The Fiery Angel (21 page)
“If you yourself admit that you are guilty before Count Heinrich, that you deprived him of his fondest dreams and took away from him the sacred aim of his life, how is it that you are astonished at his hating you?”
Renata slowly rose from the floor, looked at me with her eyes become suddenly dry, and then spoke in a quite new voice, firm like steel:
“Perhaps I am not astonished at all. Perhaps I am even gladdened that Heinrich hates me. I do not bewail him, but myself. I am not sorry that he is lost to me, but it causes me shame and bitterness to have been able to have loved him so, to have given myself thus to him. I, myself, hate him! Now I know with certainty that of which long ago I had suspicion. Heinrich deceived me! He is—a mere man, but an ordinary human being, whom I could seduce and who can be ruined, and I in my madness imagined him to be my angel! No, no, Heinrich is only Count Otterheim, a failure as Grand Master of his order, while my Madiël is in Heaven, eternally pure, eternally beautiful, eternally unattainable!”
Renata joined her hands as if in prayer, and I thought the moment propitious to acquaint her with all that of which I had dreamed and thought on my journey back from Bonn. I said:
“Renata! Thus you are convinced that Count Heinrich is not your angel Madiël, but a simple mortal, who for some time loved you and whom you loved, perhaps even owing to your self-deception. Now this love is dead in him, as well as in you, and your heart, Renata, is free. Remember then that another is near you to whom that heart is more precious than all the gold fields of Mexico! If, with equanimity of soul, even though without passion, you can stretch out your hand to me and give me a promise of faithfulness in the future, I shall accept it as a miserable beggar a kingly alms, as a hermit accepts grace from Heaven! Here once more, Renata, I kneel before you—and in your hands alone does it lie to transform your whole horrible past into a dream fading away into forget-fulness.”
Renata rose after my words, straightened herself, lowered her hands on to my shoulders and spoke thus:
“I will be your wife, but you must slay Heinrich!”
Retreating a step, I replied asking whether I had heard aright, for once more had Renata completely upset with her words all my idea of her, as a child tips over a bag dropping to the ground all the objects it contains—and Renata repeated to me, her voice very calm, but obviously affected by extreme excitement:
“You must slay Heinrich! He must not be suffered to live after giving himself out as another, as one immeasurably higher than he. He stole my caresses and my love from me. Slay him, slay him, Rupprecht, and I will be yours! I shall be faithful to you, I shall love you, I shall follow you everywhere—both in this life and in the eternal fire the way to which will be opened for both of us!”
I retorted:
“I am no hired assassin, Renata, no Neapolitan; I cannot lay in wait for the Count round a corner and thrust a dagger into his back—my honour will not allow me to do that!”
Renata replied:
“Can you not find reasons for challenging him to combat? Visit him as you visited Agrippa, insult him or force him to insult you—has a man so few means of disposing of a rival?”
That which struck me most of all in this speech was her mention of Agrippa, for until that moment I had been convinced that Renata, having been unconcerned with the things of this world, had not known the object of my journey. As to the request itself—to slay Count Heinrich, I should be a hypocrite if I were to pretend that it horrified me. It was only the unexpectedness of Renata’s words that confused me, but in the depths of my soul they found immediately a sympathetic echo, as if someone had struck a brass shield in front of deep grottoes and the many-voiced echo, dying out in the distance, long repeated the sound. And when Renata began to press me, as an opponent his enemy chased into a crevice, to tear consent out of me, as one panther a lump of meat from the claws of another—I resisted without much pertinacity, just for appearance’s sake—and gave her the oath she awaited.
Hardly had I pronounced the decisive words when Renata changed her whole attitude. Suddenly she remarked that I was exhausted by fatigue after a rather trying journey; and, with a care that manifested itself in her so seldom, she hastened to take off my travelling clothes, brought me water to wash, and found me some supper and wine. She suddenly became to me as the kindest, most domesticated of wives to her beloved husband, or as an elder sister to a younger brother fallen ill. Ceasing to speak of Count Heinrich as though she had forgotten all about our bitter conversation and my oath, Renata began at supper to question me about my journey, showing interest in all that had befallen me, and discussing with me the words of Agrippa as in the happy days of our joint studies. When, seeing through the window a completely black sky, inwardly conscious that we had already crossed the threshold of midnight, I desired, having kissed Renata’s hand, to retire to my room, she said softly to me, dropping her eyes, like a bride:
“Why do you not wish to remain with me?”
Why did I not wish to remain? But how dare I dream of remaining! It was already a very long time, the course of many weeks, since it had last been given to me to spend the night near Renata, and the memory of my former intimacy with her seemed as something illusory and unattainable.
This time Renata did not desire me to stay on the wooden podium, near her bed, but called me to lie next to her again, as in the first days. This time Renata pressed herself to me with all her body, like a mistress, kissed me, sought my lips, my hands, all of me. And when, drawing back, I said to her that she must not tempt me, Renata answered me:
“I must! I must! I want to be with you! To-day I want you!”
Thus, unexpectedly, came to pass my first union with Renata as man with woman, on a day when I least of all expected it, after a conversation that least of all led to it. This night became our first bridal night, after we had spent not a few nights in one bed as brother and sister, and after we had lived for several months side by side like modest friends. But when, in the torture of this unexpected bliss, nearly drunk with the accomplishment of all that had heretofore seemed so impossible, I bent, exhausted, over the lips of Renata to thank her with a kiss for my ecstasy, I suddenly saw that her eyes were once more full of tears, that the tears were streaming down her cheeks, and that her lips were twisted in a smile of pain and despair. I exclaimed:
“Renata! Renata! Can it be that you are weeping?”
She replied in a strangled voice:
“Kiss me, Rupprecht! Caress me, Rupprecht! Have I not given myself to you! Have I not given you all my body! More! More!”
Almost in terror I fell face downwards on the pillows, ready to weep and gnash my teeth, but Renata drew me forcibly towards her, compelling me to be the live instrument of her torture, an executioner willing but trembling in horror, racking and crucifying herself with insatiable thirst on the wheel of caresses and the cross of lust. She deceived me again and again with pretended tenderness, tempted me with passion perhaps not artificial, but not destined for me, and flinging her body into fire and upon the teeth of saws, moaned with the bliss—of feeling pain, wept with the last of all joys—the despising of herself. And till the very morn lasted this monstrous playing at love and happiness, in which the kisses were sharp blades, the calls to joy—the menaces of an inquisitor, the elixir of lust—blood, and our whole bridal couch—a black torture cell.
That evening, when in the name of love murder was demanded of me, and that night, when in the name of love tortures were demanded of me, remain as the most horrible of my deliriums, and the slumber of exhaustion that freed me from these diabolical visions granted me a favour greater than in the grant of all the rulers of the world.
In the morning I awoke more exhausted than if I had been confined for half a year in a subterranean prison: my eyes could hardly look upon the light of day, and my consciousness was dull, like inferior glass. But Renata was at times as if of metal, hard and resilient, knowing no fatigue, and when I first met her glance—it was the same as it had been on the eve. Everything was still hazy to me, so that I was ready to doubt whether we two were alive, but Renata called to me already, with merciless insistence:
“Rupprecht! It is time! It is time! We must go to Heinrich at once! I desire you to slay him soon, not later than to-morrow!”
She gave me no time to gather my thoughts, she hurried me as on a ship in the hour of shipwreck when every moment is precious, and it was now I who submitted with the meekness of the android of Albertus Magnus. Without arguing, I dressed myself as smartly as I could, buckled on my sword, and followed Renata who led me along the deserted morning street, silently, unheeding of my words, as if in obedience to someone’s invincible will. At last we came to the home of Eduard Stein, large and sumptuous with cunning balconies and stucco frames round the windows, and, with the one and only word “here,” Renata, pointing out to me the heavy, chiselled doors, quickly turned and walked away as if leaving me alone with my conscience. However, even without looking after Renata, I felt at once that she would not go far, but would hide behind the nearest turning and wait for my reappearance at that door, so that, rushing up, she might grasp at once from me the news of our success.
To tell the truth, I was so confused by the whirlwind of events that twirled me round that, contrary to my custom, I had no time attentively and narrowly to reflect upon my position. Only when grasping, in knocking, the door handle, of massive and refined workmanship, did I remember that I had not prepared the words of my conversation with Heinrich, and that in general I had no idea what I should do on entering this rich house. To tarry, however, there was no time, and with that courage with which a man, shutting his eyes, plunges into the deep, I knocked firmly and loudly metal against metal, and when a servant opened the door, I said that I must at all cost see Count Heinrich von Otterheim who was staying in the house, upon important business that brooked of no delay.
The servant led me through the entrance hall, filled with tall, but elegant cupboards, then along a broad staircase with handsome balustrading, then further through an antechamber hung with pictures depicting various animals, and at last, knocking, opened a small door. I saw before me a narrow room with a panelled, decorated ceiling, with carved friezes along the walls and set all with wooden lecterns for books, from behind which came forward a young man, dressed elegantly, like a knight, in silk with slashed sleeves, with a golden chain on his breast and a multitude of small golden decorations. I realised that he was Count Heinrich.
For a few moments, before beginning to speak, I studied this man with whom, without his knowledge, my fate had so long been miraculously linked, whose image I had tried so often to imagine, whom, at times, I had thought to be either a Heavenly spirit or the creation of a diseased imagination. Heinrich, outwardly, seemed to be not more than twenty years old, and in all his being, there was such a surplus of youth and freshness as it seemed as though nothing in the world could crush, so that one was inspired with awe and reminded involuntarily of youth eternal, with which mankind is endowed by the mysterious elixir in which the philosopher’s stone of the alchymists is dissolved. Heinrich’s face, beardless and half-youthful, was not so handsome as it was striking: his blue eyes deeply set under his somewhat thin lashes seemed like shards of the azure sky, the lips, perhaps a trifle too full, folded themselves involuntarily into a smile like that of an angel on a holy image, and his hair, in truth, like golden threads, for it was dry, sharp and thin and lay separately almost to strangeness, rose above his forehead like the nimbus of a saint. In every movement of Heinrich there was an impetuosity, not as of one running, but as of one flying, and had anyone insisted that he was a denizen of Heaven who had assumed human shape, I should perhaps have seen, sprouting behind his boyish shoulders, a pair of white swan’s wings.
Count Heinrich was the first to break the silence, of course not long, but which had seemed protracted, by asking me what service he could render me, and his voice, that I heard now for the first time, seemed to me the most beautiful thing about him—singing, easily and quickly travelling through all the steps of the musical scale.
Gathering all the forces of my wit, trying to speak fluently and easily, but yet not knowing even how I intended to terminate each sentence the first words of which I had begun—I embarked on a respectful speech. I said that I had heard a great deal about the Count, as a remarkable scientist, who, while yet young, had penetrated the forbidden mysteries of nature and all the secret doctrines, from Pythagoras and Plotinus to the teachers of our days; that from early childhood I had been drawn by an insatiable desire to comprehend the highest wisdom, to the search for the primary cause of all matter; that, by diligent and unremitting study, I had attained a certain height of understanding, but that I had become convinced, without room for doubt, that no man could penetrate the last mysteries by personal efforts alone, for the initiated, even from the days of Hiram, the builder of Solomon, had transmitted the basic truths only verbally to their disciples: that it was only as member of a society, in which the revelations of the peoples of remotest antiquity—the Hebrews, Chaldeans, Egyptians and Greeks—were handed down in succession as if from father to son, like the sacramental grace of the Church, that it was possible to achieve one’s aim on the road to knowledge; that, knowing the Count as one important and influential in the most considerable of these societies, which are each connected with the other by the oneness of their tasks and the oneness of their aim, I had recourse to him with the request—that he would help me to enter, as a humble disciple, the ranks of one of them.
To my astonishment this half-boastful, half-hypocritical speech, in which I had tried to show off all my meagre information about the mysterious orders of the initiated—was greeted by Count Heinrich as something worthy of attention. Taking me, probably, for an initiate, though one standing outside the societies, Heinrich hastily and with extreme politeness pointed me to a bench, sat down himself and, looking into my face with sad and candid eyes, spoke to me as he would to a near friend: