The Princess suddenly glided noiselessly into the room. At the door she reached out for the switch and turned out the light. In the darkness Prokop felt a hand which lightly touched his face and then passed round his neck. He took the Princess in his arms; she was so supple and almost incorporate, that he touched her fearfully as if she were something fragile. She covered his face with her aerial kisses and whispered something which he could not catch; he felt his hair being delicately stroked. Then he felt her sinuous body yielding, the arm round his neck pressed him more closely and her moist lips moved on his own, as if they were speaking voicelessly. Trembling all over, she grasped Prokop more and more firmly, pulled down his head, pressed herself to him with her breasts and knees, twined both her arms round him; a passionate, agonizing embrace, the moaning of a creature which is being suffocated; they staggered in a convulsive, insane embrace. Never to leave go. To devour one another! To fuse into one being or to die! She was sobbing helplessly, but he freed himself from the terrible grip of her hands. She swayed as if she were intoxicated, pulled a handkerchief out of her bosom and wiped her lips, and without saying a word passed into the adjacent room.
With a splitting head Prokop remained in the darkness. This last embrace seemed to him to mean farewell.
XXXV
The fat cousin was right. The old Hagen was becoming more and more paralyzed, though he had not yet succumbed to the disease. He now lay helpless, surrounded by doctors, trying to open his left eye. Uncle Rohn and his relations were suddenly sent for; and the old Prince tried once more to open his eye so as to look again at his daughter and make some signal.
She ran out of the room, bareheaded, and rushed outside to Prokop who had been waiting for her in the park for some time. Completely ignoring Holz she kissed and clung to him passionately. She made hardly any allusion to her father and Uncle Charles, absorbed in something, harassed and affectionate. She pressed herself against him and then suddenly became distant and preoccupied. He began to poke fun at the Tartar dynasty … a little too pointedly. She gave him an expressive look and changed the conversation, talking about the previous evening. “Until the last moment I thought that I wouldn’t go to you. Do you know that I am nearly thirty? When I was fifteen I fell terribly in love with our chaplain. I went to him to confess, simply in order to get a nearer sight of him, and because I was ashamed to say that I had stolen or lied I told him that I had been unchaste; I didn’t know what that meant, and the poor man had a lot of work to find out the truth. Now I couldn’t confess,” she concluded quietly, and made a bitter movement with her mouth.
Prokop was disturbed by her continued self-analysis, in which he saw a morbid desire for self-torture. He tried to find something else to talk about and discovered to his consternation that if they did not speak about love they had nothing to say to one another. They were standing on the bastion. It gave the Princess a certain relief to return to her past, to confess small but important things about herself. “Soon after I confessed we had a dancing master who fell in love with my governess, a stout woman. I heard about it and … saw them. It disgusted me. Oh! But all the same I spied on them and … I couldn’t understand. And then one day when we were dancing I suddenly understood, when he pressed himself against me. After that I wouldn’t let him touch me; in the end … I fired a shotgun at him. We had to dismiss them both.
“At that time … I was terribly worried by mathematics; I simply hadn’t a head for it, you see? My teacher was a famous man, but unpleasant; you scientists are all extraordinary. He set me an exercise and looked at his watch; it had to be done in an hour. And when I had only five, four, three minutes left and I had still done nothing … my heart began to thump and I had such a horrible feeling—” She dug her fingers into Prokop’s arm and drew in her breath. “Then I got to like those lessons.
“When I was nineteen they selected a husband for me; you wouldn’t believe it. And because by that time I understood everything I made my fiancé promise that he would never touch me. Two years later he died in Africa. I pined so much—through being romantic or something of the sort—that they never tried to make a match for me again. I thought that I’d got the question settled forever.
“And I forced myself, you know, to believe that I had some obligation to him and that I ought to be true to him even after his death, until finally I grew to believe that I had been in love with him. Now I see that all the time I was only acting to myself and that I had never felt anything more than foolish disillusion.
“It’s curious, isn’t it, that I’m telling you all these things about myself? You know, it’s a great relief to speak about oneself like this without keeping anything back.
“When you arrived I thought to begin with that you were like that professor of mathematics. I was even frightened of you, darling. He’ll give me an exercise to do, I thought, and my heart began to beat again.
“A horse simply intoxicated me. When
