Bright Magic

by Alfred Doblin

  The door sprang silently open. Delicate Ilsebill, wrapped in a black scarf, raised her candle: It was a narrow, pleasant room, the little table and walls covered in affectionate womanly frippery; the rough jagged cliff face formed the long back wall, casting strange shadows in the unsteady light; a bed with a green spread stood in a recess, raised off the ground, with two steps leading up to it. Miss Ilsebill skipped happily across the thick carpet, threw off her scarf, breathed in the weak smell of flowers, lit two lights, and the room became completely domestic and cozy. Green Japanese silk hung down from the ceiling, paintings and tapestries smiled gently and peacefully, even the bizarre cliff face shimmered like a fantastical, playful fancy. She closed the door softly, jumped onto the bed, lay there dreaming for hours, and slipped back to her room early the next morning, after extinguishing the lamps and carefully shoving the bolt back down. “Nothing happened, nothing happened to me,” she said to herself happily.

  Night after night, she glided through the corridors to sleep in the cliff room. By day, though, Miss Ilsebill chatted, sang, and wooed the preoccupied man without end. She looked brightly at him with those deep-black eyes that slipped over the things around her, and one time, when she had danced before him beneath the five whispering veils, and he held her wrists, laughing at her crazy leaps and jumps, she flung down her beauty before him and, hanging on his neck, pleaded, “I am yours, your one and only, Paolo.”

  “Are you, Miss Ilsebill? Is that what you are?” And his look was not bright, not hot, but so full of melancholy and doubt, so inconsolable, that she shrank back from him, wrapped the veils back around her, and crept from the room. Yet he enveloped her in so much quiet reverence that pale-cheeked Ilsebill was entirely plunged into astonished happiness.

  On their rambles through the forest, the black knight often carried her in his arms, and he prayed in his harsh foreign tongue, sometimes falling to his strong knees. She never raised her lips to his mouth; only rarely did he take her ivory hands and press them to his brow. What dresses did fair-ankled Ilsebill wear? Into how many braids was her blue-black hair woven? Green dresses she wore, like the silk in the cliff room; green leaves lay upon her hair, woven into three thick braids. Miss Ilsebill and Paolo played and hunted together, often sat by the sea, and dreamed together. Paolo’s eyes sparkled.

  One afternoon she told him she wanted to ask him for something. And when Paolo kindly asked what, she bit her lower lip and said that she had to tell him something. Mightn’t it be a good idea if she sent for a doctor from town—she thought she was a bit sick. Paolo’s lips turned white as snow and he breathed heavily, with eyes closed: What was wrong? She said she always heard, almost always, a soft scrabbling sound. It was a soft sound, very far away, a low regular scraping, rattling, scrabbling, like an animal running across the sand and constantly stopping to pant for breath. It was so subtle that it often sounded to her like a whistle or hiss. He stood by the window and blew on the pane; in a rough voice, he blurted out that no doctor was needed for an illness like that, she just needed a diversion, she had to go hunting, take a trip; the best thing of all would be if she went away. Then Miss Ilsebill laughed at the top of her lungs and said that her two horses had only barely made it down the road here, and where would she find horses now that would take her back without him?

  The stocky man had turned around. His brow was furrowed, his gaunt face glowed hot, and he hoarsely protested that she should go, she should go, she should go, he didn’t want her; he wanted no woman and no one and nothing; he hated them all, all the mocking senseless things; she should go, oh yes, she should go. He would give her a knife right here and now, she could carve her illness out of her heart with that. When Miss Ilsebill stepped over to him, hips swaying, he staggered to her, faltering like a child, and looked at her so full of melancholy, so inconsolable, that she stroked his hair and broke out in uninhibited sobs while he trembled at her breast. She asked him no questions; she secretly took a bodkin from the wall and hid it under her dress.

  Miss Ilsebill now often went out alone in her thin dress, roaming as far as the city walls. She occasionally brought back mussel shells for Paolo, blue stones, fragrant narcissi, too, which he loved. And on a path outside of town she spoke to an old farmer, who said the baron had sold himself body and soul to an evil monster. The monster had lived since primeval times at the bottom of the ancient ocean that was now the heath; it lived in the cliff and needed a human being every couple of years. It sounds like a fairy tale, the farmer said, but it’s true. If fornication and godlessness were not so rampant among women today, he said, the poor knight would have been freed from the beast long ago. She was glad to hear the story, because she had long since known it herself.

  In her room she played with a lizard she had caught. One time, when Paolo heard her complaining beneath her smiles that all she was doing was looking for the animal that was scrabbling and grumbling and rustling so loud, he gave a long, shaking laugh and said that he wanted to summon from town a poet he knew, to entertain her with fairy tales and strange stories. This was someone who understood the soul, Paolo said.

  The next day, at noon, the poet sauntered up the wide main road to the castle; the three of them sat down at the table. Then Paolo invited him to play the doctor for Miss Ilsebill and cure her of her melancholy, which was scrabbling and rumbling inside her and threatening to swallow her up. The poet talked to her in her balconied room; he was a slender young man with long arms and free movements. He overwhelmed her with masterful looks; they laughed together, bent over her pictures. He suggested they dance, since the desire to do so had already awakened in the wild creatures; they danced together, under Ilsebill’s last veil, and, unchained, she leapt with him onto the balcony and laughed all of a sudden at the castle and the swamp and the scrabbling beast. She bent over the iron railing, shrieked out her laughter across the dusky heath. Crazy, yes, she was crazy, a corpse with a living body. Let every antediluvian dragon in the world break free and murder Paolo’s happiness—she knew only one beast that wanted to break free, and that was herself. She reached up her voluptuous arms to the sky, cried out to the ocean that she wanted to leave, wanted to travel and wander, and wanted always to love, always to kiss. Before darkness fell, the poet departed; trilling a tune, she pulled a green leaf from her hair and stuck it between her lips.

  No sooner was it dark in the castle than Miss Ilsebill threw on her black scarf, picked up a candle, her cheeks still burning, and loaded up her left arm with two pieces of wood: She wanted to end by setting the cliff room on fire and then vanishing into the night and mist. The yacht that the poet had arranged for their flight was already waiting in the ocean. She panted down the dark hallway; footsteps came out of the darkness toward her. She let the wood slide softly down past her knees to the floor—it was Paolo, who asked her nothing, put her candle gently down on the ground, and tenderly, wordlessly, stroked her hair and hands. Miss Ilsebill’s black eyes did not slip away from his, which looked back, full of sympathy and bestowing a terrifying consolation; did not budge from the calm openness of his bright face. His obliquely set eyes showered her with gratitude; his mouth approached her lips for the first time and they kissed. He said he was going into town tonight. She cowered in the hallway; the candle had gone out, uncontrollable fear shook her shoulders. She raised the cross with both hands, stood up, left the pieces of wood there; she had to go down the hall, had to go to the door, had to go into the chamber. Her face was hard, then it contorted helplessly. Miss Ilsebill dragged herself along behind the cross, crying, castigating herself. She tugged the bolt up. Wringing her hands, she walked into the room, struck herself on the chest, and fell asleep on the soft carpet.

  In a dream she heard a scrabbling and crashing, and a loud cry of men’s voices: “Ilsebill, save yourself! Save yourself, Ilsebill, Ilsebill!” She stood up. A whirling flame, a burning mouth came out of the cliff. The cliff burst apart in the middle and water poured out of the cave, a ghoulish sea monster rolled a
nd turned, a jellyfish with countless writhing tentacles; the quaking, purple-red flame shot out of its body like breath. Miss Ilsebill rushed for the door, couldn’t find it, screamed shrilly, insanely, “Paolo, Paolo!” The beast sizzled toward her; a paralyzing sweetness flooded through her; she beat in deathly fear against the wall. A bare spear was hanging there and she yanked it down and hurled it blindly into the flame. Half collapsing, she found the door, ran screaming through the silent halls, beating the air around her with her singed hands, and fell to the floor outside the door to her room.

  Proud Miss Ilsebill lay there until the gray light of morning. At last she stood up, she took off her shoes and stockings, tied up her braids, and walked barefoot, numbly calm, in just her thin dress, out of the building, through the gates, toward the town, across the heath, until she reached where the birch trees are. She did not once turn around. Behind her it stormed and raged, a thundering and bursting from the sea. A spring flood, a mile-wide gray wall broke through the dams and dikes and, rolling and foaming, poured over the accursed plain, covering once more what had once been its own along with a gray castle and many poor sleeping people. The terrible water hurled its waves right up to the hill of birch trees near the town. Ilsebill wandered on the hill. And as she walked among the trees, a fog came into the forest. She prayed at one tree, hung her cross up on it, and from that tree came a fine, fine smoke, smelling sweeter than lilacs. It wrapped around the wandering Ilsebill, sheathing her in the folds of a wide, sweet-smelling cloak. She could not see one step ahead of her, one step behind; when she realized that it was the cloak of the Mother of God sheathing her, she started crying like a fainthearted girl. She ran faster and faster, but fell at every step. “But I want to live. Oh, dear Mother of God, let me see the flowers again, let me see the little birds. Oh, dear Mother of God, be good to me. I see—you are good to me, the way I am good to you.” Her lips grew pale. She turned thinner and thinner. With a sigh, she dissolved and disappeared into the delicate fog wafting over the birch trees.

  The sun was already rising over the water when a black stallion carrying a knight came trotting slowly up through the gap in the city walls. The knight rode over the hill, and when he was at its peak, he saw miles and miles of gray, writhing water foaming before him, and no road, no castle. He dismounted, tied the horse to a trunk, and walked among the birches. A tiny gold cross was hanging on one tree; a sweet smell surrounded it. He took off his soft hat, kneeled down, and leaned his brow on the bark. “You have granted us great fear, holy Mother of God; you have granted us great love, holy Mother of God.”

  On the day when the dam broke, the townsfolk saw the black knight race once again through the town. They heard word of him once more, many years later, when the wars were raging in Central America. He was leading volunteer troops against the Indian infidels and a surprise attack left them all dead on the battlefield.

  THE OTHER MAN

  DR. WILLIAM Converdon, the famous women’s doctor in Boston, placed an advertisement on April 14 in the Daily News, seeking a secretary. Since being elected president of the Gynecological Society, he had been excessively burdened with paperwork; his hunch-backed housekeeper, to whom he had spoken of his troubles, decided to advertise for a lady—they were cheaper and, most important, easier to get rid of.

  On April 18, at the close of his consultation hours, she presented two women to him. Converdon turned around indifferently on his chair, accepted with a nod the slight bow of an angular, black-haired, intelligent young lady, and directed his cold gray eyes for some time longer at the blond girl next to her, who handed him her references with a blush. Running his hand over his wide jaw, he decided, without a glance at the papers, on the shy blond plump-cheeked one, because she had beautiful braids and it would make him nervous to send her charms out onto the street, and also because he could hope to get tired of her quickly.

  At the start of dictation the next morning, the gaunt man felt a disturbance in his train of thought due to the girl’s presence. He therefore did not hesitate long, pacing back and forth across the consultation room’s runner, before coming to a stop behind the chair in which she was sitting, wearing a blue dress, her head with its neatly wound braids bent over the desk. During his inspection of her back he got caught by her bare neck, so at that point he slowly lifted her white standing collar and kissed her in the slit between the collar and the dress. She startled back; her eyes lit up; when he pulled her pale neck hairs through his teeth, she giggled and leaned her hot cheek back against his head and stretched out on the chair. Then, as he brushed her cheeks with his thin lips, she suddenly threw herself forward across the rolltop desk, buried her head in her arms, and sobbed very quietly for a short moment, while he pensively stood behind her, his angular face lowered, left hand on his chin. She shook herself again, wiped her eyes with a very thin hankie, stood up, turned around, and looked up at him with reddened eyes. The blond-haired girl—her name was Mery Walter—then lay her head against his white waistcoat and, to his great surprise, offered her mouth to him. At first he was inclined to reach his free left hand into his jacket pocket for his pince-nez, so that he could observe the phenomenon up close, but instead he resolutely kissed her and carefully called her “my dear Miss Walter.” Miss Walter sat back down on her chair and he strolled contentedly up and down the runner, dictating on. When the work was finished, he made her, since it just came to mind, several declarations of love, which at first she unthinkingly took down in shorthand with the rest, but when her name was mentioned she understood; she strolled arm in arm back and forth on the runner with the startled man; the busy doctor was mightily pleased, however, with the rapid course the proceedings had taken.

  He went to the theater with her, had dinners with her, this went on for a few days. Until, precisely one week later, as he sat on his chaise longue after finishing a dictation and observed Miss Walter, another thought came to him. She was just then tying a lace-trimmed white pinafore over her blue dress and looking down at her white tennis shoes when he asked for permission to button the back of her pinafore, and in the process of performing this action he whispered in her ear from behind, in a faltering voice, that perhaps she might bed down for the night in his most immediate vicinity. She inspected the tips of her fingers for a time, jerked free of his grip, and then stamped her foot; the first thing she said was, softly, “Impossible.”

  He, just as softly: “Why not?”

  He immediately switched to using the informal pronoun with her, in anticipation of the coming eventualities.

  Because she lived at home, didn’t she, that’s why.

  A telegraph was cabled off to her mother, stating that Miss Mery had to accompany her employer on a trip for a day; the hunchbacked housekeeper was informed and affably dusted a room that had been used for many years for such purposes; Dr. Converdon, in accord with his plan, spent the very pleasant night with his secretary.

  The only things that disturbed him, in the course of his necessary efforts with the girl, were the vigor of her initial resistance, her conspicuous excitement throughout the entire night, and, especially, the discovery of her indisputable virginity. Dr. Converdon was secretly filled with extraordinary indignation by this last finding. He got up very early that morning and, in front of the washbasin, loudly rebuked the girl for her way of life: One wouldn’t have thought it possible, if one saw her with her blond braids; what did she want from him; this was evidence of an incredible immaturity, of a complete misunderstanding of his person; he had no idea how he would ever get over this fact about her past. She cried, sitting by the window in just her shirt, cried terribly; she begged for forgiveness; she herself had no idea how it had happened. He dictated at her in a rage for hours that morning, dictated until she slumped forward over the desk, half asleep. He was beside himself at how crude this apparently harmless person had turned out to be.

  He wanted to kick her out at once. But he thought about how that would be letting her off too easy. She would have loved
that, slipping away after this crime against his soul. That night, when she appeared for dinner, he declared that henceforth he was engaging her services for a fixed term, three months to start; she clapped her hands; he insisted that she sign the formal contract he had drawn up. She signed it without reading it and threw her arms around his neck. He smiled grimly. For days on end no one could recognize the serious man in his explosive rage. Before a few days had passed, he had rented an apartment for her in the house next door and relieved her of her position as secretary, hiring an old clerk instead. In his house she would perform the duties of a society lady. There was nothing she needed to do except be in attendance when he wanted.

  So she rearranged his furniture, hung up little pennants and love pictures, sat at the table with him every evening. He did not speak a word to her for days at a time; he endured her, she could see his contempt in every expression of his face. One day, while she was calmly eating, his face swelled up purplish red, the veins on his forehead popped out like pencils, his eyes gushed forth, he beat the tabletop next to her with his fists. “You have to stop sitting here night after night at my table! This chair at my table must be kept free. I refuse to tolerate anyone whatsoever sitting in this chair.”