Words failed her. Surreptitiously, she crumpled up the note, but now, as she put it in her pocket and looked up, she met her husband’s eyes bent severely on her. It was a penetrating, stern and painful glance. She had never known him to look like that before. Only now, during these last few days, had he suddenly made her feel distrustful with such an expression on his face. It shook her to the core, and she was unable to parry it. A glance like that had paralysed her in the middle of dancing, and he had watched over her sleep last night with the same look, his eyes gleaming like the blade of a knife.

Did he know something, or did he want to know it, was that what sharpened his glance, made it so bright, so steely, so painful? And as she was still searching for something to say, a long-forgotten memory came back to her. Her husband had once told her how, as a lawyer, he had faced an investigating judge whose trick it was to look through his files during the examination as if short-sighted, but when the really important question came he would suddenly raise his eyes and turn their piercing gaze, like a dagger, on the suddenly alarmed defendant, who would then be discomposed by this bright lightning flash of concentrated attention, and the lie he had been carefully trying to maintain would lose its force. Could her husband be employing dangerous methods of that kind himself, and was she the victim? She shuddered, particularly because she knew what a great intellectual passion he felt for his chosen profession, far beyond that necessary for a legal career. He could track down the reasons for a crime, its development, the moment it turned to extortion, as intently as others might devote themselves to eroticism or gambling, and on a day when he was engaged in this psychological hunt he seemed to be inwardly radiant. The keen nervous energy that often made him recollect forgotten verdicts in the middle of the night expressed itself outwardly then in a steely inscrutability; he ate and drank little, but smoked the whole time, and he seemed to be saving his words for the coming hour in court. She had once gone to hear him make a plea, and never went again, she was so shaken by the dark passion and almost malevolent fire of his delivery and the sombre, austere expression on his face. Now she suddenly thought she detected the same look again in his fixed gaze under those menacingly frowning brows.

All these lost memories came crowding in on her in that single second, and kept her lips from uttering the words that they were trying to form. She said nothing, and became increasingly confused the more she realised how dangerous her silence was—she was losing her last plausible chance of explaining herself. She dared not raise her eyes, yet now, looking down, she was even more alarmed to see his hands, usually so still and steady, moving up and down on the table like little wild animals. Luckily lunch was soon over, and the children jumped up and ran into the next room, chattering in their clear, cheerful voices, while the governess tried in vain to moderate their high spirits. Her husband also got to his feet, went out of the dining room, treading heavily, and did not look back.

As soon as she was alone she took out the fateful letter again. She read the lines once more: ‘Kindly give the bearer of this letter a hundred crowns at once.’ Then she tore it into small pieces in her rage, and was crumpling them up into a ball to throw them in the waste-paper basket when she thought better of it, stopped, leant over the stove on the hearth and threw the paper into the hissing fire. The white flame that sprang up, greedily devouring the threat, soothed her.

At that moment she heard her husband’s returning footsteps. He was already at the door. She quickly straightened up, her face flushed from the warmth of the fire and from knowing that she was caught in the act. The door of the stove was still open, giving her away, and she awkwardly tried to hide it by standing in front of the fireplace. He went up to the table, struck a match to light his cigar, and as the flame came close to his face she thought she saw the quivering of his nostrils that always showed he was angry. But he looked at her quite calmly. “I would just like to point out that you are not obliged to show me your correspondence. If you want to keep secrets from me, you are entirely at liberty to do so.” She did not reply, she dared not look at him. He waited for a moment, then breathed out the smoke of his cigar as if it came from deep inside him and left the room, again with that heavy tread.

 

She didn’t want to think of anything, she wished only to live in a numb state, filling her heart with empty, pointless occupation. She could not bear to be in the apartment any more, she felt that if she was not to go mad with horror she had to be out in the street among other people. Those hundred crowns had at least, she hoped, bought her a brief respite, a few days of freedom from the blackmailer, and she decided that she would venture to go for a walk.