She stared fixedly at the phantom and saw it disappear, as if her concentration had sucked it back into her body; it was like a magic part of herself that returned to her every time she strained her eyes to see it in the darkness. It was like a spectral breath that she could inhale and exhale at will, but each time it left, an icy tingling made her hair stand on end, as if Death were at her side.
The negro did not respond at all to the appearance and disappearance of her double. Whether it was there or not, all the time he muttered to himself, as if he were talking in his sleep. Eva gradually realised that he had once more fallen into the strange, trancelike state as when she had seen him sitting on the canal railings.
Still trembling with fear, she finally plucked up the courage to leave her hiding place. She could hear shouts and voices approaching along the alley; the windows of the houses opposite reflected the bobbing gleam of the lanterns and the shadows of the trees on the church wall were transformed into a line of dancing ghosts.
She counted her heartbeats; now, now the crowd looking for the negro must be close by! Her knees almost giving way, she ran past him to the gate and gave a piercing cry for help. As she fainted she was aware of the comforting figure of a woman in a red dress kneeling beside her bathing her forehead; she was saved.
A motley army of half-naked figures clambered over the wall, blazing torches in their hands, gleaming knives between theirteeth; they seemed like fantastic, capering demons, sprung from the ground to come to her aid. Flames flared up, bringing the saints on the stained-glass windows of the church to life; there was a hubbub of shrill Spanish oaths, “There’s the nigger! Slash his guts!”
She saw the sailors, yelling with fury, hurl themselves on the Zulu, and she saw them fall to the ground, felled by the massive blows of his fists, heard the spine-chilling shout of triumph that rent the air as, like an unleashed tiger, he cut his way through the pack of assailants, swung up onto a tree and then leapt with enormous bounds from niche to niche, over the gables and onto the roof of the church.
For a few brief seconds, as she was waking from a deep swoon, she dreamt an old man with cloth round his forehead had bent over her and called her name. She thought it was Lazarus Egyolk, but then, through his features as if through a glass mask, the face of the negro appeared, with the white eyes and fleshy lips around his bared teeth, just as it had carved itself on her memory while he carried her in his arms, until lashed by a witches’ sabbath of feverish images, she lost consciousness once more.
After they had finished their dinner together, Hauberrisser stayed with Doctor Sephardi and Baron Pfeill for an hour, but he was poor company, monosyllabic and absentminded. His thoughts were constantly with Eva, and he started in surprise whenever one of the others addressed him. The solitude he had enjoyed in Amsterdam, and which he had found so refreshing, now seemed unbearable when he thought of the coming days and weeks.
Apart from Neill. - and Sephardi, to whom he had felt attracted from the moment he had met him - he had no friends or acquaintances and he had long since broken off all connections with the land of his birth. Would he be able to endure the hermit’s life that he had lived so far, now that he had found Eva?
He thought about moving to Antwerp, so that even if she did not want them to live together, at least they would be breathing the same air, perhaps that would also give him the opportunity of seeing her.
He still felt a stab of pain when he remembered how coolly she had expressed her decision to leave it to time and chance whether any kind of permanent union should develop between them. Then he would spend minutes in joyful intoxication at the thought of her kisses and that they were already united for ever. It would be his fault, and his alone, he told himself, if the separation lasted for more than a few days. What was there to stop him visiting her during the coming week, to suggest that they should continue to see each other? As far as he knew, she was completely independent and did not need to consult anyone about her decision.
But however clear and smooth the way to Eva appeared to him, when he took everything into account, he found that his hopes kept oncoming up against a feeling of fear, an indefinable fear for Eva, that he had felt for the first time when they had said farewell. He kept trying to paint a rosy picture of the future, but never got beyond the first strokes; his forlorn attempts to ignore the `No’ that rang out in his breast in answer to his question to fate whenever he forced himself to imagine a happy end brought him to the brink of despair.
He knew from long experience that, once they had been roused, there was no point in trying to drown out those inner voices threatening disaster with a certainty that was no whit diminished by its apparent lack of foundation in reality. Instead, he tried to lull them by telling himself that his concern was merely the natural consequence of his love. Nevertheless he could scarcely wait for the moment when he would hear that Eva had arrived safely in Antwerp.
He got out of the train together with Sephardi at Muiderpoort Station, which was nearer to the city centre than Central Station, accompanied him part of the way to the Herengracht, and then hurried to the Amstel Hotel to leave the bunch of roses, which Neill had given him with a smile, as if he had guessed his thoughts, at the porter’s desk for Eva. There he was told that Juffrouw van Druysen had just left, but that if he took a taxi he might well reach the train before it went.
The taxi took him quickly to Central Station.
He waited. The minutes passed, but Eva did not come.
He telephoned the hotel; she had not returned there; perhaps he should enquire at the luggage counter.
Her cases had not been collected. The ground seemed to tremble beneath him.
Only now, in his all-consuming fear forEva, did he realise the intensity of his love for her, and that he could not live without her. The last barrier between them, that slight feeling of notyet-belonging-together that had come from the unusual way they had been thrown together, collapsed under the immensity of his anxiety for her, and he knew that if she were to appear beforehim now, he would takeherinhis arms and coverherwith kisses and never let her go again.
Although there was scarcely any prospect of her arriving at the last minute, he waited at the station until the train set off. It was obvious that some accident must have happened to her. He had to force himself to remain calm. What route could she have taken? Not a minute was to be lost! If the worst had not already happened, then what was needed was a cool, clear appraisal of the situation, such as had almost always saved the day in his former profession of engineer and inventor.
Straining his imagination to its limits, he made a desperate attempt to visualise any mysterious chain of events in which Eva might have been involved before she left the hotel. He tried to create within himself the mood of expectancy she had probably been in before she left. The fact that she had sent her luggage on ahead, instead of using the Hotel carriage suggested that she meant to visit someone on the way.
But whom? And at such a late hour?
He suddenly remembered that he had urged Sephardi to see how Swammerdam was. And Swamme
rdam lived in the Zeedijk district, a shady part of town if ever there was, as was obvious from the newspaper report of the murder! That was where she must have gone!
An icy shudder went down Hauberrisser’s spine at the thought of the possible horrors she was exposing herself to amongst the unsavoury denizens of dockland. He had heard of taverns where strangers to the area were robbed, murdered and dumped through trapdoors into the canal; his hair stood on end at the thought that that might be happening to Eva.
Before he could follow this thought any farther, his taxi was racing across the Openhaven Bridge and screeching to a halt outside St. Nicholas’. The driver explained that he could not take him any farther in the narrow streets of the Zeedijk and suggested Hauberrisser went to the `Prince of Orange’ - he pointed to where then tavern lights shone across the street - and asked the landlord for the house he was looking for.
The tavern door was wide open and Hauberrisser rushed straight in; the place was empty, apart from one man standing behind the bar who gave him a shifty look. From the distance came the sound of raucous shouts, as if a street brawl were going on.
A tip elicited from the landlord the information that Swammerdam lived on the fourth floor, with ill grace he lit the way up the precipitous stairs.
“No, Juffrouw van Druysen has not been back here”, said the aged lepidopterist with a shake of his head after Hauberrisser had given him a breathless account of his worries.
Swammerdam had not been in bed, he was fully dressed even. The single tallow candle on the empty table that was almost completely burnt down as well as his grief-stricken face told Hauberrisser that he had been sitting for hours in his room, pondering over the terrible death of his friend Klinkherbogk.
Hauberrisser took his hand. “Forgive me, Mijnheer Swammerdam, for descending on you in the middle of the night like this at a time - at a time when you would want to be alone with your sorrow. Yes”, he added when he saw the old man’s surprised look, “I know what a loss you have just suffered, I even know the details; Doctor Sephardi told me about it earlier today. If you would like, we can talk aboutthat later, but at the moment I am going out of my mind with anxiety about Eva. What if she really did intend to visit you and was attacked on the way and - and - my God! It doesn’t bear thinking about!”
The Green Face Page 14