Part 47

The embarrassed Count answered, “Only ... to speak ... to speak to some human being or other!”

“Is your servant a bullock, then, or am I one?” asked Mabuse harshly. “You can talk to me if you want to. What crazy idea has got into your head?”

The Count turned his head away; he no longer had the courage to face his doctor.... “Is he going to cure me?” he asked himself. Then he looked up at him timidly and irresolutely. “You are no human being: you are a devil!” was the secret cry of his heart, but these fierce thoughts soon left him, and he felt suddenly sleepy. “I am always so tired!” he exclaimed.

“Tell your man now, in my presence, to refuse all visitors or anyone who telephones. He must say, ‘The Count has gone on a journey. He left no address. Please ring off.’”

Slowly and mechanically Told repeated the order, and the man bowed and withdrew.

“I am really not sure whether I shall go on with your case,” said Mabuse. But Told hardly heeded him; he seemed to feel a slow poison stealing into his veins.

“You are thirsty!” said Mabuse, suddenly.

“Yes, I am,” whispered the Count.

“You are to drink a mixture of brandy and Tokay, as much as you like. Take good long draughts--the brandy will do you good. You must forget everything in your past, your wife as well. When you are convinced that you have succeeded in doing that, you are on the road to recovery. You must destroy the past, you understand. The alcohol will help you there.”

“Destroy the past,” stammered the Count, as if sinking into a bog that threatened to engulf him, “destroy ... the ... past....”

“In two years’ time you can think about resuming your ordinary life again. In what time?” he broke off suddenly. “What time did I say?” he thundered.

The Count aroused himself from his lethargy. Horrified at the length of time involved, he answered in a low tone, “Two years.”

“Do you know that your wife wants to put you into a lunatic asylum? She is getting the State Attorney, Wenk, to help her. Was not that the man who rang you up?... I am coming again to-morrow.”

The Count remained alone, dejected and humiliated. It seemed as if elephants were trampling out his brains, that his spirit was a prey to crocodiles and he was covered with mud and slime. “The whole world has forsaken me,” he murmured. The pictures he had collected around him seemed to be celebrating orgies on the walls. He could no longer understand how it was they could ever have pleased him, nor why he had endured them so long. He took a hunting-knife and slit every one of them from top to bottom, hacking at their frames. When he had done it, he sprang back in horror. He held his head in his hands, groaning, “Oh God, am I really mad?”

He began drinking brandy, and he drank it out of a claret tumbler. When he had had three glasses he was intoxicated. Then it seemed as if the doctor had left something behind him and that this lay in front of him. He did not know what it was, but he tried to grasp it, and then suddenly it had jumped to his head. It seemed like a wedge fastened there, fitting tightly between the two halves of the brain. Fear seized upon him and tore his courage to shreds. “Doctor, Doctor,” he shouted, and he heard his voice re-echo in the empty rooms. The world was so wide, yet he was alone. And then he became unconscious.

* * * * *

Karstens succumbed to his wounds, and again the public imagination busied itself with the death of a second victim. Wenk found himself in a difficulty and decided one day to make a final appeal to the dancer. He went to her cell.

“I am not going to speak to you,” said Cara when she perceived him.

Wenk took no notice, and said in a troubled tone, his hopes disappearing: “Do you know that the beautiful lady who was always looking on at the play at Schramm’s has disappeared?”

“Not the one you sent to me in prison?” answered the dancer instantly.

“Yes,” said Wenk, and it was not till he had uttered the word that he perceived the significance of this admission. It was all very mysterious. Had the Countess revealed her errand to Cara, and was she in league with the gamblers? It seemed incredible, but yet how strange it was that Cara, who would not at first speak to him, at once gave him her attention when he mentioned the Countess. Wenk did not want Cara to think that he was astonished at this, and went on talking, while he was trying to consider how he could best arrive at the secret; but he did not stop to reflect upon the ideas that came uppermost. In the course of the conversation he hazarded a conjecture that had often occurred to him when he thought of Cara’s connection with the criminal, but which he had never mentioned till now. He said, “You are sacrificing yourself for this criminal because you could not make up your mind to part from him.”

Then Cara sprang up, staring at Wenk as if convulsed. He looked her right in the eyes, and noticed that an expression of overwhelming horror stood in them, and was clearly written upon her distorted features.

“Well?” he asked, encouraged and hopeful.

But Cara remained as if frozen in her stony attitude.

Then he ventured further. “If we came to some agreement, I could make proposals that would be to your advantage.”

Slowly the dancer recovered from the horror that had seized upon her. For the last three years, ever since Mabuse had repulsed her, her life had been a story of self-sacrificing martyrdom and devoted adherence to the man who had wrought her ruin and driven her to crime. Not for a single instant had she thought of betraying him, of refusing her allegiance. Indelibly stamped upon her whole nature like the brand of a slave was the feeling that mastery and might such as his could never be contested. And now, through Wenk’s words, she beheld this man whom she adored threatened with danger. What did the State Attorney know, and how had he obtained his knowledge? Had the Countess betrayed her after all? Slowly she evolved a plan by which to discover how much the lawyer knew. She might possibly convey a warning to Dr. Mabuse, and at the thought her blood was fired and the delicious sensation of feeling herself his deliverer, and perhaps, too, regaining the ascendancy she had lost, stole over her. No, it could not be, she dared not even conceive of it; to save him from danger would be enough for her, to know him secure would be bliss. Finally she said, “Since you seem to be better informed than I imagined, I will speak, but you must give me two days to think it over.”

The dancer had learnt from the warder that someone had been inquiring about her, and from the description given she believed it to be Spoerri. She would therefore have an opportunity of telling him about her interview with Wenk and warning him of what might occur.

“Very well,” said Wenk, relieved. Then he thought he would clinch the matter, and as his previous supposition seemed to have hit the mark, he imagined it a favourable opportunity to inflame her imagination still further, so he said, “I am trying to get on the track of the Countess; she seems to be in hiding with your friend.”