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She stood still, almost breathless with anger. Upon my word, I don't know whether she was handsome, but I always liked to look at her when she stood facing me like that, and so I often liked to provoke her anger. Perhaps she had noticed this and was angry on purpose. I said as much to her.
"How disgusting!" she said, with an air erf repulsion.
"I don't care," I went on. "Do you know, too, that it is dangerous for us to walk together? I often have an irresistible longing to beat you, to disfigure you, to strangle you. And what do you think—^won't it come to that? You are driving me into brain fever. Do you suppose I am afraid of a scandal? Your anger—why, what is your anger to me? I love you without hope, and I know that after this I shall love you a thousand times more than ever. If ever I do kill you I shall have to kill myself, too. Oh, well, I shall put off kilUng myself as long as possible, so as to go on feeling this insufferable pain of being witiiout you. Do you know something incredible? I love you more every day, and yet that is almost impossible. And how can I help being a fatalist? Do you remember the day before
yesterday, on the Schlangentoerg, I whispered at your provocation, 'Say the word, and I will leap into that abyss' ? If you had said that word I should have jumped in then. Don't you believe that I would have leapt down?"
"What stupid talk!" she cried.
"I don't care whether it is stupid or clever!" I cried. "I know that in your presence I must talk, eind talk, and talk— and I do talk. I lose cill self-respect in your presence, and I don't care."
"What use would it he for me to order you to jump off the Schlangenberg?" she said in a dry and peculiarly insulting ma
"Splendid," I cried; "you said that splendid 'useless' on purpose to overwhelm me. I see through you. Useless, you say? But pleasure is always of use, and savage, unbounded power—if only over a fly—is a pleasure in its way, too. Man is a despot by nature, and loves to be a torturer. You like it awfuDy."
I remember she looked at me with peculiar fixed attention. My face must have expressed my incoherent and absurd sensations. I remember to this moment that our conversation actually was almost word for word exactly as I have described it here. My eyes were Hoodshot. There were flecks of foam on my Ups. And as for the Schlangenberg, I swear on my word of honour even now, if she had told me to fling myself down I should have flung myself down! If only for a joke she had said it, with contempt, if with a jeer at me she had said it, I should even then have leapt down!
"No, why? I believe you," she pronounced, as only she knows how to speak, with such contempt and venom, with such scorn that, by God, I could have killed her at the moment.
She risked it. I was not lying about that, too, in what I said to her.
"You are not a coward?" she asked me suddenly.
"Perhaps I am a coward. I don't know. ... I have not thought about it for a long time."
"If I were to say to you, 'Kill this man,' would you kill him?"
"Whom?"
"Whom I choose."
"The Frenchman?"
"Don't ask questions, but answer. Whom I tell you. I want to know whether you spoke seriously just now?"
She waited for my answer so gravely and impatiently that it struck me as strange.
"Come, do tell me, what has been happening here?" I cried, "What are you afraid of—me, or what? I see all the muddle here for myself. You are the stepdaughter of a mad and ruined man possessed by a passion for that devil—^Blanche. Then there is this Frenchman, with his mysterious influence over you, and—here you ask me now so gravely . . . such a question. At any rate let me know, or I shall go mad on the spot and do something. Are you ashamed to deign to be open with me? Surely you can't care what I think of you?"
"I am not speaking to you of that at all. I asked you a question and I'm waiting for an answer."
"Of course I will kill anyone you tell me to," I cried. "But can you possibly . . . could you tell me to do it?"
"Do you suppose I should spare you? I shall tell you to, and stand aside and look on. Can you endure that? Why, no, as though you could I You would kill him, perhaps, fi you were told, and then you would come and kill me for having dared to send you."
I felt as though I were stu
Suddenly she laughed. We were sitting on a bench, before the pla3dng children, facing the place where the carriages used to stop and people used to get out in the avenue before the Casino.
"Do you see that stout baroness?" she cried. "That is Baroness Burmerhelm. She has only been here three days. Do you see her husband—a tall, lean Prussian with a stick? Do you remember how he looked at us the day before yesterday? Go up to the Baroness at once, take off your hat, and say something to her in French." "Why?"
"You swore that you would jump down the Schlangenberg; you swear you are ready to kill anyone if I tell you. Instead of these murders and tragedies I only want to laugh. Go without discussing it. I want to see the Baron thrash you with his stick."
"You challenge me; you think I won't do it?" "Yes, I do challenge you. Go; I want you to!" "By all means, I am going, though it's a wild freak. Only, I say, I hope it won't be unpleasant for the General, and through him for you. Upon my honour, I am not thinking of myself, but of you and the General. And what a mad idea to insult a woman!"
"Yes, you are only a chatterer, as I see," she said contemptuously. "Your eyes were fierce and bloodshot, but perhaps that was only because you had top much wine at di
I turned and went in silence to cany out her commission. Of course it was stupid, and of course I did not know how to get out of it, but as I began to get closer to the Baroness I remember, as it were, something within myself urging me on; it was an impulse of schoolboyish mischief. Besides, I was horribly overwrought, and felt just as though I were drunk.
CHAPTER VI
NOW two days have passed since that stupid day. And what a noise and fuss and talk and uproar there was 1 And how unseemly and disgraceful, how stupid and vulgar, it was I And I was the cause of it all. Yet at times it's laughabler—to me, at any rate. I can't make up my mind what happened to me, whether I really was in a state of frenzy, or whether it was a momentary aberration and I behaved disgracefully till I was pulled up. At times it seemed to me that my mind was giving way. And at times it seems to me that I have not outgrown childhood and schoolboyishness, and that it was simply a crude schoolboy's prank.