“Are you satisfied now? You’ve done your work well. You’ve brought me to despair. And now, what am I to do?”
“Live,” he said.
“Live!” she cried. “You don’t know how impossible it is! You know nothing! You know nothing!”
He asked:
“What is it?”
She shrugged her shoulders:
“Listen.”
In a few brief disconnected sentences she told him all that she had concealed from him: Bäbi’s spying on her, the ashes, the scene with Sami, the carnival, the public insult that was before her. As she told her story she was unable to distinguish between the figments of her fear and what she had any reason to fear. He listened in utter consternation, and was no more capable than she of discerning between the real and the imaginary in her story. Nothing had ever been farther from his mind than to suspect how they were being dogged. He tried to understand: he could find nothing to say: against such enemies he was disarmed. Only he was conscious of a blind fury, a desire to strike and to destroy. He said:
“Why didn’t you dismiss Bäbi?”
She did not deign to reply. Bäbi dismissed would have been even more venomous than Bäbi tolerated: and Christophe saw the idiocy of his question. His thoughts were in a whirl: he was trying to discover a way out, some immediate action upon which to engage. He clenched his fists and cried:
“I’ll kill them!”
“Who?” she said, despising him for his futile words.
He lost all power of thought or action. He felt that he was lost in such a network of obscure treachery, in which it was impossible to clutch at anything since all were parties to it. He writhed.
“Cowards!” he cried, in sheer despair.
He slipped down on to his knees and buried his face against Anna.—They were silent for a little. She felt a mixture of contempt and pity for the man who could defend neither himself nor her. He felt Anna’s limbs trembling with cold against his cheek. The window had been left open, and outside it was freezing: they could see the icy stars shivering in the sky that was smooth and gleaming as a mirror.
When she had fully tasted the bitter joy of seeing him as broken as herself, she said in a hard, weary voice:
“Light the candle.”
He did so. Anna’s teeth were chattering, she was sitting huddled up, with her arms tight folded across her chest and her knees up to her chin. He closed the window. Then he sat on the bed. He laid his hands on Anna’s feet: they were cold as ice, and he warmed them with his hands and lips. She was softened.
“Christophe!” she said.
Her eyes were pitiful to see.
“Anna!” said he.
“What are we going to do?”
He looked at her and replied:
“Die.”
She gave a cry of joy.
“Oh! You will? You will? … I shall not be alone!”
She kissed him.
“Did you think I was going to let you?”
She replied in a whisper:
“Yes.”
A few moments later he questioned her with his eyes. She understood.
“In the bureau,” she said. “On the right. The bottom drawer.”
He went and looked. At the back of the drawer he found a revolver. Braun had bought it as a student. He had never made use of it. In an open box Christophe found some cartridges. He took them to the bed. Anna looked at them, and at once turned her eyes away to the wall.
Christophe waited, and then asked:
“You don’t want to … ?”
Anna turned abruptly:
“I will. … Quick!”
She thought:
“Nothing can save me now from the everlasting pit. A little more or less, it will be just the same.”
Christophe awkwardly loaded the revolver.
“Anna,” he said, and his voice trembled. “One of us will see the other die.”
She wrenched the pistol out of his hands and said selfishly:
“I shall be the first.”
They looked at each other once more. … Alas! At the very moment when they were to die for each other they felt so far apart! … Each was thinking in terror:
“What am I doing? What am I doing?”
And each was reading the other’s eyes. The absurdity of the thing was what struck Christophe most. All his life gone for nothing: vain his struggles: vain his suffering: vain his hopes: all botched, flung to the winds: one foolish act was to wipe all away. … In his normal state he would have wrenched the revolver away from Anna and flung it out of the window and cried:
“No, no! I will not.”
But eight months of suffering, of doubt and torturing grief, and on top of that the whirlwind of their crazy passion, had wasted his strength and broken his will: he felt that he could do nothing now, that he was no longer master of himself. … Ah! what did it matter, after all?
Anna, feeling certain that she was doomed to everlasting death, stretched every nerve to catch and hold the last minute of her life: Christophe’s sorrowful face lit by the flickering candle, the shadows on the wall, a footstep in the street, the cold contact of the steel in her hand. … She clung to these sensations, as a shipwrecked man clings to the spar that sinks beneath his weight. Afterwards all was terror. Why not prolong the time of waiting? But she said to herself:
“I must. …”
She said goodbye to Christophe, with no tenderness, with the haste of a hurried traveler fearful of losing the train: she bared her bosom, felt for her heart, and laid the mouth of the revolver against it. Christophe hid his face. Just as she was about to fire she laid her left hand on Christophe’s. It was the gesture of a child dreading to walk in the darkness. …
Then a few frightful seconds passed. … Anna did not fire. Christophe wanted to raise his head, to take her in his arms: and he was afraid that his very movement might bring her to the point of firing. He heard nothing more: he lost consciousness. … A groan from Anna pierced his heart. He got up. He saw Anna with her face distorted in terror. The
