“Go! Go, you shameless woman!”
She stood up. She faced him across his desk. “I shall not go until I say what I came to say.
“There are many ministers and clergymen like you in Germany, and the world. Expedient, greedy, lying, hating, anti-Christ. Betrayers and mockers of God. Delivering the sheep, with unctuous fat words, to the slaughterer. Leading the world deeper and deeper into a pit of hopelessness and death. Singing the song of Christ, as you drag the people into the morass, holding up the lighted Cross over the abyss. Compromising with evil, for your self-gain and your safety. Betrayers. Murderers! Beasts!”
Her voice sank, became almost whispering, despairing.
“If the world dies, it will be your fault. Its blood is on your hands. God will not be mocked.”
She turned away from him, as though he were a loathsome sight. He remained where he was, shaking with rage and apoplexy. She went across the polished floor, dragging her feet, her head bent. She had reached the door. Her hand was on the handle. Then she heard him scream at her, mockingly, furiously:
“You can tell your Jewess friend that no one can help her husband, now! He hung himself a month ago, in Dachau Camp, a fitting end for his crimes!”
She turned to him, slowly. She looked at him in a terrible silence. He stood beneath the Cross. He was in shadow. But the light of the lamp, piercing its top, shone on the Cross, so that it seemed to illumine all the room.
She was driven away in a dream, in a nightmare, leaning back in her car, her eyes closed. She felt the motion of the car, but did not know where she was. Then she opened her eyes, tapped on the glass which separated her from Frederick.
“Take me to the house of the Chief Rabbi of Berlin,” she said, her voice hoarse and faint.
Frederick was so astounded that he brought the car to an abrupt stop. He stared at her over his shoulder, his eyes goggling like a fish’s.
“I said, take me to the house of the Chief Rabbi of Berlin,” she repeated. She fixed him with her eyes, and her face was grim.
“But, Frau Doctor, that is incredible,” said the young man.
She sat back on her seat, and waited. He spluttered. He muttered something to himself. He swung the car about with a vicious jerk. “I shall rid myself of him today,” she thought.
Life came back to her beaten body. She saw nothing, though she gazed through the windows. Then she saw the bronzed green dome of the city’s chief synagogue. Its steps were smeared with obscene yellow signs. She felt an impulse to vomit. The car stopped at the large comfortable house next door. Frederick did not get out of the car to open the door and help her alight. His neck was crimson. His shoulders were ominously set.
She got out of the car herself, and calmly walked to the house. She lifted the knocker. It sounded within, hollow and frightening. A little maid came to the door, opening it fearfully. She stared without speaking at Therese. Therese gave her her card. “I must see the Rabbi at once,” she said imperatively.
The girl took her card, leaving Therese on the doorstep. Therese pushed open the door and entered the warm dark hallway. Terror dwelt here. She could smell it. But under it, she could smell fortitude and peace.
The Rabbi, holding her card, came towards her, smiling a little nervously, bewildered, but very polite. “Frau Doctor Erlich,” he murmured. He was a little man, bent and aged with suffering. His eyes were beautiful and steadfast.
She held out her hand to him.
“Come with me,” she said gently, weeping a little. “There is some one waiting in my house, who needs your help and comfort.”
23
“Rest. You have the right to rest. There is a time when the most valorous soldier must fall out,” said Doctor Traub, standing beside Therese’s bed, and regarding her with affectionate gravity. In the wan sunlight of the autumn day, his clothes were uncomprisingly shabby and untidy, his paunch most evident. Never had he looked so small and stubby, so gray and stout and tired. But his kind eyes were gentle and indomitable, and full of compassion.
“I have never been ill before,” said Therese restlessly, turning her head on her hot pillow.
“You have done too much.”
She had just finished telling him about Madame Cot. The telling had agitated her unbearably. He had been forced to give her a sedative, and decided to remain with her until she slept. Madame Cot, she told him, had been assisted by the Jewish Emigration Society to leave Germany and go to her sister in New York, who was a prominent cosmetician, owning a replica of Madame Cot’s own chain of salons in that city. Therese had given her a draft on her Paris bank for a cheque, also. “When I last saw her, she was an old woman. She was no longer wearing her cross,” she added, with bitter irony.
Doctor Traub moved away from the bed and gazed through the windows at the cold withering garden. He said aloud, sadly and musingly: “In mankind’s supreme hour, in his supreme agony, the Christian Church has nothing to give it but a sop of weak vinegar, timidly tendered, furtively offered. Now is the final hour for Christianity, the grim and final test. Christianity must decide whether it will keep on its ancient way: assisting the strong against the weak, expediently compromising with evil, upholding oppressors against the oppressed, keeping silent before anguish, deafening its ears to the cry of torment and injustice, seizing avidly on the spoils offered to it by cynical thieves, or whether it will lift its voice against the madness which has the world, and brighten its rusty sword and take up its stained shield in the last struggle of men against fury and violence. It must decide whether its gilded churches are more valuable than God, and whether mercy and compassion and love are dead words or living glories worth dying for.”
He added mournfully: “So far, it is keeping to its ancient and cowardly and avaricious policy of appeasing force, and helping to subjugate the miserable and despairing. It has said: ‘Governments are not my concern. It is my business to conciliate.’ They forget that Jesus was concerned with all that concerned men, and that He never conciliated the legions of hatred and rage. It has declared, recently, that it wishes only peace. It forgets or will not remember, that Jesus declared there can be no peace between that which is evil and that which is good.”
He sighed deeply.
Therese murmured from her pillow: “My old Lotte said recently that she believed that Jesus has come again, and is walking the earth.” The sedative had blunted reality for her; she floated in a strange and boundless universe.
Doctor Traub turned abruptly from the window. The setting sun was red and golden against the glass; it outlined him in light.
“So I believe. And how sickened He must be! How terrible it must be to have to climb Calvary again!”
Therese’s eyes were closed. She was sinking into a dream-state. She saw a round and barren hill, sterile-brown and afloat with fog. She saw a lonely figure climbing that hill, painfully, gaspingly, carrying a cross. It climbed in an awful and deserted silence, step by step, sweating drops of blood and agony. It climbed alone. There was no one there to offer consolation or help. She was filled with an overpowering grief, so deep, so profound, that it seemed to her sinking senses that a thousand worlds joined in her sorrow. Then she slept.
Doctor Traub stood beside her, seeing, with sadness, how emaciated she was, how exhausted. He smoothed the fair thick hair on the pillow, touched the strands of gray at the temples. He sighed again.
As this poor woman has awakened, so the whole world must awaken, he thought. As she has suffered, so the world must suffer. Time no longer. The final hour had come. Death and hatred and evil had shown their faces first in Germany. Soon every man would be familiar with them, everywhere. The supreme day had dawned.
He slowly climbed the stairway to Karl’s rooms. He felt old and tired and hopeless. He knocked on the study door. There was a prolonged silence. He knocked again. He heard a vague shuffling of feet, as though a blind man were approaching the door. It opened. The gaunt and ravaged face, the sightless eyes, of Karl Erlich confronted him,
without question, and only with bemusement and lack of recognition. The doctor smiled genially, pushed the door wider, and stepped into the study.
“Good evening, Karl,” he said. “I have just left Therese. I thought I might visit you for a few moments.”
He glanced about the still room swiftly. There, on the desk, lay a wooden doll with a prong sunken deeply into the head. He knew what it was. He pretended not to see it. He sat down in a chair. Karl Erlich slowly closed the door and then stood near it, staring and blinking. He put his hand to his head as though it ached unbearably. His smile was spectral and sly.
“I have not been well,” he murmured.
Doctor Traub continued to smile. His alert physician’s eyes saw the red glimmer of madness in Karl’s eyes. He saw the violently trembling hands, the pulsing temples, the gray mouth and sunken nostrils. It was a dying man who stood before him, his clothing disordered, his cheeks unshaven.
“There is much sickness about,” said the doctor, in a matter-of-fact voice. “I have a few moments. I hope I am not disturbing you. But I thought I might talk to you about Therese. She is ill herself.”
For an instant the madness disappeared from those tortured eyes, and sanity sprang to the surface of the livid flesh. Karl came towards him, quickly. “Therese? What is the matter with Therese?” His voice, though exhausted, was almost normal.
Doctor Traub thought swiftly and carefully. Then he said casually: “I hope I have not alarmed you. She has a cold. She needs careful nursing for a few days.”
“Oh.” The sound was only a breath. Karl fumbled his slow way back to his desk. He sat down before it, literally falling into his chair. His eye touched the doll. He gave the doctor a crafty and evil glance, then seizing the image, he thrust it quickly into a drawer and closed it. Doctor Traub pretended to notice nothing.
“But you, yourself, are indeed ill, Karl. I should like to help you.”
The wretched man put his hands feverishly to his head. “There is really nothing wrong with me,” he cried with sudden violence. “I do not wish to be interrupted. Every one tries to interrupt me. Why will you not leave me alone?”
“I am sorry,” said the doctor, gravely. “I do not wish to interrupt you.” He paused. Karl said nothing. His shaking hands hid his face. His body was skeletonlike. An untouched tray of food lay on a near-by table. The shades were drawn against the day, and a feeble lamp shone on the desk. The air of the room was fetid, as though a corpse lay hidden somewhere. On the mantel, the head of Gilu grinned foully. The doctor had a sudden horrible presentiment that a loathsome presence lurked in the room, filling the unclean air with corruption and death.
He started quite violently. For Karl had begun to speak in a low muffled voice. “There is something you can do for me. You can tell Eric to go away and leave me in peace.”
He had dropped his hands. He was gazing at the doctor with the distended eyes of hatred and terror. “Tell him to go away!” he cried.
“What does he want?” asked Doctor Traub quietly.
The sick man’s face was convulsed. His body tensed as though it might spring. He panted audibly.
“He wants me to listen to him. I shall never listen! Not until I have done what I must do!” Beads of sweat rolled down his death-head of a face. His eyes glittered with madness.
The doctor was silent. He forced himself to maintain an attitude of judicious calm. Then all at once the imminent presence of loathsomeness vanished from the room, and it was no longer a carnal house. It was as though a friend entered, gentle and compassionate, urgently trying to make himself heard.
“Why do you not listen to him for a little while?” asked the doctor, very gently and slowly. “He only wants to talk to you. If you will just listen, once, he will go away, and leave you in peace.”
Karl still panted. Then slowly, his breath became normal. The glare died from his eyes, which fixed themselves eagerly and imploringly upon the doctor. The strained tendons of his face relaxed. He asked simply, tremblingly: “You are speaking the truth? If I listen, only once, he will go away?”
The doctor’s heart began to beat very fast. But he maintained his calm. He pursed his lips. “Yes. I am sure of it. Remember, he was your best friend, your brother. Can you blame him if he wishes to speak to you? Would you not do the same in his position? You are really very unkind to him. He wants to have peace, too. You are denying him peace. Listen the next time he comes. Then he will go away, and you will both rest.”
The tortured eyes searched the other’s face, fumbled at it. The doctor could hardly bear that pathetic sight. “Listen to Eric,” he repeated, softly.
He stood up. Karl still stared at him with that dying and imploring look. He touched his temples with the tips of his withered ringers.
“You are right,” he murmured. “I believe you. When he comes again, I shall listen. Then he will go away.”
The doctor went down the stairs again, not heavily this time, but with the steps of hope. He stopped in to see Therese. She still slept deeply. He stood beside her. “Sleep, my dear,” he said aloud. “Sleep. It will soon be morning.”
24
Therese forced herself to rest. She knew that she had much to do, more than she had ever done. But if she were to do it, she must be prepared. So she resolutely lay quiet, taking her tablets and liquids, eating the good food the anxious Lotte prepared for her, not allowing herself to think. She created a calm vacuum about her, allowed nothing to disturb her. She was shocked at her physical decay, and called in a hairdresser and cosmetician. Each day her hair was tended and brushed for an hour or more, and creams and lotions were massaged into her flesh. She received no visitors, answered no messages, though her room bloomed with flowers from sympathetic friends.
One day she received a note from her godfather, the Bishop. He announced that he had forgiven her hysteria, and asked her forgiveness for his “rather heated language.” “I should have remembered the condition of your household, and the close events of the past few months,” he said gravely in his small precise black hand. “I should have remembered that you were always a kind and sympathetic girl, easily imposed upon by malingerers and exploiters. Had your conduct towards me been even a little less violent, your accusations a little less incoherent and inexcusably vicious, I would have remembered. My impatience with you, however, was also inexcusable, and so, I humbly beg your pardon, liebchen. I hear that you are ill. Will you allow me to call upon you?”
Therese, her hands wet and trembling, tore the letter across and across. She flung it from her with a gesture of loathing. And then, strangely and suddenly, she was filled with an overpowering compassion and sorrow. The Bishop was not a stupid man. He must have his hours alone with himself, also. He must have his hours of thinking. She saw his face as in a vision, lonely, terrified, torn and dark. He was no villain. He was just cowardly. He was expedient with the expediency of the weak and the frightened. Once he had been a young man. He had chosen the Church from some deep inward conviction, not from avarice. She knew his family had been poor if noble, and he could not, in the beginning, have dreamed that he would rise so high. But he had risen, and he had lost his conviction. That was very dreadful. And he must know what he had lost. He must know what he had sold for his palace, his luxury, and his position. No wonder then, that having bartered the spirit, he desperately clung to the price he had paid for it. If he lost the thirty pieces of silver, he would be bankrupt indeed, having neither glory nor money.
Therese sighed deeply, and tears filled her eyes. She wrote him in return: “When I called upon you, I did not understand. Now I understand. I ask your forgiveness. You must ask yourself why I ask this. Do not come to see me. I have more grief than I can endure just now.”
A few days passed. Then on the fifth day he sent her a sheaf of white roses, without a word, and only his card. She held the pale glistening flowers in her arms, so mute, so expressive, so dead and odorless, and her tears fell on their pure carved petals. She felt they were
flowers removed from the grave and tendered to the living, silently, by dead hands.
One day she rose, feeling strong again, and very quiet. As she sat by the window on this first day of rising, old Lotte came to her with a puzzled and frightened expression.
“You know, Frau Doctor, that the Herr Doctor has been very quiet lately. He has not wandered so much at night. But during the day he wanders. He keeps looking in each room. I have passed his door at night, and sometimes it has been open. He just stares before him, as though waiting for some one. He has an attitude of listening. One night he said to me: ‘Lotte, have you seen Eric Reinhardt? He was to come and speak to me. I am waiting. But he does not come.’”
Therese turned her head swiftly, her new color paling. Her heart trembled. But she dared not hope yet.
“What did you say to him, Lotte?”
“I said: ‘Herr Doctor, the Herr Professor is very busy these days. But he has sent a message that he will come soon.’ And when I said that, he nodded, and seemed satisfied. He even asked me for a glass of milk.”
Therese clasped her hands together. The tears came easily to her eyes these days. But she said nothing further.
She had dismissed Frederick, through Lotte. “Tell him that under present circumstances we need him no longer,” she said. Lotte later told her, with grim satisfaction, that Frederick had been much enraged, and had muttered things under his breath. So he was a spy, after all. The whole city was full of furtive and malignant eyes. It was terrible. The air was permeated with watchfulness and evil. No wonder every man and woman on the streets appeared to be suffocating. Therese shrank from entering life again, and walking abroad.
But she knew she must do it. In the meantime, she read Schiller and Goethe, Lessing, Shakespeare and the Bible. She had thought to find a retreat here. But there was none. Each poet was preoccupied with the terribleness of mankind, and many, with a desperate sigh, yielded themselves up at the last with cynical hopelessness to the general corruption.
Time No Longer Page 27
