Wullersdorf entered and saw at a glance that something must have happened.
"Pardon me, Wullersdorf," said Innstetten, receiving him, "for having asked you to come at once to see me. I dislike to disturb anybody in his evening"s repose, most of all a hard-worked department chief. But it could not be helped. I beg you, make yourself comfortable, and here is a cigar."
Wullersdorf sat down. Innstetten again walked to and fro and would gladly have gone on walking, because of his consuming restlessness, but he saw it would not do. So he took a cigar himself, sat down face to face with Wullersdorf, and tried to be calm.
"It is for two reasons," he began, "that I have sent for you. Firstly, to deliver a challenge, and, secondly, to be my second in the encounter itself. The first is not agreeable and the second still less. And now your answer?"
"You know, Innstetten, I am at your disposal. But before I know about the case, pardon me the nave question, must it be? We are beyond the age, you know--you to take a pistol in your hand, and I to have a share in it. However, do not misunderstand me; this is not meant to be a refusal. How could I refuse you anything? But tell me now what it is."
"It is a question of a gallant of my wife, who at the same time was my friend, or almost a friend."
Wullersdorf looked at Innstetten. "Instetten, that is not possible."
"It is more than possible, it is certain. Read."
Wullersdorf ran over the letters hastily. "These are addressed to your wife?"
"Yes. I found them today in her sewing table."
"And who wrote them?"
"Major von Crampas."
"So, things that occurred when you were still in Kessin?"
Innstetten nodded.
"So, it was six years ago, or half a year longer?"
"Yes."
Wullersdorf kept silent. After a while Innstetten said: "It almost looks, Wullersdorf, as though the six or seven years made an impression on you. There is a theory of limitation, of course, but I don"t know whether we have here a case to which the theory can be applied."
"I don"t know, either," said Wullersdorf. "And I confess frankly, the whole case seems to turn upon that question."
Innstetten looked at him amazed. "You say that in all seriousness?"
"In all seriousness. It is no time for trying one"s skill at pleasantry or dialectic hair-splitting."
"I am curious to know what you mean. Tell me frankly what you think about it."
"Innstetten, your situation is awful and your happiness in life is destroyed. But if you kill the lover your happiness in life is, so to speak, doubly destroyed, and to your sorrow over a wrong suffered will be added the sorrow over a wrong done. Everything hinges on the question, do you feel absolutely compelled to do it? Do you feel so injured, insulted, so indignant that one of you must go, either he or you? Is that the way the matter stands?"
"I don"t know."
"You must know."
Innstetten sprang up, walked to the window, and tapped on the panes, full of nervous excitement. Then he turned quickly, stepped toward Wullersdorf and said: "No, that is not the way the matter stands."
"How does it stand then?"
"It amounts to this--that I am unspeakably unhappy. I am mortified, infamously deceived, and yet I have no feeling of hatred or even of thirst for revenge. If I ask myself "why not?" on the spur of the moment, I am unable to a.s.sign any other reason than the intervening years. People are always talking about inexpiable guilt. That is undeniably wrong in the sight of G.o.d, but I say it is also in the sight of man. I never should have believed that time, purely as time, could so affect one. Then, in the second place, I love my wife, yes, strange to say, I love her still, and dreadful as I consider all that has happened, I am so completely under the spell of her loveliness, the bright charm peculiarly her own, that in spite of myself I feel in the innermost recesses of my heart inclined to forgive."
Wullersdorf nodded. "I fully understand your att.i.tude, Innstetten, I should probably feel the same way about it. But if that is your feeling and you say to me: "I love this woman so much that I can forgive her everything," and if we consider, further, that it all happened so long, long ago that it seems like an event in some other world, why, if that is the situation, Innstetten, I feel like asking, wherefore all this fuss?"
"Because it must be, nevertheless. I have thought it over from every point of view. We are not merely individuals, we belong to a whole, and have always to take the whole into consideration. We are absolutely dependent. If it were possible to live in solitude I could let it pa.s.s. I should then bear the burden heaped upon me, though real happiness would be gone. But so many people are forced to live without real happiness, and I should have to do it too, and I could. We don"t need to be happy, least of all have we any claim on happiness, and it is not absolutely necessary to put out of existence the one who has taken our happiness away. We can let him go, if we desire to live on apart from the world. But in the social life of the world a certain something has been worked out that is now in force, and in accordance with the principles of which we have been accustomed to judge everybody, ourselves as well as others. It would never do to run counter to it. Society would despise us and in the end we should despise ourselves and, not being able to bear the strain, we should fire a bullet into our brains. Pardon me for delivering such a discourse, which after all is only a repet.i.tion of what every man has said to himself a hundred times. But who can say anything now? Once more then, no hatred or anything of the kind, and I do not care to have blood on my hands for the sake of the happiness taken away from me. But that social something, let us say, which tyrannizes us, takes no account of charm, or love, or limitation. I have no choice. I must."
"I don"t know, Innstetten."
Innstetten smiled. "You shall decide yourself, Wullersdorf. It is now ten o "clock. Six hours ago, I will concede, I still had control of the situation, I could do the one thing or the other, there was still a way out. Not so now; now I am in a blind alley. You may say, I have n.o.body to blame but myself; I ought to have guarded and controlled myself better, ought to have hid it all in my own heart and fought it out there. But it came upon me too suddenly, with too much force, and so I can hardly reproach myself for not having held my nerves in check more successfully. I went to your room and wrote you a note and thereby lost the control of events. From that very moment the secret of my unhappiness and, what is of greater moment, the smirch on my honor was half revealed to another, and after the first words we exchanged here it was wholly revealed. Now, inasmuch as there is another who knows my secret, I can no longer turn back."
"I don"t know," repeated Wullersdorf. "I don"t like to resort to the old worn-out phrase, but still I can do no better than to say: Innstetten, it will all rest in my bosom as in a grave."
"Yes, Wullersdorf, that is what they all say. But there is no such thing as secrecy. Even if you remain true to your word and are secrecy personified toward others, still _you_ know it and I shall not be saved from your judgment by the fact that you have just expressed to me your approval and have even said you fully understood my att.i.tude.
It is unalterably settled that from this moment on I should be an object of your sympathy, which in itself is not very agreeable, and every word you might hear me exchange with my wife would be subject to your check, whether you would or no, and if my wife should speak of fidelity or should p.r.o.nounce judgment upon another woman, as women have a way of doing, I should not know which way to look. Moreover, if it came to pa.s.s that I counseled charitable consideration in some wholly commonplace affair of honor, "because of the apparent lack of deception," or something of the sort, a smile would pa.s.s over your countenance, or at least a twitch would be noticeable, and in your heart you would say: "poor Innstetten, he has a real pa.s.sion for a.n.a.lyzing all insults chemically, in order to determine their insulting contents, and he _never_ finds the proper quant.i.ty of the suffocating element. He has never yet been suffocated by an affair."
Am I right, Wullersdorf, or not?"
Wullersdorf had risen to his feet. "I think it is awful that you should be right, but you _are_ right. I shall no longer trouble you with my "must it be." The world is simply as it is, and things do not take the course _we_ desire, but the one _others_ desire. This talk about the "ordeal," with which many pompous orators seek to a.s.sure us, is sheer nonsense, there is nothing in it. On the contrary, our cult of honor is idolatry, but we must submit to it so long as the idol is honored."
Innstetten nodded.
They remained together a quarter of an hour longer and it was decided that Wullersdorf should set out that same evening. A night train left at twelve. They parted with a brief "Till we meet again in Kessin."
CHAPTER XXVIII
According to the agreement Innstetten set out the following evening.
He took the same train Wullersdorf had taken the day before and shortly after five o"clock in the morning was at the station, from which the road branched off to the left for Kessin. The steamer referred to several times before was scheduled to leave daily, during the season, immediately after the arrival of this train, and Innstetten heard its first signal for departure as he reached the bottom step of the stairway leading down the embankment. The walk to the landing took less than three minutes. After greeting the captain, who was somewhat embarra.s.sed and hence must have heard of the whole affair the day before, he took a seat near the tiller. In a moment the boat pulled away from the foot bridge; the weather was glorious, the morning sun bright, and but few pa.s.sengers on board. Innstetten thought of the day when, returning here from his wedding tour, he had driven along the sh.o.r.e of the Kessine with Effi in an open carriage.
That was a gray November day, but his heart was serene. Now it was the reverse: all was serene without, and the November day was within.
Many, many a time had he come this way afterward, and the peace hovering over the fields, the horses in harness p.r.i.c.king up their ears as he drove by, the men at work, the fertility of the soil--all these things had done his soul good, and now, in harsh contrast with that, he was glad when clouds came up and began slightly to overcast the laughing blue sky. They steamed down the river and soon after they had pa.s.sed the splendid sheet of water called the "Broad" the Kessin church tower hove in sight and a moment later the quay and the long row of houses with ships and boats in front of them. Soon they were at the landing. Innstetten bade the captain goodbye and approached the bridge that had been rolled out to facilitate the disembarkation.
Wullersdorf was there. The two greeted each other, without speaking a word at first, and then walked across the levee to the Hoppensack Hotel, where they sat down under an awning.
"I took a room here yesterday," said Wullersdorf, who did not wish to begin with the essentials. "When we consider what a miserable hole Kessin is, it is astonishing to find such a good hotel here. I have no doubt that my friend the head waiter speaks three languages. Judging by the parting of his hair and his low-cut vest we can safely count on four--Jean, please bring us some coffee and cognac."
Innstetten understood perfectly why Wullersdorf a.s.sumed this tone, and approved of it, but he could not quite master his restlessness and kept taking out his watch involuntarily. "We have time," said Wullersdorf. "An hour and a half yet, or almost. I ordered the carriage at a quarter after eight; we have not more than ten minutes to drive."
"Where?"
"Crampas first proposed a corner of the woods, just behind the churchyard. Then he interrupted himself and said: "No, not there."
Then we agreed upon a place among the dunes, close by the beach. The outer dune has a cut through it and one can look out upon the sea."
Innstetten smiled. "Crampas seems to have selected a beautiful spot.
He always had a way of doing that. How did he behave?"
"Marvelously."