Chapter 4

He had reached the Behaim monument when he began to walk more slowly. A short distance before him he saw a man and a woman. He recognized Dorothea.

They were speaking very rapidly and in subdued tones. Daniel followed them; and when they reached the door of his house and turned to go in, he stopped in the shadow of the church.

The man seemed to be angry and excited: Dorothea was trying to quiet him. She was standing close by him; she held his hand in hers until she unlocked the door. First she whispered, looked up at the house anxiously, and then said out loud: “Good night, Edmund. Sweet dreams!”

The man went on his way without lifting his hat. Dorothea hastened in.

Daniel was trembling in his whole body. There was something in his eyes that seemed to be beseeching; and there was something mystic about them. He watched until the light had been lighted upstairs and the window shade drawn. He was tortured by the stillness of the Square; when the clock in the tower struck eleven he thought he could hear the blood roaring in his ears.

It was only with difficulty that he dragged himself into the house. Dorothea, already in her night-gown, was sitting at the table in the living room, sewing a ribbon on the dress she had just been wearing: it had somehow got loose.

They spoke to each other. Daniel stood behind her, near the stove, and looked over at the back of her bared neck as if held by a spell. One cold shiver after another was running through his body.

“Who gave you those ostrich feathers?” he asked, suddenly and rather brusquely. The question slipped from his lips before he himself was aware of it. He would have liked to say something else.

Dorothea raised her head with a jerk. “I thought I told you,” she replied, and he noticed that she coloured up.

“I cannot believe that a perfect stranger, and a woman at that, is making you such costly presents,” said Daniel slowly.

Dorothea got up, and looked at him rather undecidedly. “Very well, if you simply must know, I bought them myself,” she said with unusual defiance. “But you don’t need to try to browbeat me like that; I’ll get the money that I paid for them. And you needn’t think for a minute that I am going to let you draw up a family budget, and expect to make me live by it.”

“You didn’t buy those feathers,” said Daniel, cutting her off in the middle of her harangue.

“I didn’t buy them, and they were not given to me! How did I get them then? Stole them perhaps?” Dorothea was scornful; but cowardice made it impossible for her to look Daniel in the face.

“I have never in my life talked to any one in this way, nor has any one ever spoken to me like that,” thought Daniel to himself. He turned deathly pale, went up to her, and placed his hand like an iron vise about her arm. “I shall permit you to waste my money; I shall not object if you fritter your time away in the company of good-for-nothing people; if you regard my health and peace of mind as of no consequence whatever, I shall say nothing; if you let your poor little child suffer and pine away, I shall keep quiet. I shall submit to all of this. And why shouldn’t I? Why should I want to have my meals served at regular hours? Why should I insist that my morning coffee be warm and my rolls fresh from the baker? Why should I be so exacting as to ask that my clothes be mended, my windows washed, my room swept, and my table in order? I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth; I have never known what it was to be comfortable.”

“Oh, listen, Daniel, it’s too bad about you,” said Dorothea in an anxious tone, “but let go of my arm.”

He loosened his grip on her arm, but did not let it go. “You may associate with whomsoever you please. Let those people treasure you to whom you are a treasure. So far as money is concerned, you can have all that I have. Here it is, take it.” He drew from his pocket an embroidered purse filled with coins, and hurled them on the table. “So that you can wear fine dresses, I will play the organ on Sundays. So that you can go to masquerade balls and parties of all kinds, I will try to beat a little music into some twenty-odd unmusical idiots. I will do more than that: I will promise never to bother myself about your behaviour: I will never ask you where you have been or where you are going. But listen, Dorothea,” he said, as his face flushed with anger and anxiety, his voice rising as if by unconscious pressure, “don’t you ever dare dishonour my name! It is the only thing I have. I owe humanity an irreparable debt for it. It invests me not simply with what is known as civic honour, it gives me also the honour I feel and enjoy when I stand in the presence of what I have created. Lie, and you besmirch my name! Lie, and you sully and debase it! I am probably not as much afraid as you think I am of being regarded as a cuckold, though I admit that the thought of it makes my blood boil. But I want to say to you here and now, that when I think of you in the arms of another man I feel within me a deep desire, a real lust for murder. But you would throw me into the last pit of hell and damnation, if you were to repay the truths I have told you and given you with lies, lies, lies. You must not, you dare not, imagine for a minute that I am so selfish and vulgar as not to be able to understand that a change might come over your heart. But that is one thing; telling a lie and living a lie is quite another. It is impossible for me to live side by side with another human being except in absolute truth. A lie, the lie, crushes what there is in me of the divine. A lie to me is carrion and corruption. Tell me, then, whether you have been and are true to me! Don’t be afraid, Dorothea, and don’t be ashamed. Everything may be right yet and work out as it should. But tell me: Have you been deceiving me?”

“I—deceiving you?” breathed Dorothea, and looked into his face as if hypnotised, never so much as moving an eyelash. “What do you mean? Deceiving you? Do you really think that I would be capable of such baseness?”

“You have no lover? No other man has touched you since you have been my wife?”

“A lover? Some other man has touched me?” she repeated with that same hypnotic look. In her child-like face there was the glow of unadulterated honour and undiluted innocence.

“You have been having no secret rendezvous, you have not been receiving treacherous letters, nor writing them, you have promised no man anything, not even in jest?”

“Ah, well now, Daniel, listen! In jest. That’s another matter. Who knows? You know me, and you know how one talks and laughs.”

“And you assure me that all this mysterious abuse that is being whispered into my ears and to which your conduct has given a certain amount of plausibility is nothing in the world but wickedness on the part of people who know us, nothing but calumny?”

“Yes, Daniel: it is merely wickedness, meanness, and calumny.”

“You are willing that God above should never grant you another minute of peace, if you have been lying to me? Do you wish that, Dorothea?”

Dorothea balked; she blinked a little. Then she said quite softly: “Those are terrible words, Daniel. But if you insist upon it, I am willing to abide by the curse you have made a possibility.”

Daniel breathed a breath of relief. He felt that a mighty load had been taken from his heart. And in grateful emotion he went up to his wife, and pressed her to his bosom.

But at the same time he was repelled by something. He felt that the creature he was pressing to his heart was without rhythm, or vibration, or law, or order. He began again to be gnawed at by torture, this time of a new species and coming from another direction.

As he opened the door to the hall, he heard a rustle; and he saw a dark figure hastening over to the room that opened on the court.