"In Berlin, while I danced, I always had to look at you," she continued, holding her doll against her lips so that her little nose was a bit flattened. "The very first time I saw you, I felt something like a bond between us; I knew we should meet again."
Frederick started, though not for an instant deceived, knowing this must be an oft-used formula for establishing a relationship, and in essence a lie.
"Are you married?" he heard before he had fully recovered his balance. He turned pale. His answer was hard and repellent.
"It would be well, Miss Hahlström, if you were to examine me more closely before you treat me as one among many. So far, I don't believe in the bond that unites us. During your dance you looked not only at me, but at everybody else." He spoke with increasing coldness. "At any rate, it doesn't in the least concern you whether I am, or am not, married—just as little as it concerns me what repulsive personages, whom nothing but a depraved instinct can enjoy, you keep company with." He meant Achleitner.
Ingigerd gave a short laugh. "Do you take me for Joan of Arc?"
"Not exactly that," rejoined Frederick, "but if you would allow me, I should like to regard you as still a girl, a distinguished little lady, whose reputation cannot be too carefully guarded against the faintest blemish."
"Reputation!" sneered the girl. "You are very much mistaken if you think I ever cared for anything of the sort. I'd rather be disreputable ten times over and live as I please, than have a good reputation and die of boredom. I must enjoy my life, Doctor von Kammacher."
Frederick's teeth clenched. Outwardly composed, he was suffering the pangs of torture.
Ingigerd proceeded to reveal her life in a series of confidences of such shocking content as to be worthy of a Laïs or a Phryne. Doctor von Kammacher, she said, might be sorry for her if he wanted to, but nobody was to make a mistake about her. Everybody associating with her was to know exactly who she was. In this she betrayed a certain dread, as one who would absolutely guard others as well as herself against the catastrophe of disillusionment.
When the sun had set, and Ingigerd, still with that suggestive, sensual, evil smile on her lips, had finished her hideous confession, Frederick found himself confronting the knowledge of a childhood so outrageous as to be worse than anything he had met with in all his experience as a physician.
Several times in the course of her narrative, Achleitner and her father had come to take her inside, but she had angrily driven them away. It was Frederick who finally helped her back to her cabin.
In his own cabin, without even removing his overcoat, he threw himself on his berth to think over the inconceivable story. He sighed, he gnashed his teeth, he wanted to doubt it. Several times he said aloud, "No!" or "Impossible!" and beat his fists against the mattress of the berth above. He could have sworn an oath that this time there had not been a single lie in Mara's whole shameless narrative. "Mara, or the Spider's Victim." Now, of a sudden, he understood her dance! She had danced the thing she had lived in her own life!
XIV
"I have set my all on nothing."
To the accompaniment of this refrain beating in his soul Frederick maintained an outer show of hilarity. He and the ship's doctor were drinking champagne. He had ordered the first bottle with the soup and had immediately drunk several glasses.
The more he drank the less he felt the smart of a certain burning wound, and the more wonderful the world appeared, full of miracles and riddles, surrounding and penetrating him with the intoxication of an adventurer's life. He was a brilliant entertainer, with an easy, happy way in conversation of popularising his rich store of knowledge, and with a light humour, which stood at his command even when, as now, grim humour crawled in the depths of his being, like evil reptiles. Thus it was that the captain's corner that evening fell under his spell, both of his jocular self and serious self.
Though he had lost his belief that science and modern progress alone possess the power to convey happiness, he extolled their virtues. As a matter of fact, in the festive gleam of the countless electric lights, excited by the wine, the music, and the rhythmic pulse beat of the moving vessel, it seemed to him at times as if humanity in a festal procession with music playing were sailing to the Isles of the Blessed. Perhaps, he said, science may some day teach man the secret of immortality. Ways and means would be found to keep the cells of the body young. Dead animals had been brought back to life by pumping a salt solution into them. He spoke of the wonders of surgery, always the theme of conversation when a man of the present, over his champagne and pâté de foie gras, triumphs in the superiority of his age over all other ages. In a short while, he declared, chemistry would solve the social question, and man would forget what it is to worry about food. Why, chemistry was on the verge of discovering how to make bread of stones, a thing that hitherto only plants could do. Frederick continued in a similar strain, speaking by rote, and scarcely looking up, yet fascinating his listeners.
But in the midst of the whirl of self-intoxication, he thought with a shudder of bedtime, knowing he should not close his eyes the whole night. And what recompense was the brightest height of the clearest day for the hell of a single sleepless night, such as he had often spent within the last years.
After dinner, he went with Doctor Wilhelm to the ladies' parlour, from there to the smoking-room. Soon after, he went on deck, where it was dark and gloomy and the wind was again whining dismally through the rigging of the four masts. It was bitter cold, and snowflakes, it seemed to him, swept his cheeks. Finally, there was nothing for him to do but go to bed.
For two hours, between eleven and one, he lay writhing in his berth, sometimes for a short while falling into a troubled state between waking and sleeping. In both states he saw visions, now a wild dance of faces, now a single stark face, which tormented him and would not budge. Yet an irresistible impulse gathered in him to keep his mental eye open for the devilish play of supernatural powers.
He had turned out the electric lights, and in the dark, when the eye is unoccupied, one is doubly sensitive to the messages of hearing and feeling. He caught every sound, felt every movement, of the mighty ship, steadily pursuing its course through the midnight. He heard the churning of the propeller, like the labouring of a great demon condemned to slave for mankind. He heard shouts and calls and the walking of men when the coal-passers threw overboard the cinders from the huge boiler furnaces. On the trip to New York those furnaces consumed over a thousand tons of coal, and the casting away of the slag and ashes was left for the nighttime. Thus, to the relief of the man wrestling with sleep, his attention was drawn to the present and the things taking place in the ship's body.
Yet, when there was no sound or movement to distract him, his imagination succumbed to torturing thoughts of Mara and sometimes of his wife, with whose sufferings he occasionally used to reproach himself. Now that Ingigerd Hahlström had dishonoured his love for her, his conscience smote him all the more. His whole mentality seemed to have entered a state of reaction against the poison of his passion. A high fever raged in his veins. The thing that in this condition represented his "I" was engaged in a wild chase after the "you" of Mara. He picked her up in the streets of Prague and dragged her back to her mother. He discovered her in houses of ill repute. He saw her standing before the home of a man who had taken her with him out of pity and then had turned her away in scorn, and she stood for hours weeping outside his window. Frederick had by no means fully sloughed the skin of the conventional German youth. The old hackneyed ideal of virginity was in his eyes still surrounded by a sacred aureole; but no matter how often he discovered Mara in evil things, no matter how often he rejected her in his imagination, or tried with all the moral strength of his being to destroy her image in his mind, her face in its golden setting, her frail, white girlish body pierced through each curtain, each wall, each thought with which he strove to conceal the evil spirit that would not be exorcised either by prayers or curses.