The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch Read Free Book Online

dining-room, which with its carved old German furniture breathed out an oppressive comfort, they were going to make a winter-garden with a fountain, and perhaps transform the drawing-room too. Then they climbed the stairs, at the top and the bottom of which were velvet hangings, and the Baroness went on opening door after door, passing over only the more intimate ones. Hesitatingly and with a slight blush Elisabeth’s room was revealed to the masculine eye, but even the cloud of white lace with which her bed, window, washing-table and mirror were hung did not fill Joachim with such a painful and ashamed feeling as the bedroom of her parents; indeed he could almost have reproached the Baroness for making him free of the household and compelling him to be a co-witness of her shame. For now, before his eyes, before everybody’s eyes, plainly displayed even before Elisabeth, whom he felt such knowledge confounded and violated, the two beds stood side by side, ready for the sexual uses of the Baroness, whom he now suddenly saw before him, not indeed naked, but unladylike and brazen: here was the double bedchamber, and now in a flash it seemed to him the central point of the house, its hidden and yet obviously visible altar, round which all the other rooms were built. And in the same flash he saw clearly that every house in the long row of villas which he had passed had as its central point a similar bedroom, and that the sonatinas and the
études
sent out through the open windows, behind which the spring breeze softly waved the lace curtains, were only intended to veil the actual facts. So everywhere towards evening the beds of the master and mistress were decked with the sheets that were folded with such hypocritical glossiness in the linen-room, and the servants and the children knew why this was done;everywhere the maids and the children slept, chaste and unpaired, round the coupled central point of the house, they chaste and pure, yet at the service and command of the unchaste and the shameless. How had the Baroness dared, when she was lauding the advantages of the neighbourhood, to include among these the nearness of the church? Should not she enter it with humility, and as it were barefoot? Perhaps this was what Bertrand had meant when he spoke of the unchristian age, and it became intelligible to Joachim that the black warriors of God must fall on this abomination with fire and sword, so as again to restore true chastity and Christlikeness. He looked across at Elisabeth and thought he read from her glance that she shared his indignation. And that she should be fated to the same desecration, that indeed he himself should be the man chosen to perform that act of desecration, filled him with such compassion that he longed to steal her away, simply that he might watch before her door, so that undisturbed and unviolated she might dream for ever in a dream of white lace.
    Affably conducted back to the ground floor by the ladies, he parted from them with the promise to return soon. In the street he became aware of the emptiness of his visit; he thought how dismayed the ladies would be if they heard Bertrand talking, and he actually wished that they could hear him for once.
    When a man has adopted the habit of not noticing his fellow-creatures—in consequence perhaps of the caste-like seclusion of his life, and of a certain slowness in emotional reaction—he is bound to be surprised at himself if his eye should be attracted and held by two strange young men standing talking together near him. This is what happened to Joachim one evening in the foyer of the Opera House. The two gentlemen were obviously foreigners and not much over twenty; he was inclined to take them for Italians, not merely because of the cut of their clothes which was a little unusual, but because one of them, a black-eyed and black-haired fellow, wore an upward-curling Italian moustache. And although it went against Joachim’s grain to listen to the