Krakatit/Chapter 33
CHAPTER XXXIIl
She sat motionless on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin, her hair falling across her face and her hands clasped convulsively around her neck. He was afraid of what he had done, and kissed her knees, hands, hair, grovelled on the floor and poured out entreaties and endearments; she did not see or hear. It seemed to him that she trembled with revulsion at his every touch.
Then she quietly got up and went over to the glass. He approached her on tiptoe, hoping to surprise her, but then he caught sight of her reflection. She was looking at herself with an expression so wild, terrible, and desperate, that he was horrified. She turned round and fell on his shoulder. “Am I ugly? Do I revolt you? What have I done, what have I done?” She pressed her face against his chest. “I’m stupid, you see? I know . . . I know that you’re disappointed. But you mustn’t be contemptuous of me, you understand?” She nestled against him like a repentant young girl. “You won’t escape, will you? I’ll do anything you like, you see? As if I were your wife. Darling, darling, don’t leave me to think; I shall become horrible to myself again if once I think; you’ve no idea what my thoughts are. Don’t leave me now ” Her trembling fingers caressed his neck; he raised her head and kissed her, murmuring all sorts of things in his ecstasy. Color came back into her face and she became beautiful again. “Am I ugly?” she whispered, happy and dazed, between his kisses, “I should like to be beautiful for your sake. Do you know why I came? I expected that you would kill me.”
“And if you had known what was going to happen,” whispered Prokop, rocking her in his arms, “would you have come?”
The Princess nodded. “I am horrible. What must you think of me! But I won’t let you think.” He embraced her quickly and raised her from the couch. “No, no,” she implored, resisting him. But she lay still with moist eyes, her fingers playing with the hair on his heavy forehead. “Dear, dear,” she sighed, “how you have tortured me these last few days! Do you?” She did not say the word “love.” He assented passionately: “And you?”
“Yes. You should have seen it already. Do you know what you are? You are the most beautiful horrible man that ever had a big nose. Your eyes are as bloodshot as a St. Bernard’s. Is it through your work? Perhaps you wouldn’t be so nice if you were a prince. Ah! Stop!”
She slipped out of his embrace and went to the mirror to comb her hair. She examined herself attentively and then made a deep bow in front of the glass. “There’s the Princess,” she said, pointing to her image, “and here,” she added, indicating herself, “is your girl, you see? Did you realize that you possess a princess?”
Prokop made an abrupt movement. “What does that matter?” he cried, bringing down his fist heavily on the table.
“You must choose, the princess or the girl. You can’t have the princess; you may worship her from the distance but you may not kiss her hand, and you must not ask her whether she loves you. A princess may not do such things; she has behind her a thousand years of noble blood. Did you know that we used to be kings? Ah, you know nothing, but you ought to know at least that a princess lives in a glass case and you may not touch her. But you can have the ordinary woman, this dark girl. Stretch out your hand and she is yours, like anything else. Now you must choose between the two.”
Prokop was again chilled. “Princess,” he said heavily.
She came over to him and seriously kissed his cheek. “You’re mine, you understand? You darling! You see that you have a princess. And are you proud that you have a princess? What a terrible thing the princess must have done to cause anyone to grow haughty for a couple of days! I knew, I knew from the first moment I saw you that you wanted the princess; from anger, from a masculine sense of power or something like that. For this reason you hated me so much that you desired me and I ran after you. Do you think that I am annoyed with myself? On the contrary, I am proud that I have done it. That’s something, isn’t it? To lower oneself so quickly, to be a princess, a great lady and then to come . . . to come alone . . .”
Her words threw Prokop into consternation. “Stop,” he begged her and took her into his trembling arms. “I’m not your equal . . . in birth . . .”
“What did you say? Equal? Do you think that if you had been a prince I should have come to you? If you wanted me to treat you like an equal I shouldn’t have been with you . . . like this,” she cried. “There’s a big difference, you understand?” Prokop’s hands fell. “You shouldn’t have said such a thing,” he said through his teeth, recoiling.
She threw her arms round his neck. “Darling, darling, let me speak! Am I reproaching you? I came . . . alone . . . because you wanted to escape or to get yourself killed, I don’t know what; any girl would have done the same. . . . Do you think that I was wrong to do it? Tell me! Did I do wrong? You don’t understand,” she said, wincing, “you don’t understand!”
“Wait,” cried Prokop. He extricated himself from her embrace, and paced up and down the room. Suddenly he was blinded by a sudden hope. “Do you believe in me? Do you believe that I shall do something? I can work terribly hard. I’ve never thought about fame, but if you wished it . . . I’d exert all my strength! You know that Darwin was carried to his coffin by dukes? If you wished, I could do . . . tremendous things. I can work—I could change the face of the world. Give me ten years and you’ll see”
It seemed as if she was not listening to him. “If you were a prince it would be enough to look at you, give you one’s hand and you would know, you would know, you musn’t doubt—it wouldn’t have to be demonstrated to you . . . ten years! Would you be true to me for ten days! In ten minutes you will become gloomy, dear, and grow angry at the fact that the Princess does not want you . . . because she is a princess and you are not a prince, see? And then, try as I may to convince you, it will be in vain; no demonstration will be great enough, no humiliation sufficiently deep. He would have me run after him, offer myself to him, do more than any other girl, I don’t know what! What am I to do with you?” She came up to him and offered him her lips. “Wil you be true to me for ten years, then?”
He seized hold of her, sobbing. “There,” she whispered and stroked his hair. “So you’re pulling at the chain? And yet I should have remained just as I was. Darling, darling, I know that you will leave me.” She sank into his arms. He lifted her up and forced open her closed lips with his kisses.
She lay still with her eyes closed, hardly breathing, and Prokop, bending over her, his heart oppressed, contemplated the inscrutable serenity of her hot, strained face. She extricated herself from his embrace as if in a dream. “What have you got in all those bottles? Are they poison?” She examined his shelves and instruments. “Give me some poison or other.”
“Why?”
“In case they want to take me away from here.”
Her serious face made him anxious, but to appease her he poured a solution of chalk into a small box, but at that moment she pounced on some crystals of arsenic. “Don’t take that!” he cried, but she had already placed it in her bag.
“I see you will be a great man,” she said softly. “I never imagined such things. Did you say that Darwin was carried to his grave by dukes? Who were they?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
She kissed him. “You are nice! Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Well . . . the Duke of Argyll and . . . the Duke of Devonshire,” he muttered.
“Really!” she considered this, frowning. “I should never have imagined . . . that scientists were so . . . And you only mentioned it incidentally!” She put her arms round his shoulders, as if for the first time. “And you, you could? Really?”
“Well, wait until I am buried.”
“Ah, if that were only very soon,” she said reflectively with naïve cruelty. “You’d be wonderful if you were famous. Do you know what I like the most?”
“No.”
“I don’t, either,” she said musingly, and turned and kissed him. “I don’t know. Whoever and whatever you were” She moved her shoulders with a gesture of impatience. “It’s for always, you understand?”
Prokop recoiled from this relentless monogamy. She stood before him, muffled up to her eyes in her blue fox fur and looked at him in the twilight with glistening eyes. “Oh!” she cried suddenly and sank back into a chair, “my legs are trembling.” She smoothed and rubbed them with naïve shamelessness. “How shall I be able to ride? Come, darling, come and see me to-day. Mon Oncle Charles is away to-day, and even if he weren’t it’s all the same to me.” She got up and kissed him. “Au revoir.”
In the doorway she stopped, hesitated, and came back to him. “Kill me, please,” she said, her hands hanging limp by her side, “kill me.” He put his hands on her: “Why?”
“So that I shan’t have to go away . . . and so that I shall never have to be here.” He whispered into her ear: “. . . To-morrow.”
She looked at him, and submissively bent down her head; it was . . . a sign of assent.
When she had been gone some time he also went out into the half-light. Some one a hundred yards away got up from the ground and rubbed the dirt off his clothes with his sleeve. The silent Mr. Holz.