In the afternoon Christophe had very few pupils. Then, as a rule, he would stay at home with Anna, while the doctor went out. They never saw each other. They used to go about their separate business. At first Braun had begged Christophe to give his wife a few lessons on the piano: she was, he said, an excellent musician. Christophe asked Anna to play him something. She did not need to be pressed, although she disliked doing it: but she did it with her usual ungraciousness: she played mechanically, with an incredible lack of sensibility: each note was like another: there was no sort of rhythm or expression: when she had to turn the page she stopped short in the middle of a bar, made no haste about it, and went on with the next note. Christophe was so exasperated by it that he was hard put to it to keep himself from making an insulting remark: he could not help going out of the room before she had finished. She was not put out, but went on imperturbably to the very last note, and seemed to be neither hurt nor indignant at his rudeness: she hardly seemed to have noticed it. But the matter of music was never again mentioned between them. Sometimes in the afternoons when Christophe was out and returned unexpectedly, he would find Anna practising the piano, with icy, dull tenacity, going over and over one passage fifty times, and never by any chance showing the least animation. She never played when she knew that Christophe was at home. She devoted all the time that was not consecrated to her religious duties to her household work. She used to sew, and mend, and darn, and look after the servant: she had a mania for tidiness and cleanliness. Her husband thought her a fine woman, a little odd—"like all women," he used to say—but "like all women," devoted. On that last point Christophe made certain reservations in petto: such psychology seemed to him too simple; but he told himself that, after all, it was Braun's affair; and he gave no further thought to the matter.

They used to sit together after dinner in the evening. Braun and Christophe would talk. Anna would sit working. On Braun's entreaty, Christophe had consented to play the piano sometimes: and he would occasionally play on to a very late hour in the big gloomy room looking out on to the garden. Braun would go into ecstasies.... Who is there that does not know the type that has a passionate love for things they do not understand, or understand all wrong!—(which is why they love them!)—Christophe did not mind: he had met so many idiots in the course of his life! But when Braun gave vent to certain mawkish expressions of enthusiasm, he would stop playing, and go up to his room without a word. Braun grasped the truth at last, and put a stopper on his reflections. Besides, his love for music was quickly sated: he could never listen with any attention for more than a quarter of an hour on end: he would pick up his paper, or doze off, and leave Christophe in peace. Anna would sit back in her chair and say nothing: she would have her work in her lap and seem to be working: but her eyes were always staring and her hands never moved. Sometimes she would go out without a sound in the middle of a piece, and be seen no more.

* * * * *

So the days passed. Christophe regained his strength. Braun's heavy but kindly attentions, the tranquillity of the household, the restful regularity of such a domestic life, the extremely nourishing German food, restored him to his old robustness. His physical health was repaired: but his moral machinery was still out of gear. His new vigor only served to accentuate the disorder of his mind, which could not recover its balance, like a badly ballasted ship which will turn turtle on the smallest shock.

He was profoundly lonely. He could have no intellectual intimacy with Braun. His relations with Anna were reduced, with a few exceptions, to saying good-morning and good-night. His dealings with his pupils were rather hostile than otherwise: for he hardly hid from them his opinion that the best thing for them to do was to give up music altogether. He knew nobody. It was not only his fault, though he had hidden himself away since his loss. People held aloof from him.

He was living in an old town, full of intelligence and vitality, but also full of patrician pride, self-contained, and self-satisfied. There was a bourgeois aristocracy with a taste for work and the higher culture, but narrow and pietistic, who were calmly convinced of their own superiority and the superiority of their city, and quite content to live in family isolation. There were enormous families with vast ramifications. Each family had its day for a general gathering of the clan. They were hardly at all open to the outside world. All these great houses, with fortunes generations old, felt no need of showing their wealth. They knew each other, and that was enough: the opinion of others was a thing of no consequence. There were millionaires dressed like humble shopkeepers, talking their raucous dialect with its pungent expressions, going conscientiously to their offices, every day of their lives, even at an age when the most industrious of men will grant themselves the right to rest. Their wives prided themselves on their domestic skill. No dowry was given to the daughters. Rich men let their sons in their turn go through the same hard apprenticeship that they themselves had served. They practised strict economy in their daily lives. But they made a noble use of their fortune in collecting works of art, picture galleries, and in social work: they were forever giving enormous sums, nearly always anonymously, to found charities and to enrich the museums. They were a mixture of greatness and absurdity, both of another age. This little world, for which the rest of the world seemed not to exist—(although its members knew it thoroughly through their business, and their distant relationships, and the long and extended voyages which they forced their sons to take,)—this little world, for which fame and celebrity in another land only were esteemed from the moment when they were welcomed and recognized by itself,—practised the severest discipline upon itself. Every member of it kept a watch upon himself and upon the rest. The result of all this was a collective conscience which masked all individual differences (more marked than elsewhere among the robust personalities of the place) under the veil of religious and moral uniformity. Everybody practised it, everybody believed in it. Not a single soul doubted it or would admit of doubt. It were impossible to know what took place in the depths of souls which were the more hermetically sealed against prying eyes inasmuch as they knew that they were surrounded by a narrow scrutiny, and that every man took upon himself the right to examine into the conscience of other men. It was said that even those who had left the country and thought themselves emancipated—as soon as they set foot in it again were dominated by the traditions, the habits, the atmosphere of the town: even the most skeptical were at once forced to practise and to believe. Not to believe would have seemed to them an offense against Nature. Not to believe was the mark of an inferior caste, a sign of bad breeding. It was never admitted that a man of their world could possibly be absolved of his religious duties. If a man did not practise their religion, he was at once unclassed, and all doors were closed to him.

Even the weight of such discipline was apparently not enough for them. The men of this little world were not closely bound enough within their caste. Within the great Verein they had formed a number of smaller Verein by way of binding their fetters fast. There were several hundred of them: and they were increasing every year. There were Verein for everything: for philanthropy, charitable work, commercial work, work that was both charitable and commercial, for the arts, for the sciences, for singing, music, spiritual exercises, physical exercises, merely to provide excuses for meeting and taking their amusement collectively: there were Verein for the various districts and the various corporations: there were Verein for men of the same position in the world, the same degree of wealth, men of the same social weight, who wore the same handle to their names. It was even said that an attempt had been made to form a Verein for the Vereinlosen (those who did not belong to any Verein): though not twelve such people had been forthcoming.

Within this triple bandage of town, caste, and union, the soul was cramped and bound. Character was suppressed by a secret constraint. The majority were brought up to it from childhood—had been for centuries: and they found it good: they would have thought it improper and unhealthy to go without these bandages. Their satisfied smiles gave no indication of the discomfort they might be feeling. But Nature always took her revenge. Every now and then there would arise some individual in revolt, some vigorous artist or unbridled thinker who would brutally break his bonds and set the city fathers by the ears. They were so clever that, if the rebel had not been stifled in the embryo, and became the stronger, they never troubled to fight him—(a fight might have produced all sorts of scandalous outbreaks):—they bought him up. If he were a painter, they sent him to the museum: if he were a thinker, to the libraries. It was quite useless for him to roar out all sorts of outrageous things: they pretended not to hear him. It was in vain for him to protest his independence: they incorporated him as one of themselves. So the effect of the poison was neutralized: it was the homeopathic treatment.—But such cases were rare, most of the rebellions never reached the light of day. Their peaceful houses concealed unsuspected tragedies. The master of a great house would go quietly and throw himself into the river, and leave no explanation. Sometimes a man would go into retirement for six months, sometimes he would send his wife to an asylum to restore her mind. Such things were spoken of quite openly, as though they were quite natural, with that placidity which is one of the great features of the town, the inhabitants of which are able to maintain it in the face of suffering and death.

These solid burgesses, who were hard upon themselves because they knew their own worth, were much less hard on others because they esteemed them less. They were quite liberal towards the foreigners dwelling in the town like Christophe, German professors, and political refugees, because they had no sort of feeling about them. And, besides, they loved intelligence. Advanced ideas had no terrors for them: they knew that their sons were impervious to their influence. They were coldly cordial to their guests, and kept them at a distance.

Christophe did not need to have these things underlined. He was in a state of raw sensitiveness which left his feelings absolutely unprotected: he was only too ready to see egoism and indifference everywhere, and to withdraw into himself.

To make matters worse, Braun's patients, and the very limited circle to which his wife belonged, all moved in a little Protestant society which was particularly strict. Christophe was ill-regarded by them both as a Papist by origin and a heretic in fact. For his part, he found many things which shocked him. Although he no longer believed, yet he bore the marks of his inherited Catholicism, which was more poetic than a matter of reason, more indulgent towards Nature, and never suffered the self-torment of trying to explain and understand what to love and what not to love: and also he had the habits of intellectual and moral freedom which he had unwittingly come by in Paris. It was inevitable that he should come into collision with the little pious groups of people in whom all the defects of the Calvinistic spirit were marked and exaggerated: a rationalistic religion, which clipped the wings of faith and left it dangling over the abyss: for it started with an a priori reason which was open to discussion like all mysticism: it was no longer poetry, nor was it prose, it was poetry translated into prose. They had pride of intellect, an absolute, dangerous faith in reason—in their reason. They could not believe in God or in immortality: but they believed in reason as a Catholic believes in the Pope, or as a fetish-worshiper believes in his idol. They never even dreamed of discussing the matter. In vain did life contradict it; they would rather have denied life. They had no psychology, no understanding of Nature, or of the hidden forces, the roots of humanity, the "Spirit of the Earth." They fashioned a scheme of life and nature that were childish, silly, arbitrary figments. Some of them were cultured and practical people who had seen and read much. But they never saw or read anything as it actually was: they always reduced it to an abstraction. They were poor-blooded: they had high moral qualities: but they were not human enough: and that is the cardinal sin. Their purity of heart, which was often very real, noble, and naive, sometimes comic, unfortunately, in certain cases, became tragic: it made them hard in their dealings with others, and produced in them a tranquil inhumanity, self-confident and free from anger, which was quite appalling. How should they hesitate? Had they not truth, right, virtue, on their side? Did they not receive revelation direct from their hallowed reason? Reason is a hard sun: it gives light, but it blinds. In that withering light, without shade or mist, human beings grow pallid, the blood is sucked up from their hearts.

Now, if there was one thing in the world that was utterly meaningless to Christophe at that time it was reason. To his eyes its sun only lit up the walls of the abyss, and neither showed him the means of escape nor even enabled him to sound its depths.

As for the artistic world, Christophe had little opportunity and less desire to mix with it. The musicians were for the most part worthy conservatives of the neo-Schumann period and "Brahmins" of the type against which Christophe had formerly broken many a lance. There were two exceptions: Krebs, the organist, who kept a famous confectioner's shop, an honest man and a good musician, who would have been an even better one if, to adapt the quip of one of his fellow-countrymen, "he had not been seated on a Pegasus which he overfed with hay,"—and a young Jewish composer of an original talent, a man full of a vigorous and turbid sap, who had a business in the Swiss trade: wood carvings, chalets, and Berne bears. They were more independent than the others, no doubt because they did not make a trade of their art, and they would have been very glad to come in touch with Christophe: and at any other time Christophe would have been interested to know them: but at this period of his life, all artistic and human curiosity was blunted in him: he was more conscious of the division between himself and other men than of the bond of union.

His only friend, the confidant of his thoughts, was the river that ran through the city—the same mighty fatherly river that washed the walls of his native town up north. In the river Christophe could recover the memory of his childish dreams.... But in his sorrow they took on, like the Rhine itself, a darkling hue. In the dying day he would lean against the parapet of the embankment and look down at the rushing river, the fused and fusing, heavy, opaque, and hurrying mass, which was always like a dream of the past, wherein nothing could be clearly seen but great moving veils, thousands of streams, currents, eddies twisting into form, then fading away: it was like the blurred procession of mental images in a fevered mind: forever taking shape, forever melting away. Over this twilight dream there skimmed phantom ferry-boats, like coffins, with never a human form in them. Darker grew the night. The river became bronze. The lights upon its banks made its armor shine with an inky blackness, casting dim reflections, the coppery reflections of the gas lamps, the moon-like reflections of the electric lights, the blood-red reflections of the candles in the windows of the houses. The river's murmur filled the darkness with its eternal muttering that was far more sad than the monotony of the sea....

For hours together Christophe would stand drinking in the song of death and weariness of life. Only with difficulty could he tear himself away: then he would climb up to the house again, up the steep alleys with their red steps, which were worn away in the middle: broken in soul and body he would cling to the iron hand-rail fastened to the walls, which gleamed under the light thrown down from the empty square on the hilltop in front of the church that was shrouded in darkness....

He could not understand why men went on living. When he remembered the struggles he had seen, he felt a bitter admiration for the undying faith of humanity. Ideas succeeded the ideas most directly opposed to them, reaction followed action:—democracy, aristocracy: socialism, individualism: romanticism, classicism: progress, tradition:—and so on to the end of time. Each new generation, consumed in its own heat in less than ten years, believed steadfastly that it alone had reached the zenith, and hurled its predecessors down and stoned them: each new generation bestirred itself, and shouted, and took to itself the power and the glory, only to be hurled down and stoned in turn by its successors and so to disappear. Whose turn next?...

The composition of music was no longer a refuge for Christophe: it was intermittent, irregular, aimless. Write? For whom? For men? He was passing through an acute phase of misanthropy. For himself? He was only too conscious of the vanity of art with its impotence to top the void of death. Only now and then the blind force that was in him would raise him on its mighty beating wing and then fall back, worn out by the effort. He was like a storm cloud rumbling in the darkness. With Olivier gone, he had nothing left. He hurled himself against everything that had filled his life, against the feelings that he had thought to share with others, against the thoughts which he had in imagination had in common with the rest of humanity. It seemed to him now that he had been the plaything of an illusion: the whole life of society was based upon a colossal misunderstanding originating in speech. We imagine that one man's thought can communicate with the thought of other men. In reality the connection lies only in words. We say and hear words: not one word has the same meaning in the mouths of two different men. Words outrun the reality of life. We speak of love and hatred. There is neither love nor hatred, friends nor enemies, no faith, no passion, neither good nor evil. There are only cold reflections of the lights falling from vanished suns, stars that have been dead for ages.... Friends? There is no lack of people to claim that name. But what a stale reality is represented by their friendship! What is friendship in the sense of the everyday world? How many minutes of his life does he who thinks himself a friend give to the pale memory of his friend? What would he sacrifice to him, not of the things that are necessary, but of his superfluity, his leisure, his waste time? What had Christophe sacrificed for Olivier?—(For he made no exception in his own case: he excepted only Olivier from the state of nothingness into which he cast all human beings).—Art is no more true than love. What room does it really occupy in life? With what sort of love do they love it, they who declare their devotion to it?... The poverty of human feeling is inconceivable. Outside the instincts of species, the cosmic force which is the lever of the world, nothing exists save a scattered dust of emotion. The majority of men have not vitality enough to give themselves wholly to any passion. They spare themselves and save their force with cowardly prudence. They are a little of everything and nothing absolutely. A man who gives himself without counting the cost, to everything that he does, everything that he suffers, everything that he loves, everything that he hates, is a prodigy, the greatest that is granted to us here on earth. Passion is like genius: a miracle, which is as much as to say that it does not exist.

So thought Christophe: and life was on the verge of giving him the lie in a terrible fashion. The miracle is everywhere, like fire in stone: friction brings it forth. We have little notion of the demons who lie slumbering within ourselves....

... Pero non mi destar, deh! parla basso!...

One evening when he was improvising at the piano, Anna got up and went out, as she often did when Christophe was playing. Apparently his music bored her. Christophe had ceased to notice it: he was indifferent to anything she might think. He went on playing: then he had an idea which he wished to write down, and stopped short and hurried up to his room for the necessary paper. As he opened the door into the next room and, with head down, rushed into the darkness, he bumped violently against a figure standing motionless just inside. Anna.... The shock and the surprise made her cry out. Christophe was anxious to know if he had hurt her, and took her hands in his. Her hands were frozen. She seemed to shiver,—no doubt from the shock. She muttered a vague explanation of her presence there:

"I was looking in the dining-room...."

He did not hear what she was looking for: and perhaps she did not say what it was. It seemed to him odd that she should go about looking for something without a light. But he was used to Anna's singular ways and paid no attention to it. An hour later he returned to the little parlor where he used to spend the evening with Braun and Anna. He sat at the table near the lamp, writing. Anna was on his right at the table, sewing, with her head bent over her work. Behind them, in an armchair, near the fire, Braun was reading a magazine. They were all three silent. At intervals they could hear the pattering of the rain on the gravel in the garden. To get away from her Christophe sat with his back turned to Anna. Opposite him on the wall was a mirror which reflected the table, the lamp, the two faces bending over their work. It seemed to Christophe that Anna was looking at him. At first he did not pay much attention to it; then, as he could not shake off the idea, he began to feel uneasy and he looked up at the mirror and saw.... She was looking at him. And in such a way! He was petrified with amazement, held his breath, watched her. She did not know that he was watching her. The light of the lamp was cast upon her pale face, the silent solemnity of which seemed now to be fiercely concentrated. Her eyes—those strange eyes that he had never been able squarely to see—were fixed upon him: they were dark blue, with large pupils, and the expression in them was burning and hard: they were fastened upon him, searching through him with dumb insistent ardor. Her eyes? Could they be her eyes? He saw them and could not believe it. Did he really see them? He turned suddenly.... Her eyes were lowered. He tried to talk to her, to force her to look up at him. Impassively she replied without raising her eyes from her work or from their refuge behind the impenetrable shadow of her bluish eyelids with their short thick lashes. If Christophe had not been quite positive of what he had seen, he would have believed that he had been the victim of an illusion. But he knew what he had seen, and he could not explain it away.

However, as his mind was engrossed in his work and he found Anna very uninteresting, the strange impression made on him did not occupy him for long.

A week later Christophe was trying over a song he had just composed, on the piano. Braun, who had a mania, due partly to marital vanity and partly to love of teasing, for worrying his wife to sing and play, had been particularly insistent that evening. As a rule Anna only replied with a curt "No"; after which she would not even trouble to reply to his requests, entreaties, and pleasantries: she would press her lips together and seem not to hear. On this occasion, to Braun's and Christophe's astonishment, she folded up her work, got up, and went to the piano. She sang the song which she had never even read. It was a sort of miracle:—the miracle. The deep tones of her voice bore not the faintest resemblance to the rather raucous and husky voice in which she spoke. With absolute sureness from the very first note, without a shade of difficulty, without the smallest effort, she endued the melody with a grandeur that was both moving and pure: and she rose to an intensity of passion which made Christophe shiver: for it seemed to him to be the very voice of his own heart. He looked at her in amazement while she was singing, and at last, for the first time, he saw her as she was. He saw her dark eyes in which there was kindled a light of wildness, he saw her wide, passionate mouth with its clear-cut lips, the voluptuous, rather heavy and cruel smile, her strong white teeth, her beautiful strong hands, one of which was laid on the rack of the piano, and the sturdy frame of her body cramped by her clothes, emaciated by a life of economy and poverty, though it was easy to divine the youth, the vigor, and the harmony, that were concealed by her gown.

She stopped singing, and went and sat down with her hands folded in her lap. Braun complimented her: but to his way of thinking there had been a lack of softness in her singing. Christophe said nothing. He sat watching her. She smiled vaguely, knowing that he was looking at her. All the evening there was a complete silence between them. She knew quite well that she had risen above herself, or rather, that she had been "herself," for the first time. And she could not understand why.

* * * * *

From that day on Christophe began to observe Anna closely. She had relapsed into her sullenness, her cold indifference, and her mania for work, which exasperated even her husband, while beneath it all she lulled the obscure thoughts of her troubled nature. It was in vain that Christophe watched her, he never found her anything but the stiff ordinary woman of their first acquaintance. Sometimes she would sit lost in thought, doing nothing, with her eyes staring straight in front of her. They would leave her so, and come back a quarter of an hour later and find her just the same: she would never stir. When her husband asked her what she was thinking of, she would rouse herself from her torpor and smile and say that she was thinking of nothing. And she spoke the truth.

There was nothing capable of upsetting her equanimity. One day when she was dressing, her spirit-lamp burst. In an instant Anna was a mass of flames. The maid rushed away screaming for help. Braun lost his head, flung himself about, shouted and yelled, and almost fell ill. Anna tore away the hooks of her dressing-gown, slipped off her skirt just as it was beginning to burn, and stamped on it. When Christophe ran in excitedly with a water-bottle which he had blindly seized, he found Anna standing on a chair, in her petticoat with her arms bare, calmly putting out the burning curtains with her hands. She got burnt, said nothing about it, and only seemed to be put out at being seen in such a costume. She blushed, awkwardly covered her shoulders with her arms, and with an air of offended dignity ran away into the next room. Christophe admired her calmness: but he could not tell whether it proved her courage or her insensibility. He was inclined to the latter explanation. Indeed, Anna seemed to take no interest in anything, or in other people, or in herself. Christophe doubted even whether she had a heart.

He had no doubt at all after a little scene which he happened to witness. Anna had a little black dog, with intelligent soft eyes, which was the spoiled darling of the household. Braun adored it. Christophe used to take it to his room when he shut himself up to work; and often, when the door was closed, instead of working, he would play with it. When he went out, the dog was always waiting for him at the door, looking out for him, to follow at his heels: for he always wanted a companion in his walks. She would run in front of him, pattering along with her little paws moving so fast that they seemed to fly. Every now and then she would stop in pride at walking faster than he: and she would look at him and draw herself up archly. She used to beg, and bark furiously at a piece of wood: but directly she saw another dog in the distance she would tear away as fast as she could and tremblingly take refuge between Christophe's legs. Christophe loved her and used to laugh at her. Since he had held aloof from men he had come nearer to the brutes: he found them pitiful and touching. The poor beasts surrender with such absolute confidence to those who are kind to them! Man is so much the master of their life and death that those who are cruel to the weak creatures delivered into their hands are guilty of an abominable abuse of power.

Affectionate though the pretty creature was with every one, she had a marked preference for Anna. She did nothing to attract the dog: but she liked to stroke her and let her snuggle down in her lap, and see that she was fed, and she seemed to love her as much as she was capable of loving anything. One day the dog failed to get out of the way of a motor-car. She was run over almost under the very eyes of her masters. She was still alive and yelping pitiably. Braun ran out of the house bareheaded: he picked up the bleeding mass and tried to relieve the dog's suffering. Anna came up, looked down without so much as stooping, made a face of disgust, and went away again. Braun watched the little creature's agony with tears in his eyes. Christophe was striding up and down the garden with clenched fists. He heard Anna quietly giving orders to the servant. He could not help crying out:

"It doesn't affect you at all?"

She replied:

"There's nothing to be done. It is better not to think of it."

He felt that he hated her: then he was struck by the grotesqueness of her reply: and he laughed. He thought it would be well if Anna could give him her recipe for avoiding the thought of sad things, and that life must be very easy for those who are lucky enough to have no heart. He fancied that if Braun were to die, Anna would hardly be put out by it, and he felt glad that he was not married. His solitude seemed less sad to him than the fetters of habit that bind a man for life to a creature to whom he may be an object of hatred, or worse still, nothing at all. It was very certain that this woman loved no one. She hardly existed. The atmosphere of piety had withered her.

She took Christophe by surprise one day at the end of October.—They were at dinner. He was talking to Braun about a crime of passion which was the sole topic in the town. In the country two Italian girls, sisters, had fallen in love with the same man. They were both unable to make the sacrifice with a good grace, and so they had drawn lots as to who should yield. But when the lot was cast the girl who had lost showed little inclination to abide by the decision. The other was enraged by such faithlessness. From insult they came to blows, and even to fighting with knives: then, suddenly, the wind changed: they kissed each other, and wept, and vowed that they could not live without each other: and, as they could not submit to sharing the lover, they made up their minds that he should be killed. This they did. One night the two girls invited the lover to their room, and he was congratulating himself upon such twofold favor; and, while one girl clasped him passionately in her arms, the other no less passionately stabbed him in the back. It chanced that his cries were heard. People came and tore him in a pitiable condition from the embraces of his charmers, and they were arrested. They protested that it was no one's business, and that they alone were interested in the matter, and that, from the moment when they had agreed to rid themselves of their own property, it was no one else's concern. Their victim was not a little inclined to agree with their line of argument: but the law was unable to follow it. And Braun could not understand it either.

"They are mad," he said. "They should be shut up in an asylum. Beasts!... I can understand a man killing himself for love. I can even understand a man killing the woman he loves if she deceives him.... I don't mean that I would excuse his doing so: but I am prepared to admit that there is a remnant of primitive savagery in us: it is barbarous, but it is logical: you kill the person who makes you suffer. But for a woman to kill the man she loves, without bitterness, without hatred, simply because another woman loves him, is nothing but madness.... Can you understand it, Christophe?"

"Peuh!" said Christophe. "I'm quite used to being unable to understand things. Love is madness."

Anna, who had said nothing, and seemed not to be listening, said in her calm voice:

"There is nothing irrational in it. It is quite natural. When a woman loves, she wants to destroy the man she loves so that no one else may have him."

Braun looked at his wife aghast, thumped on the table, folded his arms, and said:

"Where on earth did you get that from?... What? So you must put your oar in, must you? What the devil do you know about it?"

Anna blushed a little, and said no more. Braun went on:

"When a woman loves, she wants to destroy, does she? That's a nice sort of thing to say! To destroy any one who is dear to you is to destroy yourself.—On the contrary, when one loves, the natural feeling is to do good to the person you love, to cherish him, to defend him, to be kind to him, to be kind to everything and everybody. Love is paradise on earth."

Anna sat staring into the darkness, and let him talk, and then shook her head, and said coldly:

"A woman is not kind when she loves."

Christophe did not renew the experiment of hearing Anna sing. He was afraid ... of disillusion, or what? He could not tell. Anna was just as fearful. She would never stay in the room when he began to play.

But one evening in November, as he was reading by the fire, he saw Anna sitting with her sewing in her lap, deep in one of her reveries. She was looking blankly in front of her, and Christophe thought he saw in her eyes the strangely burning light of the other evening. He closed his book. She felt his eyes upon her, and picked up her sewing. With her eyelids down she saw everything. He got up and said:

"Come."

She stared at him, and there was still a little uneasiness in her eyes: she understood, and followed him.

"Where are you going?" asked Braun.

"To the piano," replied Christophe.

He played. She sang. At once he found her just as she had been on the first occasion. She entered the heroic world of music as a matter of course, as though it were her own. He tested her yet further, and went on to a second song, then to a third, more passionate, which let loose in her the whole gamut of passion, uplifting both herself and him: then, as they reached a very paroxysm, he stopped short and asked her, staring straight into her eyes:

"Tell me, what woman are you?"

Anna replied:

"I do not know."

He said brutally:

"What is there in you that makes you sing like that?"

She replied:

"Only what you put there to make me sing."

"Yes? Well, it is not out of place. I'm wondering whether I created it or you. How do you come to think of such things?"

"I don't know. I think I am no longer myself when I am singing."

"I think it is only then that you are yourself."

They said no more. Her cheeks were wet with a slight perspiration. Her bosom heaved, but she spoke no word. She stared at the lighted candles, and mechanically scratched away the wax that had trickled down the side of the candlestick. He drummed on the keys as he sat looking at her. They exchanged a few awkward remarks, brusquely and roughly, and then they tried a commonplace remark or two, and finally relapsed into silence, being fearful of probing any farther....

Next day they hardly spoke: they stole glances at each other in a sort of dread. But they made it a habit to play and sing together in the evening. Before long they began in the afternoon, giving a little more time to it each day. Always the same incomprehensible passion would take possession of her with the very first bars, and set her flaming from head to foot, and, while the music lasted, make of the ordinary little woman an imperious Venus, the incarnation of all the furies of the soul. Braun was surprised at Anna's sudden craze for singing, but did not take the trouble to discover any explanation for a mere feminine caprice: he was often present at their little concerts, marked time with his head, gave his advice, and was perfectly happy, although he would have preferred softer, sweeter music: such an expenditure of energy seemed to him exaggerated and unnecessary. Christophe breathed freely in the atmosphere of danger: but he was losing his head: he was weakened by the crisis through which he had passed, and could not resist, and lost consciousness of what was happening to him without perceiving what was happening to Anna. One afternoon, in the middle of a song, with all the frantic ardor of it in full blast, she suddenly stopped, and left the room without making any explanation. Christophe waited for her: she did not return. Half an hour later, as he was going down the passage past Anna's room, through the half-open door he saw her absorbed in grim prayer, with all expression frozen from her face.

However, a slight, very slight, feeling of confidence cropped up between them. He tried to make her talk about her past: only with great difficulty could he induce her to tell him a few commonplace details. Thanks to Braun's easy, indiscreet good nature, he was able to gain a glimpse into her intimate life.

She was a native of the town. Her maiden name was Anna Maria Senfl. Her father, Martin Senfl, was a member of an old commercial house, very old and enormously rich, in whom pride of caste and religious strictness were ingrained. Being of an adventurous temper, like many of his fellow-countrymen, he had spent several years abroad in the East and in South America: he had even made bold exploring expeditions in Central Asia, whither he had gone to advance the commercial interests of his house, for love of science, and for his own pleasure. By dint of rolling through the world, he had not only gathered no moss, but had also rid himself of that which covered him, the moss of his old prejudices. When, therefore, he returned to his own country, being of a warm temper and an obstinate mind, he married, in face of the indignant protests of his family, the daughter of a farmer of the surrounding country, a lady of doubtful reputation who had originally been his mistress. Marriage had been the only available means of keeping the beautiful girl to himself, and he could not do without her. After having exercised its veto in vain, his family absolutely closed its doors to its erring member who had set aside its sacrosanct authority. The town—all those, that is, who mattered, who, as usual, were absolutely united in any matter that touched the moral dignity of the community—sided bodily against the rash couple. The explorer learned to his cost that it is no less dangerous to traverse the prejudice of the people in a country inhabited by the sectaries of Christ, than in a country inhabited by those of the Grand Lania. He had not been strong enough to live without public opinion. He had more than jeopardized his patrimony: he could find no employment: everything was closed to him. He wore himself out in futile wrath against the affronts of the implacable town. His health, undermined by excess and fever, could not bear up against it. He died of a flux of blood five months after his marriage. Four months later, his wife, a good creature, but weak and feather-brained, who had never lived through a day since her marriage without weeping, died in childbirth, casting the infant Anna upon the shores which she was leaving.

Martin's mother was alive. Even when they were dying she had not forgiven her son or the woman whom she had refused to acknowledge as her daughter-in-law. But when the woman died—and Divine vengeance was appeased—she took the child and looked after her. She was a woman of the narrowest piety: she was rich and mean, and kept a draper's shop in a gloomy street in the old town. She treated her son's daughter less as a grandchild than as an orphan taken in out of charity, and therefore occupying more or less the position of a servant by way of payment. However, she gave her a careful education; but she never departed from her attitude of suspicious strictness towards her; it seemed as though she considered the child guilty of her parents' sin, and therefore set herself to chasten and chastise the sin in her. She never allowed her any amusement: she punished everything that was natural in her gestures, words, thoughts, as a crime. She killed all joy in her young life. From a very early age Anna was accustomed to being bored in church and disguising the fact: she was hemmed in by the terrors of hell: every Sunday the child's heavy-lidded eyes used to see them at the door of the old Munster, in the shape of the immodest and distorted statues with a fire burning between their legs, while round their loins crawled toads and snakes. She became accustomed to suppressing her instincts and lying to herself. As soon as she was old enough to help her grandmother, she was kept busy from morning to night in the dark gloomy shop. She assimilated the habits of those around her, the spirit of order, grim economy, futile privations, the bored indifference, the contemptuous, ungracious conception of life, which is the natural consequence of religious beliefs in those who are not naturally religious. She was so wholly given up to her piety as to seem rather absurd even to the old woman: she indulged in far too many fasts and macerations: at one period she even went so far as to wear corsets embellished with pins, which stuck into her flesh with every movement. She was seen to go pale, but no one knew what was the matter. At last, when she fainted, a doctor was called in. She refused to allow him to examine her—(she would have died rather than undress in the presence of a man)—but she confessed: and the doctor was so angry about it that she promised not to do it again. To make quite sure her grandmother thereafter took to inspecting her clothes. In such self-torture Anna did not, as might have been supposed, find any mystic pleasure: she had little imagination, she would never have understood the poetry of saints like Francis of Assisi or Teresa. Her piety was sad and materialistic. When she tormented herself, it was not in any hope of advantage to be gained in the next world, but came only from a cruel boredom which rebounded against herself, so that she only found in it an almost angry pleasure in hurting herself. Singularly enough, her hard, cold spirit was, like her grandmother's, open to the influence of music, though she never knew how profound that influence was. She was impervious to all the other arts: probably she had never looked at a picture in her life: she seemed to have no sense of plastic beauty, for she was lacking in taste, owing to her proud and wilful indifference; the idea of a beautiful body only awoke in her the idea of nakedness, that is to say, like the peasant of whom Tolstoy speaks, a feeling of repugnance, which was all the stronger in Anna inasmuch as she was dimly aware, in her relations with other people whom she liked, of the vague sting of desire far more than of the calm impression of esthetic judgment. She had no more idea of her own beauty than of her suppressed instincts: or rather, she refused to have any idea of it: and with her habitual self-deception she succeeded in deluding herself.

Braun met her at a marriage feast at which she was present, quite unusually for her: for she was hardly ever invited because of the evil reputation which clung to her from her improper origin. She was twenty-two. He marked her out; not that she made any attempt to attract attention. She sat next him at dinner: she was very stiff and badly dressed, and she hardly ever opened her mouth. But Braun never stopped talking to her, in a monologue, all through the meal, and he went away in raptures. With his usual penetration, he had been struck by his neighbor's air of original simplicity: he had admired her common sense and her coolness: also he appreciated her healthiness and the solid domestic qualities which she seemed to him to possess. He called on her grandmother, called again, proposed, and was accepted. She was given no dowry: Madame Senfl had left all the wealth of her family to the town to encourage trade abroad.

At no point in her life had the young wife had any love for her husband; the idea of such a thing never seemed to her to play any part in the life of an honest woman, but rather to be properly set aside as guilty. But she knew the worth of Braun's kindness: she was grateful to him, though she never showed it, for having married her in spite of her doubtful origin. Besides, she had a very strong feeling of honor between husband and wife. For the first seven years of their married life nothing had occurred to disturb their union. They lived side by side, as it were, did not understand each other, and never worried about it: in the eyes of the world they were a model couple. They went out very little. Braun had a fairly practice, but he had never succeeded in making his friends accept his wife. No one liked her: and the stigma of her birth was not yet quite obliterated. Anna, for her part, never put herself out in order to gain admission to society. She was resentful on account of the scorn which had cast a cloud on her childhood. Besides, she was never at her ease in society, and she was not sorry to be left out of it. She paid and received a few inevitable calls, such as her husband's interests made necessary. Her callers were inquisitive and scandalous women of the middle-class. Anna had not the slightest interest in their gossip, and she never took the trouble to conceal her indifference. That is what such people never forgive. So her callers grew fewer and more far between, and Anna was left alone. That was what she wanted: nothing could then come and break in upon the dreams over which she brooded, and the obscure thrill and humming of life that was ever in her body. Meanwhile for some weeks Anna looked very unwell. Her face grew thin and pale. She avoided both Christophe and Braun. She spent her days in her room, lost in thought, and she never replied when she was spoken to. Usually Braun did not take much notice of her feminine caprices. He would explain them to Christophe at length. Like all men fated to be deceived by women he flattered himself that he knew them through and through. He did know something about them, as a matter of fact, but a little knowledge is quite useless. He knew that women often have fits of persistent moodiness and blindly sullen antagonism: and it was his opinion that it was necessary at such times to leave them alone, and to make no attempt to understand or, above all, to find out what they were doing in the dangerous unconscious world in which their minds were steeped. Nevertheless he did begin to grow anxious about Anna. He thought that her pining must be the result of her mode of life, always shut up, never going outside the town, hardly ever out of the house. He wanted her to go for walks: but he could hardly ever go with her: the whole day on Sunday was taken up with her pious duties, and on the other days of the week he had consultations all day long. As for Christophe, he avoided going out with her. Once or twice they had gone for a short walk together, as far as the gates of the town: they were bored to death. Their conversation came to a standstill. Nature seemed not to exist for Anna: she never saw anything: the country was to her only grass and stones: her insensibility was chilling. Christophe tried once to make her admire a beautiful view. She looked, smiled coldly, and said, with an effort towards being pleasant:

"Oh! yes, it is very mystic...."

She said it just as she might have said:

"The sun is very hot."

Christophe was so irritated that he dug his nails into the palms of his hands. After that he never asked her anything: and when she was going out he always made some excuse and stayed in his room.

In reality it was not true that Anna was insensible to Nature. She did not like what are conventionally called beautiful landscapes: she could see no difference between them and other landscapes. But she loved the country whatever it might be like—just earth and air. Only she had no more idea of it than of her other strong feelings: and those who lived with her had even less idea of it.

Braun so far insisted as to induce his wife to make a day's excursion into the outskirts of the town. She was so bored with him that she consented for the sake of peace. It was arranged that they should go on the Sunday. At the last moment, the doctor, who had been looking forward to it with childlike glee, was detained by an urgent case of illness. Christophe went with Anna.

It was a fine winter day with no snow: a pure cold air, a clear sky, a flaming sun, and an icy wind. They went out on a little local railway which took them to one of the lines of blue hills which formed a distant halo round the town. Their compartment was full: they were separated. They did not speak to each other. Anna was in a gloomy mood: the day before she had declared, to Braun's surprise, that she would not go to church on Sunday. For the first time in her life she missed a service. Was it revolt?... Who could tell what struggles were taking place in her? She stared blankly at the seat in front of her, she was pale: she was eating her heart out.

They got out of the train. The coldness and antagonism between them did not disappear during the first part of their walk. They stepped out side by side: she walked with a firm stride and looked at nothing: her hands were free: she swung her arms: her heels rang out on the frozen earth.—Gradually her face quickened into life. The swiftness of their pace brought the color to her pale cheeks. Her lips parted to drink in the keen air. At the turn of a zigzag path she began to climb straight up the hillside like a goat; she scrambled along the edge of a quarry, where she was in great danger of failing, clinging to the shrubs. Christophe followed her. She climbed faster and faster, slipping, stopping herself by clutching at the grass with her hands. Christophe shouted to her to stop. She made no reply, but went on climbing on all fours. They passed through the mists which hung above the valley like a silvery gauze rent here and there by the bushes: and they stood in the warm sunlight of the uplands. When she reached the summit she stopped: her face was aglow: her mouth was open, and she was breathing heavily. Ironically she looked down at Christophe scaling the slope, took off her cloak, flung it at him, then without giving him time to take his breath, she darted on. Christophe ran after her. They warmed to the game: the air intoxicated them. She plunged down a steep slope: the stones gave way under her feet: she did not falter, she slithered, jumped, sped down like an arrow. Every now and then she would dart a glance behind her to see how much she had gained on Christophe. He was close upon her. She plunged into a wood. The dead leaves crackled under their footsteps: the branches which she thrust aside whipped back into his face. She stumbled over the roots of a tree. He caught her. She struggled, lunging out with hands and feet, struck him hard, trying to knock him off: she screamed and laughed. Her bosom heaved against him: for a moment their cheeks touched: he tasted the sweat that lay on Anna's brow: he breathed the scent of her moist hair. She pushed away from him and looked at him, unmoved, with defiant eyes. He was amazed at her strength, which all went for nothing in her ordinary life.

They went to the nearest village, joyfully trampling the dry stubble crisping beneath their feet. In front of them whirled the crows who were ransacking the fields. The sun was burning, the wind was biting. He held Anna's arm. She had on a rather thin dress: through the stuff he could feel the moisture and the tingling warmth of her body. He wanted her to put on her cloak once more: she refused, and in bravado undid the hooks at her neck. They lunched at an inn, the sign of which bore the figure of a "wild man" (Zum wilden Mann). A little pine-tree grew in front of the door. The dining-room was decorated with German quatrains, and two chromolithographs, one of which was sentimental: In the Spring (Im Fruhling), and the other patriotic: The Battle of Saint Jacques, and a crucifix with a skull at the foot of the cross. Anna had a voracious appetite, such as Christophe had never known her to have. They drank freely of the ordinary white wine. After their meal they set out once more across the fields, in a blithe spirit of companionship. In neither was there any equivocal thought. They were thinking only of the pleasure of their walk, the singing in their blood, and the whipping, nipping air. Anna's tongue was loosed. She was no longer on her guard: she said just whatever came into her mind.

She talked about her childhood, and how her grandmother used to take her to the house of an old friend who lived near the cathedral: and while the old ladies talked they sent her into the garden over which there hung the shadow of the Munster. She used to sit in a corner and never stir: she used to listen to the shivering of the leaves, and watch the busy swarming insects: and she used to be both pleased and afraid.—(She made no mention of her fear of devils: her imagination was obsessed by it: she had been told that they prowled round churches but never dared enter: and she used to believe that they appeared in the shape of animals: spiders, lizards, ants, all the hideous creatures that swarmed about her, under the leaves, over the earth, or in the crannies of the walls).—Then she told him about the house she used to live in, and her sunless room: she remembered it with pleasure: she used to spend many sleepless nights there, telling herself things....

"What things?"

"Silly things."

"Tell me."

She shook her head in refusal.

"Why not?"

She blushed, then laughed, and added:

"In the daytime too, while I was at work."

She thought for a moment, laughed once more, and then said:

"They were silly things, bad things."

He said, jokingly: "Weren't you afraid?"

"Of what?"

"Of being damned?"

The expression in her eyes froze.

"You mustn't talk of that," she said.

He turned the conversation. He marveled at the strength she had shown a short while before in their scuffle. She resumed her confiding expression and told him of her girlish achievements—(she said "boyish," for, when she was a child she had always longed to join in the games and rights of the boys).—On one occasion when she was with a little boy who was a head taller than herself she had suddenly struck him with her fist, hoping that he would strike her back. But he ran away yelling that she was beating him. Once, again, in the country she had climbed on to the back of a black cow as she was grazing: the terrified beast flung her against a tree, and she had narrowly escaped being killed. Once she took it into her head to jump out of a first-floor window because she had dared herself to do it: she was lucky enough to get off with a sprain. She used to invent strange, dangerous gymnastics when she was left alone in the house: she used to subject her body to all sorts of queer experiments.

"Who would think it of you now, to see you looking so solemn?..."

"Oh!" she said, "if you were to see me sometimes when I am alone in my room!"

"What! Even now?"

She laughed. She asked him—jumping from one subject to another—if he were a shot.

He told her that he never shot. She said that she had once shot at a blackbird with a gun and had wounded it. He waxed indignant.

"Oh!" she said. "What does it matter?"

"Have you no heart?"

"I don't know."

"Don't you ever think the beasts are living creatures like ourselves?"

"Yes," she said. "Certainly. I wanted to ask you: do you think the beasts have souls?"

"Yes. I think so."

"The minister says not. But I think they have souls.... Sometimes," she added, "I think I must have been an animal in a previous existence."

He began to laugh.

"There's nothing to laugh at," she said (she laughed too). "That is one of the stories I used to tell myself when I was little. I used to pretend to be a cat, a dog, a bird, a foal, a heifer. I was conscious of all their desires. I wanted to be in their skins or their feathers for a little while: and it used to be as though I really was. You can't understand that?"

"You are a strange creature. But if you feel such kinship with the beasts how can you bear to hurt them?"

"One is always hurting some one. Some people hurt me. I hurt other people. That's the way of the world. I don't complain. We can't afford to be squeamish in life! I often hurt myself for the pleasure of it."

"Hurt yourself?"

"Myself. One day I hammered a nail into my hand, here."

"Why?"

"There wasn't any reason."

(She did not tell him that she had been trying to crucify herself.)

"Give me your hand," she said.

"What do you want it for?"

"Give it me."

He gave her his hand. She took it and crushed it until he cried out. They played, like peasants, at seeing how much they could hurt each other. They were happy and had no ulterior thought. The rest of the world, the fetters of their ordinary life, the sorrows of the past, fear of the future, the gathering storm within themselves, all had disappeared.

They had walked several miles, but they were not at all tired. Suddenly she stopped, flung herself down on the ground, and lay full length on the stubble, and said no more. She lay on her back with her hands behind her head and looked up at the sky. Oh! the peace of it, and the sweetness!... A few yards away a spring came bubbling up in an intermittent stream, like an artery beating, now faintly, now more strongly. The horizon took on a pearly hue. A mist hung over the purple earth from which the black naked trees stood out. The late winter sun was shining, the little pale gold sun sinking down to rest. Like gleaming arrows the birds cleft the air. The gentle voices of the country bells called and answered calling from village to village.... Christophe sat near Anna and looked down at her. She gave no thought to him. She was full of a heartfelt joy. Her beautiful lips smiled silently. He thought:

"Is that you? I do not know you."

"Nor I. Nor I. I think I must be some one else. I am no longer afraid: I am no longer afraid of Him.... Ah! How He stifled me, how He made me suffer! I seemed to have been nailed down in my coffin.... Now I can breathe: this body and this heart are mine. My body. My dear body. My heart is free and full of love. There is so much happiness in me! And I knew it not. I never knew myself! What have you done to me?..."

So he thought he could hear her softly sighing to herself. But she was thinking of nothing, only that she was happy, only that all was well.

The evening had begun to fall. Behind the gray and lilac veils of mist, about four o'clock, the sun, weary of life, was setting. Christophe got up and went to Anna. He bent down to her. She turned her face to him, still dizzy with looking up into the vast sky over which she seemed to have been hanging. A few seconds passed before she recognized him. Then her eyes stared at him with an enigmatic smile that told him of the unease that was in her. To escape the knowledge of it he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again she was still looking at him: and it seemed to him that for many days they had so looked into each other's eyes. It was as though they were reading each other's soul. But they refused to admit what they had read there.

He held out his hand to her. She took it without a word. They went back to the village, the towers of which they could see shaped like the pope's nose in the heart of the valley: one of the towers had an empty storks' nest on the top of its roof of mossy tiles, looking just like a toque on a woman's head. At a cross-roads just outside the village they passed a fountain above which stood a little Catholic saint, a wooden Magdalene, graciously and a little mincingly holding out her arms. With an instinctive movement Anna responded to the gesture and held out her arms also, and she climbed on to the curb and filled the arms of the pretty little goddess with branches of holly and mountain-ash with such of their red berries as the birds and the frost had spared.

On the road they passed little groups of peasants and peasant women in their Sunday clothes: women with brown skins, very red cheeks, thick plaits coiled round their heads, light dresses, and hats with flowers. They wore white gloves and red cuffs. They were singing simple songs with shrill placid voices not very much in tune. In a stable a cow was mooing. A child with whooping-cough was coughing in a house. A little farther on there came up the nasal sound of a clarionet and a cornet. There was dancing in the village square between the little inn and the cemetery. Four musicians, perched on a table, were playing a tune. Anna and Christophe sat in front of the inn and watched the dancers. The couples were jostling and slanging each other vociferously. The girls were screaming for the pleasure of making a noise. The men drinking were beating time on the tables with their fists. At any other time such ponderous coarse joy would have disgusted Anna: but now she loved it: she had taken off her hat and was watching eagerly. Christophe poked fun at the burlesque solemnity of the music and the musicians. He fumbled in his pockets and produced a pencil and began to make lines and dots on the back of a hotel bill: he was writing dance music. The paper was soon covered: he asked for more, and these too he covered like the first with his big scrawling writing. Anna looked over his shoulder with her face near his and hummed over what he wrote: she tried to guess how the phrases would end, and clapped her hands when she guessed right or when her guesses were falsified by some unexpected sally. When he had done Christophe took what he had written to the musicians. They were honest Suabians who knew their business, and they made it out without much difficulty. The melodies were sentimental, and of a burlesque humor, with strongly accented rhythms, punctuated, as it were, with bursts of laughter. It was impossible to resist their impetuous fun: nobody's feet could help dancing. Anna rushed into the throng; she gripped the first pair of hands held out to her and whirled about like a mad thing; a tortoise-shell pin dropped out of her hair and a few locks of it fell down and hung about her face. Christophe never took his eyes off her: he marveled at the fine healthy animal who hitherto had been condemned to silence and immobility by a pitiless system of discipline: he saw her as no one had ever seen her, as she really was under her borrowed mask: a Bacchante, drunk with life. She called to him. He ran to her and put his arms round her waist. They danced and danced until they whirled crashing into a wall. They stopped, dazed. Night was fully come. They rested for a moment and then said good-by to the company. Anna, who was usually so stiff with the common people, partly from embarrassment, partly from contempt, held out her hand to the musicians, the host of the inn, the village boys with whom she had been dancing.

Once more they were alone under the brilliant frozen sky retracing the paths across the fields by which they had come in the morning. Anna was still excited. She talked less and less, and then ceased altogether, as though she had succumbed to fatigue or to the mysterious emotion of the night. She leaned affectionately on Christophe. As they were going down the slope up which they had so blithely scrambled a few hours before, she sighed. They approached the station. As they came to the first house he stopped and looked at her. She looked up at him and smiled sadly. The train was just as crowded as it had been before, and they could not talk. He sat opposite her and devoured her with his eyes. Her eyes were lowered: she raised them and looked at him when she felt his eyes upon her: then she glanced away and he could not make her look at him again. She sat gazing out into the night. A vague smile hovered about her lips which showed a little weariness at the corners. Then her smile disappeared. Her expression became mournful. He thought her mind must be engrossed by the rhythm of the train and he tried to speak to her. She replied coldly, without turning her head, with a single word. He tried to persuade himself that her fatigue was responsible for the change: but he knew that it was for a very different reason. The nearer they came to the town the more he saw Anna's face grow cold, and life die down in her, and all her beautiful body with its savage grace drop back into its casing of stone. She did not make use of the hand he held out to her as she stepped out of the carriage. They returned home in silence.

A few days later, about four o'clock in the evening, they were alone together. Braun had gone out. Since the day before the town had been shrouded in a pale greenish fog. The murmuring of the invisible river came up. The lights of the electric trams glared through the mist. The light of day was dead, stifled: time seemed to be wiped out: it was one of those hours when men lose all consciousness of reality, an hour which is outside the march of the ages. After the cutting wind of the preceding days, the moist air had suddenly grown warmer, too damp and too soft. The sky was filled with snow, and bent under the load.

They were alone together in the drawing-room, the cold cramped taste of which was the reflection of that of its mistress. They said nothing. He was reading. She was sewing. He got up and went to the window: he pressed his face against the panes, and stood so dreaming: he was stupefied and heavy with the dull light which was cast back from the darkling sky upon the livid earth: his thoughts were uneasy: he tried in vain to fix them: they escaped him. He was filled with a bitter agony: he felt that he was being engulfed: and in the depths of his being, from the chasm of the heap of ruins came a scorching wind in slow gusts. He turned his back on Anna: she could not see him, she was engrossed in her work; but a faint thrill passed through her body: she pricked herself several times with her needle, but she did not feel it. They were both fascinated by the approaching danger.

He threw off his stupor and took a few strides across the room. The piano attracted him and made him fearful. He looked away from it. As he passed it his hand could not resist it, and touched a note. The sound quivered like a human voice. Anna trembled, and let her sewing fall. Christophe, was already seated and playing. Without seeing her, he knew that Anna had got up, that she was coming towards him, that she was by his side. Before he knew what he was doing, he had begun the religious and passionate melody that she had sung the first time she had revealed herself to him: he improvised a fugue with variations on the theme. Without his saying a word to her, she began to sing. They lost all sense of their surroundings. The sacred frenzy of music had them in its clutches....

O music, that openest the abysses of the soul! Thou dost destroy the normal balance of the mind. In ordinary life, ordinary souls are closed rooms: within, there droop the unused forces of life, the virtues and the vices to use which is hurtful to us: sage, practical wisdom, cowardly common sense, are the keepers of the keys of the room. They let us see only a few cupboards tidily and properly arranged. But music holds the magic wand which drives back every lock. The doors are opened. The demons of the heart appear. And, for the first time, the soul sees itself naked.—While the siren sings, while the bewitching voice trembles on the air, the tamer holds all the wild beasts in check with the power of the eye. The mighty mind and reason of a great musician fascinates all the passions that he set loose. But when the music dies away, when the tames is no longer there, then the passions he has summoned forth are left roaring in their tottering cage, and they seek their prey....

The melody ended. Silence.... While she was singing she had laid her hand on Christophe's shoulder. They dared not move: and each felt the other trembling. Suddenly—in a flash—she bent down to him, he turned to her: their lips met: he drank her breath....

She flung away from him and fled. He stayed, not stirring in the dark. Braun returned. They sat down to dinner. Christophe was incapable of thought. Anna seemed absent-minded: she was looking "elsewhere." Shortly after dinner she went to her room. Christophe found it impossible to stay alone with Braun, and went upstairs also.

About midnight the doctor was called from his bed to a patient. Christophe heard him go downstairs and out. It had been snowing ever since six o'clock. The houses and the streets were under a shroud. The air was as though it were padded with cotton-wool. Not a step, not a carriage could be heard outside. The town seemed dead. Christophe could not sleep. He had a feeling of terror which grew from minute to minute. He could not stir. He lay stiff in his bed, on his back, with his eyes wide open. A metallic light cast up from the white earth and roofs fell upon the walls of the room.... An imperceptible noise made him tremble. Only a man at a feverish tension could have heard it. Came a soft rustling on the floor of the passage. Christophe sat up in bed. The faint noise came nearer, stopped; a board creaked. There was some one behind the door: some one waiting.... Absolute stillness for a few seconds, perhaps for several minutes.... Christophe could not breathe, he broke out into a sweat. Outside flakes of snow brushed the window as with a wing. A hand fumbled with the door and opened it. There appeared a white form, and it came slowly forward: it halted a few yards away from him. Christophe could see nothing clearly: but he could hear her breathing: and he could hear his own heart thumping. She came nearer to him; once more she halted. Their faces were so near that their breath mingled. Their eyes sought each other vainly in the darkness.... She fell into his arms. In silence, without a word, they hugged each other close, frenziedly....

* * * * *

An hour, two hours, a century later, the door of the house was opened. Anna broke from the embrace in which they were locked, slipped away, and left Christophe without a word, just as she had come. He heard her bare feet moving away, just skimming the floor in her swift flight. She regained her room, and there Braun found her in her bed, apparently asleep. So she lay through the night, with eyes wide open, breathless, still, in her narrow bed near the sleeping Braun. How many nights had she passed like that!

Christophe could not sleep either. He was utterly in despair. He had always regarded the things of love, and especially marriage, with tragic seriousness. He hated the frivolity of those writers whose art uses adultery as a spicy flavoring. Adultery roused in him a feeling of repulsion which was a combination of his vulgar brutality and high morality. He had always felt a mixture of religious respect and physical disgust for a woman who belonged to another man. The doglike promiscuity in which some of the rich people in Europe lived appalled him. Adultery with the consent of the husband is a filthy thing: without the husband's knowledge it is a base deceit only worthy of a rascally servant hiding away to betray and befoul his master's honor. How often had he not piteously despised those whom he had known to be guilty of such cowardice! He had broken with some of his friends who had thus dishonored themselves in his eyes.... And now he too was sullied with the same shameful thing! The circumstances of the crime only made it the more odious. He had come to the house a sick, wretched man. His friend had welcomed him, helped him, given him comfort. His kindness had never flagged. Nothing had been too great a demand upon it. He owed him his very life. And in return he had robbed the man of his honor and his happiness, his poor little domestic happiness! He had basely betrayed him, and with whom? With a woman whom he did not know, did not understand, did not love.... Did he not love her? His every drop of blood rose up against him. Love is too faint a word to express the river of fire that rushed through him when he thought of her. It was not love, it was a thousand times a greater thing than love.... He was in a whirl all through the night. He got up, dipped his face in the icy water, gasped, and shuddered. The crisis came to a head in an attack of fever.

When he got up, aching all over, he thought that she, even more than he, must be overwhelmed with shame. He went to the window. The sun was shining down upon the dazzling snow. In the garden Anna was hanging out the clothes on a line. She was engrossed in her work, and seemed to be in no wise put out. She had a dignity in her carriage and her gesture which was quite new to him, and made him, unconsciously, liken her to a moving statue.

* * * * *

They met again at lunch. Braun was away for the whole day. Christophe could not have borne meeting him. He wanted to speak to Anna. But they were not alone: the servant kept going and coming: they had to keep guard on themselves. In vain did Christophe try to catch Anna's eye. She did not look at him or at anything. There was no indication of inward ferment: and always in her smallest movement there was the unaccustomed assurance and nobility. After lunch he hoped they would have an opportunity of speaking: but the servant dallied over clearing away; and when they went into the next room she contrived to follow them: she always had something to fetch or to bring: she stayed bustling in the passage near the half-open door which Anna showed no hurry to shut: it looked as though she were spying on them. Anna sat by the window with her everlasting sewing. Christophe leaned back in an armchair with his back to the light, and a book on his knee which he did not attempt to read. Anna could only see his profile, and she noticed the torment in his face as he looked at the wall: and she gave a cruel smile. From the roof of the house and the tree in the garden the melting snow trickled down into the gravel with a thin tinkling noise. Some distance away was the laughter of children chasing each other in the street and snowballing. Anna seemed to be half-asleep. The silence was torture to Christophe: it hurt him so that he could have cried out.

At last the servant went downstairs and left the house. Christophe got up, turned to Anna, and was about to say:

"Anna! Anna! what have we done?"

Anna looked at him: her eyes, which had been obstinately lowered, had just opened: they rested on Christophe, and devoured him hotly, hungrily. Christophe felt his own eyes burn under the impact, and he reeled; everything that he wanted to say was brushed aside. They came together, and once more they were locked in an embrace....

The shades of the evening were falling. Their blood was still in turmoil. She was lying down, with her dress torn, her arms outstretched. He had buried his face in the pillow, and was groaning aloud. She turned towards him and raised his head, and caressed his eyes and his lips with her fingers: she brought her face close to his, and she stared into his eyes. Her eyes were deep, deep as a lake, and they smiled at each other in utter indifference to pain. They lost consciousness. He was silent. Mighty waves of feeling thrilled through them....

That night, when he was alone in his room, Christophe thought of killing himself.

Next day, as soon as he was up, he went to Anna. Now it was he whose eyes avoided hers. As soon as he met their gaze all that he had to say was banished from his mind. However, he made an effort, and began to speak of the cowardice of what they had done. Hardly had she understood than she roughly stopped his lips with her hand. She flung away from him with a scowl, and her lips pressed together, and an evil expression upon her face. He went on. She flung the work she was holding down on the ground, opened the door, and tried to go out. He caught her hands, closed the door, and said bitterly that she was very lucky to be able to banish from her mind all idea of the evil they had done. She struggled like an animal caught in a trap, and cried angrily:

"Stop!... You coward, can't you see how I am suffering?... I won't let you speak! Let me go!"

Her face was drawn, her expression was full of hate and fear, like a beast that has been hurt: her eyes would have killed him, if they could.—He let her go. She ran to the opposite corner of the room to take shelter. He had no desire to pursue her. His heart was aching with bitterness and terror. Braun came in. He looked at them, and they stood stockishly there. Nothing existed for them outside their own suffering.

Christophe went out. Braun and Anna sat down to their meal. In the middle of dinner Braun suddenly got up to open the window. Anna had fainted.

Christophe left the town for a fortnight on the pretext of having been called away. For a whole week Anna remained shut up in her room except for meal-times. She slipped back into consciousness of herself, into her old habits, the old life from which she had thought she had broken away, from which we never break away. In vain did she close her eyes to what she had done. Every day anxiety made further inroads into her heart, and finally took possession of it. On the following Sunday she refused once more to go to church. But the Sunday after that she went, and never omitted it again. She was conquered, but not submissive. God was the enemy,—an enemy from whose power she could not free herself. She went to Him with the sullen anger of a slave who is forced into obedience. During service her face showed nothing but cold hostility: but in the depths of her soul the whole of her religious life was a fierce, dumbly exasperated struggle against the Master whose reproaches persecuted her. She pretended not to hear. She had to hear: and bitterly, savagely, with clenched teeth, hard eyes, and a deep frowning furrow in her forehead, she would argue with God. She thought of Christophe with hatred. She could not forgive him for having delivered her for one moment from the prison of her soul, only to let her fall back into it again, to be the prey of its tormentors. She could not sleep; day and night she went over and over the same torturing thoughts: she did not complain: she went on obstinately doing her household work and all her other duties, and throughout maintaining the unyielding and obstinate character of her will in her daily life, the various tasks of which she fulfilled with the regularity of a machine. She grew thin, and seemed to be a prey to some internal malady. Braun questioned her fondly and anxiously: he wanted to sound her. She repulsed him angrily. The greater her remorse grew for what she had done to him, the more harshly she spoke to him. Christophe had determined not to return. He wore himself out. He took long runs and violent exercise, rowed, walked, climbed mountains. Nothing was able to quench the fire in him.

He was more the victim of passion than an ordinary man. It is the necessity of the nature of men of genius. Even the most chaste, like Beethoven and Burchner, must always be in love: every human capacity is raised to a higher degree in them, and as, in them, every human capacity is seized on by their imagination, their minds are a prey to a continual succession of passions. Most often they are only transitory fires: one destroys another, and all are absorbed by the great blaze of the creative spirit. But if the heat of the furnace ceases to fill the soul, then the soul is left defenseless against the passions without which it cannot live: it must have passion, it creates passion: and the passions will devour the soul ...—and then, besides the bitter desire that harrows the flesh, there is the need of tenderness which drives a man who is weary and disillusioned of life into the mothering arms of the comforter, woman. A great man is more of a child than a lesser man: more than any other, he needs to confide in a woman, to lay his head in the soft hands of the beloved, in the folds of the lap of her gown.

But Christophe could not understand.... He did not believe in the inevitability of passion—the idiotic cult of the romantics. He believed that a man can and must fight with all the force of his will.... His will! Where was it? Not a trace of it was left. He was possessed. He was stung by the barbs of memory, day and night. The scent of Anna's body was with him everywhere. He was like a dismantled hulk, rolling rudderless, at the mercy of the winds. In vain did he try to escape, he strove mightily, wore himself out in the attempt: he always found himself brought back to the same place, and he shouted to the wind:

"Break me, break me, then! What do you want of me?"

Feverishly he probed into himself. Why, why this woman?... Why did he love her? It was not for her qualities of heart or mind. There were any number of better and more intelligent women. It was not for her body. He had had other mistresses more acceptable to his senses. What was it?...—"We love because we love."—Yes, but there is a reason, even if it be beyond ordinary human reason. Madness? That means nothing. Why this madness?

Because there is a hidden soul, blind forces, demons, which every one of us bears imprisoned in himself. Our every effort, since the first existence of humanity, has been directed towards the building up against this inward sea of the dykes of our reason and our religions. But a storm arises (and the richest souls are the most subject to storms), the dykes are broken, the demons have free play, they find themselves in the presence of other souls uptorn by similar powers.... They hurl themselves at each other. Hatred or love? A frenzy of mutual destruction?—Passion is the soul of prey.