Christian was shocked. “What do you mean by that?”
“One would have to gain a new experience,” answered Amadeus Voss, “to know a being truly human--in the highest and deepest sense.” In the gathering dusk his face had the hue of stone. It was a well-shaped face--long, narrow, intelligent, full of impassioned suffering. The lenses in front of his eyes sparkled in the last light of day, and on his fair hair was a glimmer as upon jewels.
“Are you going to stay in the village?” Christian inquired, not from a desire to know, but out of the distress which he felt in the heavy silence. “You were employed by Councillor Ribbeck. Will you return to him?”
Voss’s nerves twitched. “Return? There is no return,” he murmured. “Do you know Ribbeck? Well, I hardly know him myself. I saw him just twice. The first time was when he came to the seminary to engage a tutor for his sons. When I think of him I have the image of something fat and frozen. I was picked out at once. My superiors approved of me highly and desired to smooth my path. Yes. And I saw him for the second time one night in December, when he appeared at Halbertsroda with a commissary of police to put me out. You needn’t look at me that way. There were no further consequences. It wouldn’t have done to permit any.”
He fell silent. Christian got up. Voss did not urge him to stay longer, but accompanied him to the door. There he said in a changed voice: “What kind of a man are you? One sits before you and pours out one’s soul, and you sit there in silence. How does it happen?”
“If you regret it I shall forget all you have said,” Christian answered in his flexible, courteous way, that always had a touch of the equivocal.
Voss let his head droop. “Come in again when you are passing,” he begged gently. “Perhaps then I’ll tell you about what happened there!” He pointed with his thumb across his shoulder.
Albrecht Wahnschaffe came into his wife’s bedroom. She was in bed. It was a magnificent curtained bed with carved posters. On both sides of the wall hung costly tapestries representing mythological scenes. A coverlet of blue damask concealed Frau Wahnschaffe’s majestic form.
Gallantly he kissed the hand which she held out toward him with a weary gesture, and glided into an armchair. “I want to talk to you about Christian,” he said. “For some time his doings have worried me. He drifts and drifts. The latest thing is his purchase of that diamond. There is a challenge in such an action. It annoys me.”