The Fiery Angel (25 page)
“Rupprecht, I love you! Do you not know that I love you? For long I have loved you! You alone! I do not want you to die without knowing!”
Renata’s avowal was the last ray that then imprinted itself on my consciousness, when once more it sank into darkness, and on its surface, like the reflections of an invisible fire, again danced red devils, waving their voluminous sleeves and plaiting their long tails. But a sound penetrated to me as though, in their monstrous dance, they were continuing Renata’s words in chorus, and singing, and crying, and howling above me: “I love you, Rupprecht! For long I have loved you! You alone!” and throughout the labyrinth of delirium, along its steep staircases and down its headlong abysses, it was as though I bore these words, precious, yet crushing as a burden upon my shoulders and my chest: “I love you, Rupprecht!”
The second time I came to, it was from the sound of the church bells at early Sunday Mass, and this time, despite the weakness and pain of the wound, I felt that an edge had been overpassed, that life was in me and that I was in life. Renata was near me, and I made a sign to her with my eyes that I recognised her, remembered the words she had spoken yesterday, was grateful to her, and happy, and she, understanding, lowered herself once more on her knees to the floor and bowed her head against me, as one bows one’s head in church in prayer. The realisation that I had as if risen from the grave, the touch of the tender eyelashes of Renata upon my hand, the soft rays of the dawn and the carillons of bells softly penetrating through the panes, made the moment unspeakable and unearthly, as though, by some purpose, it combined in it everything that is most beautiful and most precious to man.
From that day began my recovery. Chained to the bed, almost without strength to move, I watched with astonishment how, smartly and efficiently, Renata ordered all the flow of domestic life, fussing over me, forcing Martha to perform her desires, not allowing visitors to bore and worry me. Visitors, during this time, knocked at our door far more frequently than one might have imagined, for Matthew came to me unceasingly every day, somewhat cast down by my failure, but of course not having lost his healthy cheerfulness and his gay animation, and nearly as often appeared Lucian Stein, insistently demanding news of the progress of my illness that he might carry it to Count Heinrich. And lastly, also every day, the doctor engaged by Matthew came to me, a man in a black cloak and a round hat, a pedant and an ignoramus, to whom I consider I am less indebted for my life than to all others.
Being not entirely ignorant of medical sciences, and having seen not a few wounds in the course of my service in New Spain, as soon as I had recovered the ability to reason sensibly, I ordered them immediately to throw away all the oily ointments of various repellent composition confected by this priest of Aesculapius, and began to treat my wound exclusively with warm water, to the great worry of Renata and the indignation of the black doctor. I, however, knowing that the question was one of life or death to me, now found in me sufficient strength to clothe my decision in armour impenetrable either to threats or entreaties, and later, pointed out day by day the success of my care, a vindication both of doctor and patient.
And when Renata and I were left alone, we forgot my illness, for she wanted only to repeat that she loved me, and it was sweet to me to listen to these admissions, oversweet, for my heart began to beat so fast that I felt pain in my wound. I asked of Renata for the hundredth and thousandth time: “So you love me? But why did you not tell me so before?”—and she for the hundredth and thousandth time answered:
“It is long that I have loved you, Rupprecht. How is it that you did not remark it? Often I would softly whisper to you the words ‘I love you.’ Not hearing them, you would ask me what I was saying and I would answer thus: ‘Nothing, no matter.’ I admired your face, stern and forbidding, your brows joined together, your firm step, but when you chanced to catch my loving glance I began to speak to you of Heinrich. How many times, when you slept alone, have I crawled at night on tiptoe into your room and kissed your hands, your breast, your feet, trembling lest I might wake you! Even when you were not at home I would enter your room and kiss your bedclothes, the pillows on which you slept. But how could I admit my love to you, after all that I had told you of my love for Heinrich? I felt that you must despise me, that you would think my love unworthy, if I threw it from one to another like a ball. Ah, am I guilty in that you have conquered me, with your tenderness, with your devotion, with the strength of your love, unbending and mighty as a mountain torrent!
I asked Renata:
“Notwithstanding this, you sent me to almost certain death? You forbade me to touch Heinrich and commanded me to offer my breast to his thrust! He came near to plunging it into my very heart!”
Renata replied:
“That was the final trial, the Trial of God. Do you remember that I was praying while you were on your way to combat? I was asking the Lord whether He willed that I should love you. If it were His will, He could preserve your life even before the blade of an adversary. And I also desired to test your love for the last time—would it dare to look—eye to eye—at death? And, had you perished, know that, that very day, I should have locked myself away in a convent cell, for I could not have borne further to live—were it not by your side!”
“I do not know how much truth there was in the words of Renata! I am well prepared to admit that she did not relate the whole of the matter as it had been in the past, but as she now represented it to herself; however, at that time I had no opportunity of judging the value of her words, for I had barely the strength to drink them in as a wilting flower drinks in the moisture of the rain. I was like a pauper, who for many long years has fruitlessly begged pitiful coppers on the church porch, and before whom suddenly open all the riches of the Lydian Crœsus, offering him to take gold, diamonds and sapphires by handfuls. I, who had listened with a face of stone to all the cruellest reproaches of Renata, could not find strength in me now to bear her tenderness, and often it was not her cheeks but mine that were now moist with tears.
A painful sweetness was imparted to our intimacy by the fact that my wound made it for many a day impossible for us to give ourselves up to our passion in full measure. At first I had barely strength enough to approach, raising my head, my lips to Renata’s lips, as if to a burning coal, and, bereft of power by such an effort, I would then fall back breathless into the pillows. Later, when I could already sit up in bed, Renata had, with meek insistence, to restrain me from mad enthusiasm, for I desired, taking her in my arms, to press her, kiss her and caress her, and make her live through all the tremors of the joy of love. But true, at the very first attempt to trust myself to the hurricane of passion, my forces betrayed me, blood oozed through my bandages, before my eyes began to whirl single-hued rings, in my ears to whistle a monotoned wind, my hands dropped, and Renata, smiling and forgiving, put me into bed like a child and whispered to me:
“Precious, dearest! Please don’t! We have the whole of life before us yet! We have the whole of life before us yet!”
About the end of the first December week, I was at last sufficiently recovered to wander weakly round the room and, seated in the large armchair, I fingered with my thin hands the volumes of the magic works, now abandoned by us. Simultaneously with my recovery, the stream of our lives began to pour into a more familiar channel, as our visitors one by one disappeared: first Lucian Stein, who had nothing more to inquire after, then the black doctor, to whom I myself showed the door, and finally the good Matthew, who got on very badly with Renata. Around us there began to form a solitude to which we were used, but how different did it seem to me from that in which I had been plunged heretofore! One might have believed that above me was a new sky, and new stars, and that all the surrounding objects had been transformed by some magic power—so unlike was it all to the past I had lived through within these same walls, that formerly had oppressed me like an unrelenting nightmare!
And now, when I recall this December, that I lived through with Renata, like a newly-married couple, I am willing to go down upon my knees and give thanks to the Creator, if it came about by His will, for the moments I was permitted to experience. And during these days only one thought insistently occupied and tormented me: that my life had reached its peak, and that thereafter there must inevitably begin a descent into a depth, that I, like Phaeton, the driver of the chariot of the Sun, was now borne to the zenith, and being unable to check my father’s steeds, must soon be hurled ignominiously along the steep decline back to earth. With agonising haste I strove with all my being to inhale the bliss of the heights, and wildly said to Renata that the most reasonable course for me would be to die, so that, happy and a conqueror, I might leave this life in which otherwise there undoubtedly still lay in wait for me, not for the first time, tragic masques of sorrow and defeat.
But Renata replied to all these speeches of mine:
“How unaccustomed you are to happiness! Believe me, dearest, we are only at the doors of it, we have not yet traversed the entrance hall. I have led you through the catacombs of torment, and I will lead you through the palaces of bliss. Only stay with me, only love me—and together we shall rise higher and higher! It is I who made you so aghast, but I want you to forget all that, I want to repay each moment of suffering with days, whole days of happiness; for you, by your love, have already repaid me for a whole lifetime of despair and ruin!”
As she said this, Renata assumed the air of one who all her life had been nourished upon happiness, as the birds of paradise are nourished upon air.
And just as she knew no limits in expressing her despair, so Renata knew no limits in the expression of her love. I was by no means a novice in sailing the ocean of sensuality in the galley with the banner of the goddess Venus at the masthead, but it was the first time I had encountered such a greed for passion, a greed before which all caresses seemed too weak, all unions too imperfect, all joys insufficient to fill the measure of desire. Moreover, as if eager to recompense me for the cruelty with which she had previously treated my love, Renata now sought to achieve, in passion, meekness and humility. I had to use no little opposition to prevent her from kissing my feet, as the Magdalen did those of Christ, and to restrain her almost by force from a great deal of which I cannot trust even a hint to this manuscript.
Our honeymoon lasted for about two weeks, a time during which my strength nearly returned to me, and, with it, that sober outlook innate in me, that I value more than any other of my abilities. At the same time, there passed in me also that tautness of all my feelings, in which I had so long been held by the indefiniteness of my relations with Renata, by our continuous searching for something, our unremitting expectation of something, and I began to feel as though a long drawn bow had at last been discharged in my soul, and the arrow sped to its mark. Naturally, even in the first days of our unexpected intimacy, when Renata desired to transform our lives, as it appeared, into the realised delirium of two maniacs, I did not altogether lose my head and, through all the frenzy of mutual oaths, avowals of love, and caresses, following one another in an uninterrupted chain, I was yet aware of stern reality, like the light of day through thickly-growing lianas, and did not forget, even for a single hour, that we were only pilgrims on an enchanted island. And when my being had at last been satiated with unaccustomed, and by it forgotten joys, when the black and flaming nightmare of the months of torture had been completely screened behind the roseate veil of the present, I could not refrain from thinking, soberly and clearly, about the future.
I was chiefly urged to do so by the knowledge that of the money I had gathered beyond the Ocean, there was left barely half, and that too was melting fairly rapidly. Second, apart from the necessity to consider earning money, I was visibly affected by my many months of idleness, and often dreamed of business and affairs, as noble joys. Lastly, I had never lost the conviction that all thinking men arrive at in mature judgment, that one cannot bale out one’s life with personal pleasures alone, any more than one can bale out the sea with the tankards of a festive banquet. True, in order to work it was necessary that our future course should first definitely be decided, but I firmly recollected that, in the days when she had still concealed her love under the mask of severity, Renata had given agreement to be my wife, and I could not doubt that she would consent now, when she had revealed its face.
Choosing an appropriate hour, I said to Renata:
“Dearest mine, you know well enough from what I have told you that we cannot indefinitely lead together a care-free existence like the present, and I must, without question, devote myself to affairs of some kind. I should prefer a business of which I have long thought; trading with the heathen in New Spain. And so to-day, Renata, now that you have given me many thousands of proofs of your affection, I repeat to you my prayer, that heretofore I have hardly dared to voice: that you become my wife, for I desire my sweetheart to be able to look without confusion into the eyes of all women. If you will now repeat once more your ‘yes,’ we shall repair straightway together to my native Losheim, and I am sure that my parents will not refuse us their blessing—otherwise, we shall do without it, for I have already long hewed my own way through the wilderness of life. And so, husband and wife, we shall set sail for the New World, to realise there those years of light and bliss you have foretold to me.”
To my surprise, this offer, which I still believe to have been reasonable and natural, produced on Renata the worst possible impression, and there fell at once upon her face, as it were the shadow of some past swooping wing. I should mention, in this connection, that this shadow invariably darkened her face whenever I spoke of my parents and my home; she herself never, not even in the moments of nearest intimacy of two passionately fond, mentioned to me anything of her own father and mother or her native lands. And then, with puckered brows, she answered me as follows: