“That is not the question!” answered the voice, falling like a stone, falling, lying, lying for thousands of years. “The question is, are you going to remain with me of your own free will or as my prisoner?”
The Countess, now fully alive to the force and compulsion which threatened her, strove to collect her wits. She looked, listened, considered, and slowly began to ask herself, “Shall it be cunning or resistance?” After a time she answered, “You cannot keep me as your prisoner in Munich.”
Mabuse replied roughly, “How do you know that you are in Munich?”
“Have you run away with me?” she cried.
“I am not a gorilla.”
“Who are you? What is your name?”
“Whatever you like to call me!”
“Then I shall call you a gorilla,” she was about to retort angrily, but it seemed as if her tongue refused to utter the hateful name. It would not be expressed, and something within her appeared to change and soften the situation, to promise allurement in the distance and play around her fancy like busy little elves of night. Yet something in her conscience seemed to tell her that there could be no ease for her while her husband was cast down by misfortune and her own future was so uncertain, and she spoke defiantly, “What do you want with me?”
But the man looked at her long and steadily, and she felt as if her question floated away, minute and unconsidered as a trifle on the mighty ocean. The ocean was the breast of the man before her. There was no breast more mighty or powerful; it represented what her inmost being and her secret desires had yearned after. To rest upon it, to rest … as in the jungle. …
Then, after he had looked at her in a silence fraught with meaning, the man spoke. “The human race is too contemptible and inferior to give its men and women such force as nature has provided for its other creations; that the one sex should see, know and belong to the other as naturally and inevitably as light belongs to day!”
“You mean to say,” said the Countess hesitatingly, “that you love me, and that—is why you have brought me here!”
“I desire you, and that—for me—is stronger than love! You are here because there is no resisting my desires. You may reign as a queen, in this breast, and in my kingdom of Citopomar in Southern Brazil. A queen ruling the virgin forest, its savage beasts, savage and civilized human beings, valleys, rocks and heights. Who in this miserable continent can offer you more?”
“No one!” said the Countess, under the secret dominion of the dream which had so rapidly begun its twofold play in her spirit.
“You have decided, then, to remain of your own free will?” asked Mabuse.
The Countess once more realized her position. She shrank from him, and tried to shelter herself behind the ottoman. She closed her lips firmly, but at the same time she was torn by a conflict within; she desired to go, and at the same time she felt a yearning in some part of her being to remain and to submit.
He continued: “If it were like this: a man and a woman see each other for the first time, and in the first glance that they exchange they say to themselves, ‘There is nothing left to me of what I was. Everything has vanished like a dissolving view, and thou, the only one, thou alone remainest. It is inconceivable that there should be a single heartbeat that does not belong to thee.’ It is as if all the races in all the ages had united their powers in these two beings, instead of giving each individual a beggarly portion of it. What a puny creature is man, but if it were the other way with the race he would be the image of God and of creation!”
The Countess felt as if a sudden force was stretching her between two poles. She knew that she herself resembled both of them, and yet they were unlike each other. “Must I proceed from the one extreme to the other?” she asked herself, feeling very weary, “or can I remain hovering between them, calm and comfortable, in the warm rays of a sunshine that steals over me so pleasantly?”
There was always the inclination to follow the extraordinary and unusual, that she might feel wherein she was most akin to humanity, and yet most herself when surrounded by what did not belong to or affect her. And over her spirit there stole again a feeling as of Paradise, the scent of the Elysian Fields, the songs of enchanting sirens, and it seemed as if the limits of her physical nature were dissolved and, leaving her narrow horizon behind her, she floated as if in ether. “What is happening to me?” she thought, as, struggling with herself, she advanced yet nearer to the vision of Paradise which swam before her eyes.
The eyes of this strange, compelling being flooded her like a spring season of sunshine. He stood high as the clouds above her. The sunshine overpowered the earth, but the earth yielded itself gladly to its rays. Was that the secret of her nature too? she herself asked. The season, now wild and stormy, advanced like a monster endued with power, from beyond the horizon, over the forests, rivers, cities, mountains, looking neither to right nor left and penetrating to the very heart of things. “If this man overcomes me in such a way, fills my whole being, is that indeed Paradise? Is it for me completion, redemption, deliverance? Is this my second nature which I have never yet dared to follow?”
She desired to resist, but a subtle and enchanting feebleness stole over her, and she felt herself like a March field, dark and yielding. A jackdaw was screeching in it, but somewhere or other a thrush was singing behind her. And the screeching jackdaw and the singing thrush were snatching at a maggot,
