The Green Face (20 page)

With swift and yet unhurried steps she went through the town,
not knowing whether at the next comer she should go straight
on or not, and yet certain that when the moment to choose came
there would be no doubt as to the direction she should take.

Her every limb was trembling. She knew that it was from fear of death, but herheartwas unaffected by it. She was impervious
to the fear her body felt, stood apartfrom it, as if hernerves were
those of another.

When she reached an open square, with the dark, massive
block of the Stock Exchange in the background, she thought for
a moment that it had all been an illusion and that she was on her
way to the station after all, but suddenly she was dragged off to
the right through narrow twisting alleyways.

The few figures she passed stopped and she could feel them
looking back at her.

With a new power of inner vision, that she had never before
realised she possessed, she found she could guess whatever it
was that most worried each individual she met. Some seemed
to exude concern, like a mental current of deep pity that was
directed at her; and yet she knew that these people had not the
least idea of what was going on inside themselves, that they
were completely unaware of why they tamed to look at her, and
had they been asked, they would have said they did it out of
curiosity or some such similar motive.

She was astonished to learn that there was a secret, invisible
bond uniting all men and that, without any physical awareness
of the fact, their souls recognised and spoke to one another in
imperceptible vibrations and in feelings that were too faint to be
registered by the physical senses. Resentful, greedy, murderous, they were like predators struggling for existence; and yet
it would perhaps have only taken a tiny rent in the curtain that
veiled their eyes to turn the bitterest of enemies into the most
faithful of friends.

The alleys she passed through were becoming emptier and
eerier, she no longer felt any doubt that the next hours would
bring something terrible - she assumed it would be death at the
hand of a murderer- if she did not succeed in breaking the spell
that drew her ever onwards; and yet she did not even try to fight
it. Unresisting, she bore the alien will that compelled her to
follow the path into the darkness, calm in her confidence that
whatever should happen to her, it would be one more step
towards her goal.

For a brief moment, as she was crossing an iron footbridge over a canal, she saw the silhouette of St. Nicholas’ through a
gap between two gables, its two towers standing out from the
horizon like a dark hand raised in warning. She gave an involuntary sigh of relief at the thought that it might only be Swammerdam calling to her with his heart in his sorrow for his friend
Klinkherbogk.

The animosity that she sensed all around her told herthat she
was mistaken. The very earth gave off a dark malevolence
which was directed against her: the icy, pitiless fury of nature
towards any man who tries to cast off the bonds of his servitude.

For the first time since she had left her room, she felt afraid;
she almost collapsed under the awareness of how completely
defenceless she was. She tried to stop, but her feet carried her
on, as if she had lost all power over them.

In her desperation she looked up to the sky and was deeply
moved by the immense feeling of solace she drew from the sight
of the host of stars, like a thousand eyes glittering threateningly
down at the earth, the eyes of all-powerful helpers who would
not suffer a hair of her head to be harmed. She remembered the
greybeards in the hall into whose hands she had put her destiny
and they seemed to her a gathering of immortals, who only
needed to bat an eyelid for the world to crumble to dust.

And again she heard in her ear the strange, compelling guttural sounds; hoarsely, urgently, as if from very close, they
urged her to hasten. Then suddenly in the darkness she recognised the crooked house in which Klinkherbogk had been
murdered.

A man was sitting on the railing above the confluence of the
canals. He sat motionless, leaning tensely forward as if he were
listening forher approaching steps. Eva felt that it was from him
that the demonic power emanated that had compelled her to
make her way to the Zeedijk.

Even before she could make out his face, she knew from the
mortal fear that paralysed her every limb and froze her blood,
that it was the terrible Zulu that she had seen in the shoemaker’s
attic.

In her terror she wanted to scream for help, but the link be tween desire and action seemed to have been cut within her, her
body was under another power. As if she had died and were
outside her body, she saw herself stumble towards the man and
stop right in front of him.

He raised his head and seemed to look at her, but his eyeballs
were turned upwards, like someone sleeping with open eyes.

Eva realised that he was as stiff as a corpse and that she only
needed to give him a push in the chest to send him tumbling
backwards into the water. In spite of that, she was completely
under his spell and incapable of doing it. She knew she would
be defenceless before him when he awoke, and she could count
the minutes that separated her from her fate: from time to time
his face twitched with the first signs of the gradual return of
consciousness.

She had often heard and read of women, particularly blondes,
who were supposed to have succumbed to negroes in spite of the
violent repugnance they felt; they said the untamed African
blood exerted a spell over them which it was impossible to
resist. Eva had never believed these explanations, and had
regarded such women as low creatures who gave way to their
animal instincts; but now, with an icy shudder, she recognised
from what was happening within her that a dark force of that
nature did indeed exist. Disgust and sensual pleasure were only
apparent opposites, in reality the partition dividing them was
thin and transparent and when it gave way a woman had no
defence against the bestial instincts let loose within her.

What was it that gave this half animal, half human savage
such inexplicable power, as he called to her from afar, that it
drew her like a sleepwalker to him through strange alleyways?
There must be chords within her that responded to his lust,
although she, inherpride, had imagined she was free from them.

Did every woman feel the satanic power emanating from this
negro, she asked herself, trembling with fear, or was she herself
so much lower than all the others, who had not even heard his
magic call, much less followed it?

She saw no hope of salvation. The bliss she had craved for her
beloved and herself would be destroyed along with her body.
Anything she could take with her over the threshold ofdeath was formless and incapable of giving her that which she desired. She
had wanted to turn her back on the earth, but the earth spirit kept
an iron grip on his own: the giant figure of the negro before her
was the embodiment of its omnipotence.

She saw him shake off his trance and leap down from the
railing. He grabbed her by the arms and pulled her to him. She
screamed, and her cry for help echoed from the walls of the
houses around, but he pressed his hand over her mouth so hard
that she was almost suffocated.

Like a butcher’s cur, he had round his neck a dark-red leather
leash; she grasped it and held on tight so as not to be thrust to
the ground. For a moment she managed to free her head. She
gathered her last reserves of strength and screamed for help
again.

It must have been heard, for she heard the crash of a glass door
followed by a babble of voices; a broad glare of light illuminated
the alleyway.

Then she felt the negro set off with wild leaps and bounds
towards the shadow of St. Nicholas’, pulling her along with him.
Two Chilean sailors with orange sashes round their waists were
already close on his heels, she could see the bare knives gleaming in theirhands as theirbold bronze faces drew nearer. Instinctively she held on tight to the negro’s neckthong and dragged her
feet behind so as to encumber him as much as possible, but he
seemed scarcely to notice her weight; he jerked her up from the
ground and rushed with her along the churchyard wall. Close
before her she could see the fleshy lips around his bared teeth,
like the jaws of some beast of prey, and the savage intensity of
expression in his white eyes burned her senses, so that she froze
as if hypnotised, incapable of any resistance at all.

One of the sailors had overtaken the negro and now threw
himself, curled up like a cat, at his feet to trip him up, at the same
time stabbing upwards at him with his knife; in a flash, the Zulu
leapt up and his knee caughtthe sailoron the head, knocking him
to the ground where he lay, his skull smashed.

Then Eva felt herself thrown over the wrought-iron bars of
the churchyard gate and expected to crash to the ground, breaking every bone in her body; but her dress caught on the iron spikes and through the bars she watched as the Zulu fought with
his second assailant. It lasted only a few seconds; the sailor was
thrown like a ball against a window in the wall of the house
opposite which shattered in an explosion of glass and wood.

Quivering in fear of her life, Eva had freed herself from the
spikes of the gate and tried to flee, but there was nowhere to go
in the narrow garden behind the church. Like a hunted animal
she crawled under a bench, but she knew that she was lost all the
same: her light-coloured dress shone in the darkness and would
surely give her away any moment.

With trembling fingers and scarcely able to think, she felt for
the pin at her neck; she wanted to plunge it into her heart, for
already the negro had vaulted over the wall, and she did not
intend that he should take her alive. The last thing she could
recall was her mute, desperate cry to God that she might find
something with which she could kill herself before her tormentor found her. Then, for a sudden moment, she thought she
must have gone mad, for there, in the middle of the garden, with
a calm smile on her face, stood her own double.

The negro must have seen it as well; he halted in astonishment
and then went over to it. She thought she could hear him talking
to the apparition; she could not understand what was said, but
his voice suddenly changed to that of a man paralysed by horror
and hardly able to stammer a few words.

It must be an illusion! Perhaps the savage had already had his
way with her and it had driven her mad! Nevertheless, she could
not tear her eyes away from the scene. For a moment she became
convinced she herself was the double and in some mysterious
way the Zulu was in her power, and in the next she was desperately searching for the pin once more.

She made a supreme effort. She was determined to establish
whether she had gone mad or not. She stared fixedly at the
phantom and saw it disappear, as if her concentration had
sucked it back into her body; it was like a magic part of herself
that returned to her every time she strained her eyes to see it in
the darkness. It was like a spectral breath that she could inhale
and exhale at will, but each time it left, an icy tingling made her
hair stand on end, as if Death were at her side.

The negro did not respond at all to the appearance and disappearance of her double. Whether it was there or not, all the
time he muttered to himself, as if he were talking in his sleep.
Eva gradually realised that he had once more fallen into the
strange, trancelike state as when she had seen him sitting on the
canal railings.

Still trembling with fear, she finally plucked up the courage
to leave her hiding place. She could hear shouts and voices
approaching along the alley; the windows of the houses opposite reflected the bobbing gleam of the lanterns and the shadows
of the trees on the church wall were transformed into a line of
dancing ghosts.

She counted her heartbeats; now, now the crowd looking for
the negro must be close by! Her knees almost giving way, she
ran past him to the gate and gave a piercing cry for help. As she
fainted she was aware of the comforting figure of a woman in
a red dress kneeling beside her bathing her forehead; she was
saved.

A motley army of half-naked figures clambered over the
wall, blazing torches in their hands, gleaming knives between
theirteeth; they seemed like fantastic, capering demons, sprung
from the ground to come to her aid. Flames flared up, bringing
the saints on the stained-glass windows of the church to life;
there was a hubbub of shrill Spanish oaths, “There’s the nigger!
Slash his guts!”

She saw the sailors, yelling with fury, hurl themselves on the
Zulu, and she saw them fall to the ground, felled by the massive
blows of his fists, heard the spine-chilling shout of triumph that
rent the air as, like an unleashed tiger, he cut his way through
the pack of assailants, swung up onto a tree and then leapt with
enormous bounds from niche to niche, over the gables and onto
the roof of the church.

For a few brief seconds, as she was waking from a deep
swoon, she dreamt an old man with cloth round his forehead had
bent over her and called her name. She thought it was Lazarus
Egyolk, but then, through his features as if through a glass mask,
the face of the negro appeared, with the white eyes and fleshy
lips around his bared teeth, just as it had carved itself on her memory while he carried her in his arms, until lashed by a
witches’ sabbath of feverish images, she lost consciousness
once more.