When she had disappeared he felt the emptiness that her strange eyes had left in him, and he did not understand why; but the emptiness was there. Sleepy, with eyes half-closed, lying in a corner of the carriage, he felt her eyes looking into his, and all other thoughts ceased, to let him feel them more keenly. The image of Corinne fluttered outside his heart like an insect breaking its wings against a window; but he did not let it in.
He found it again when he got out of the train on his arrival, when the keen night air and his walk through the streets of the sleeping town had shaken off his drowsiness. He scowled at the thought of the pretty actress, with a mixture of pleasure and irritation, according as he recalled her affectionate ways or her vulgar coquetries.
“Oh! these French people,” he growled, laughing softly, while he was undressing quietly, so as not to waken his mother, who was asleep in the next room.
A remark that he had heard the other evening in the box occurred to him:
“There are others also.”
At his first encounter with France she laid before him the enigma of her double nature. But, like all Germans, he did not trouble to solve it, and as he thought of the girl in the train he said quietly:
“She does not look like a Frenchwoman.”
As if a German could say what is French and what is not.
French or not, she filled his thoughts; for he woke in the middle of the night with a pang: he had just remembered the valise on the seat by the girl’s side; and suddenly the idea that she had gone forever crossed his mind. The idea must have come to him at the time, but he had not thought of it. It filled him with a strange sadness. He shrugged his shoulders.
“What does it matter to me?” he said. “It is not my affair.”
He went to sleep.
But next day the first person he met when he went out was Mannheim, who called him “Blücher,” and asked him if he had made up his mind to conquer all France. From the garrulous newsmonger he learned that the story of the box had had a success exceeding all Mannheim’s expectations.
“Thanks to you! Thanks to you!” cried Mannheim. “You are a great man. I am nothing compared with you.”
“What have I done?” said Christophe.
“You are wonderful!” Mannheim replied. “I am jealous of you. To shut the box in the Grünebaums’ faces, and then to ask the French governess instead of them—no, that takes the cake! I should never have thought of that!”
“She was the Grünebaums’ governess?” said Christophe in amazement.
“Yes. Pretend you don’t know, pretend to be innocent. You’d better! … My father is beside himself. The Grünebaums are in a rage! … It was not for long: they have sacked the girl.”
“What!” cried Christophe. “They have dismissed her? Dismissed her because of me?”
“Didn’t you know?” said Mannheim. “Didn’t she tell you?”
Christophe was in despair.
“You mustn’t be angry, old man,” said Mannheim. “It does not matter. Besides, one had only to expect that the Grünebaums would find out …”
“What?” cried Christophe. “Find out what?”
“That she was your mistress, of course!”
“But I do not even know her. I don’t know who she is.”
Mannheim smiled, as if to say:
“You take me for a fool.”
Christophe lost his temper and bade Mannheim do him the honor of believing what he said. Mannheim said:
“Then it is even more humorous.”
Christophe worried about it, and talked of going to the Grünebaums and telling them the facts and justifying the girl. Mannheim dissuaded him.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “anything you may say will only convince them of the contrary. Besides, it is too late. The girl has gone away.”
Christophe was utterly sick at heart and tried to trace the young Frenchwoman. He wanted to write to her to beg her pardon. But nothing was known of her. He applied to the Grünebaums, but they snubbed him. They did not know themselves where she had gone, and they did not care. The idea of the harm he had done in trying to do good tortured Christophe: he was remorseful. But added to his remorse was a mysterious attraction, which shone upon him from the eyes of the woman who was gone. Attraction and remorse both seemed to be blotted out, engulfed in the flood of the day’s new thoughts. But they endured in the depths of his heart. Christophe did not forget the woman whom he called his victim. He had sworn to meet her again. He knew how small were the chances of his ever seeing her again: and he was sure that he would see her again.
As for Corinne, she never answered his letters. But three months later, when he had given up expecting to hear from her, he received a telegram of forty words of utter nonsense, in which she addressed him in little familiar terms, and asked “if they were still fond of each other.” Then, after nearly a year’s silence, there came a scrappy letter scrawled in her enormous childish zigzag writing, in which she tried to play the lady—a few affectionate, droll words. And there she left it. She did not forget him, but she had no time to think of him.
Still under the spell of Corinne and full of the ideas they had exchanged about art, Christophe dreamed of writing the music for a play in which Corinne should act and sing a few airs—a sort of poetic melodrama. That form of art once so much in favor in Germany, passionately admired by Mozart, and practised by Beethoven, Weber, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and all the great classics, had fallen into discredit since the triumph of Wagnerism, which claimed to have realized the definite formula of the theater and music. The Wagnerian pedants, not content
