Suddenly another guest arrived—the rich lady who loved to visit such affairs as a kind of hobby. She had come from the fashionable part of the city in her silken coupé, out of her splendid mansion with the Gobelins and the door-casings of giallo antico, had climbed up all the stairs, and now came through the door, beautiful, fragrant, luxurious, in a dress of blue cloth with yellow embroidery, a Parisian hat upon her reddish brown hair, and a smile in her Titian eyes. She came out of curiosity, out of ennui, out of joy in contrarieties, out of sheer goodwill towards all that was a little out of the common, out of a kindly extravagance of feelings. She greeted Daniel’s sister and the short-story writer, who was frequently a guest at her house, and then seated herself on the bench in front of the window niche between the erotic lady and the philosopher who had the appearance of a kangaroo, as though that was all quite in order.
“I’ve almost come too late,” said she softly with her beautiful, mobile mouth to the short-story writer, who sat behind her. “I had people to tea, and so things dragged along.”
The short-story writer was much affected and thanked Heaven that he was in a presentable dress. “How beautiful she is!” thought he. “She is worthy of being the mother of that daughter of hers.”
“And Fräulein Sonia?” he asked her across her shoulder. “Didn’t you bring Fräulein Sonia with you?”
Sonia was the daughter of the rich lady, and in the eyes of the short-story writer she was an unbelievable example of a perfect creature, a marvel of versatile education, an attained ideal of culture. He spoke her name twice, for it gave him an inexpressible pleasure to pronounce it.
“Sonia is ill,” said the rich lady. “Yes—would you believe it?—she has a bad foot. Oh, it is nothing, a swelling, a kind of little inflammation or congestion. It has been cut. It might not have been necessary, perhaps, but she insisted upon it herself.”
“She insisted upon it herself!” repeated the short-story writer in an enthusiastic whisper. “That is like her! But how in the world can one express one’s sympathy?”
“Well, I’ll take her your greetings!” said the rich woman. And as he was silent, she added: “Doesn’t that satisfy you?”
“No, it does not,” said he very softly, and as she prized his books, she answered with a smile:
“Well, then, send her a flower or two.”
“Thanks!” said he. “Thanks! I’ll do so!” And he thought to himself: “A flower or two? A nosegay! A big bouquet! I’ll drive tomorrow to the florist’s before breakfast!” And he felt that he had a certain relation to life.
A slight noise was heard without, the door opened and closed quickly and with a jerk, and a short and stocky young man in a dark lounge-suit stood before the guests in the candlelight: the disciple from Switzerland. He cast a swift and threatening look over the room, strode with heavy steps towards the plaster column in front of the alcove, established himself behind this on the low platform with a firmness as though he wished to take root there, seized the uppermost sheet of manuscript, and instantly began to read.
He was about twenty-eight years of age, short-necked, and ugly. His cropped hair grew in the form of an acute point unusually far down on his forehead, which besides was low and furrowed. His face, beardless, sullen, and heavy, revealed a doglike nose, coarse cheekbones, a pair of sunken cheeks, and coarse, protuberant lips, which seemed to shape the words they spoke only by a great effort, reluctantly, and with a kind of limp anger. His face was brutal and yet pale. He read with a wild and overloud voice, which, however, at the same time trembled inwardly, shook, and suffered from scantiness of breath. The hand that held the written sheet was broad and red, and yet it trembled. He embodied an eerie mixture of brutality and weakness, and the things he read coincided in a strange way with his looks.
They were sermons, comparisons, theses, laws, visions, prophecies, and appeals in the manner of orders of the day, and these followed one another in a variegated and endless string, in a mixture of styles, in tones borrowed from the Psalms and from Revelation, intermingled with military-strategic as well as philosophical-critical “trade” expressions. A feverish ego, terribly excited, thrust itself upward in solitary megalomania and threatened the world with a torrent of convulsive words. Christus imperator maximus was his name and he recruited death-devoted troops for the subjugation of the terrestrial globe, issued messages, set up his implacable conditions, longed for poverty and chastity, and in a spirit of boundless revolt kept on reiterating with a kind of unnatural lust the imperative of unconditional obedience. Buddha, Alexander, Napoleon, and Jesus were all designated as his humble predecessors, not worthy of unloosing the shoe-latchets of this spiritual emperor.
The disciple read for an hour; then, trembling, he took a gulp from the goblet of red wine and reached for new proclamations. Sweat stood in pearls on his low forehead, his thick lips quivered, and between the words he kept on blowing his breath with a short, snorting sound through his nose, like a bellowing exhaust. The solitary ego sang, raved, and commanded. It lost itself in mad metaphors, went down in a whirl of illogic, and suddenly popped up again horribly and quite unexpectedly in another place. Blasphemies and hosannas, incense and fumes of blood, were intermingled. The world was conquered in thunderous battles and then redeemed.
It would have been difficult to establish the effect of Daniel’s proclamations upon the auditors. Some of them, with heads thrown back, looked with lacklustre eyes at the ceiling; others, bent over their knees, held their faces buried in their hands. The eyes of the
